Newsweek: The Last Days
In late 2008, Newsweek, then under control of the Washington Post, decided to make its audience as selective as possible, Spinal Tap style, by becoming, as Andrew Ferguson wrote at the Weekly Standard, “a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals.” In early 2009, the magazine decided to go on the record, declaring, “We Are All Socialists Now” on one of its last memorable covers. (We can assume by inference that that statement included most of the gang at its then-parent company as well.) In 2010, those socialists received a miniature version of Obama’s “stimulus” program, with the Post offloading its sinking enterprise to Sidney Harman (and his wife, then a liberal Democrat Congresswoman in California) for a buck. With Sidney having gone off to the great hi-fi shop in the sky the following year, Newsweek soldiered on with Tina Brown as editor, producing wafer-thin print editions with such cutting edge cover stories as Princess Di, Hillary Clinton, and Woody Allen.
Fortunately, it will soon be safe to return to your supermarket checkout aisle. As it must to all dinosaurs, death will be forthcoming for Citizen Newsweek:
Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp which recently acquired sole control of Newsweek, said that a plan to end its print edition is coming as soon as this fall. His comments came in IAC’s quarterly earnings call and were first reported in a two-sentence story by Bloomberg News’s Sarah Frier (“Newsweek, the 79-year-old magazine, will eventually transition to an online-only publication”) and then in a tweet from her colleague Edmund Lee (“Barry Diller says by September-October, plan for digital only Newsweek will be announced”). The first actual quote from Diller came later in a post by Politico’s Dylan Byers: “The transition will happen. The transition to online from hard print will take place. We’re examining all of our options.”
That doesn’t sound like the print edition is going to end imminently, and an IAC spokesperson followed up with Byers with a statement confirming the September or October target for the announcement of a plan to transition to digital.
The online version of the Daily Beast will soldier on, but to understand how far the mighty have fallen, recall John Podhoretz’s article on the rarefied air that weekly news magazine journalists breathed at the genre’s zenith a few decades ago. Is Time-Warner-CNN-HBO investigating a similar online-only option for its weekly opinion magazine, which was once, nine decades ago, the inventor of the genre of weekly news magazine, now rendered anathema by the speed of the Internet? Presumably.
I get Newsweek and other mags a week after my subscribing neighbor finishes it and them each week. Have read the rag for years (used to read Time before it croaked) and have clearly seen the quality of writing fall and the lefty smart-assiness rise. Also, too much celebration of pop culture vulgarity in Newsweek now. Newsweek turned itself into a dinosaur.
Wait, you mean there’s a magazine that will tell me everything that happened last week?*
*I just wanted to be the last guy to use that joke.
The other thing about today’s current crop of journalist movers and shakers is that given a choice between broadening their audience (and their own ideological viewpoint) or writing what gladdens their own hearts and those inside their ideological bubble, they would rather see publications like Newsweek go out of business than give one inch to the other side in the political/culture wars. It’s not quite Gen. McAuliffe telling the Germans “Nuts” in response to a surrender order during the Battle of the Bulge, but this is where the folks running Newsweek have decided to make their stand, and those at Time, the Washington Post and the New York Times would do the same thing in future similar situations.
As far as l’affaire de la poulet fliet goes, Drier’s analogy can be taken even further — If just being against gay marriage now can produce Cathy Derangement Syndrome at Def Con 1 levels due to hatred of Christian beliefs, you know lawsuits aplenty are going to be coming in the near future against any religious institution which refuses to perform gay marriages. It’s not happening now, in the run-up to November, but they’ll be at the courthouse door if and when the most militant in the same sex marriage debate think they’re either in the majority or have enough government power behind them to get away with it (i.e., sometime in the next four years in a liberal state that’s already approved the change, if Obama wins in November).
All indicators point to “yes”. These ideologue news outlets WOULD rather go out of business than allow conservative viewpoints on their pages. But how do the shareholders let this happen? Are the only ones left, flaming liberals themselves? Have they bought the “internet’s killing us off” excuse, hook, line, and sinker?
I still think that most of the remaining print outlets (esp. The New York Times) are hoping to be rewarded for their support in Obama’s hoped-for second term. I already know how he’ll put it out there. That the print media is a historic institution closely aligned with our nation itself, and deserves to be baled out at taxpayer expense, or something like that. Then they really will be the state run media.
I think the Scarlet Lady would take the handout without a trace of irony. And she’d still tell you her news was unbiased.
Well yes, secular progressivism is a nihilistic secular religion that will not die until it dies.
One of the problems at the Times is that Pinch is one of the truest of the True Believers, and was the driving force behind turning the paper from a standard liberal publication into a liberal advocacy journalism outlet of the type those on the far left in New York had been wishing it would become for half a century. Once he decided the op-ed page’s opinions were to be part of Page 1′s stories and would shape the attitude of the paper’s other sections, the Times began its 20-year downturn that has accelerated with the rise of Internet media outlets.
Even the paper’s True Believer staff realizes the stock price fall can’t go on forever, but are currently fantasizing the idea that someone like Mike Bloomberg will come along and buy the paper and basically let them run it as a money-losing vanity publication, just the way it is right now (this scenario would be particularly funny to watch, since if there’s anything Bloomberg is not it’s a hands-off type of guy, and he and the Times’ editorial board have been 180 degrees at odds over the city’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy for the past several months, with the Times wanting the police to go back to the pre-Guiliani years of law enforcement. The wailing that would come out of the liberals at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue when they discovered their new owner won’t follow Tina Brown’s “We can lose millions forever” ethos would be a popcorn-worthy moment.)
I doubt that they think they’re ideological at all. Like a Sorkin character, each of them has studied both sides of every issue and arrived at the truth on every issue without noticing an ideological pattern in their thinking.
If News-weak is scheduled to go off-(supermarket checkout)line this fall, it will happen in November.
No matter what, they will clearly see what the darkening of America’s premier socialist journal would say about the zeitgeist in the midst of Chairman Obama’s re-election campaign. By hook or crook, desperately gasping for oxygen, they will expend whatever it takes to crawl over the November 6th finish line before they proclaim loudly to us all what will always be the inevitable final result of any socialist endeavor.
Their own best case scenario at this point? That they can proclaim loudly and with joy the re-election of Chairman Obama – “Hoorah, The Great One has prevailed, all is wonderful….. Oh, and now we are going out of business after 80 odd years. Goodbye.”
Yeah, that’s about right. They’ll tough it out until November for no other reason than that, you watch. After that, like a mighty oak, a titan of an American institution for decades, rotted from within by a corrupting fungus, will topple and die before our eyes. But with more of a whimper than a bang.
And yes, it is a shame…. like so much else.
One hopes it was 100 pennies and they paid some clerk 2.25 to count them.
Newsweak will fail as an online effort also. Their niche market is too small to support them. Abrosexuals are only 2% of the population, if that. How much of a market is there in prostate massagers anyway?
Meanwhile, if I was still playing the market, I would buy Chick-Fil-A stock if it was for sale. Being a private company, they will get to keep all that lovely money themselves.
Unfortunately it seems like over 50% of the under 40 crowd has been brainwashed by them.
Bury it 10 feet deep this time!
I was planning on going for a burger before I read this. Now, it’ll be a Chick-Fil-A!
I’ll be sorry to see Newsweak go out of print. I can’t light a charcoal grille with pixels.
Newsweek reminds me of a cancer patient that is just clinging to life. But, eventually, the sickness does them in and they die. Well, that’s about to happen to Newsweek. Once it only goes on line, that really will be the end. It will have a handfull of die-hard readers, I guess, but not nearly enough to keep a lot of people employed and it certainly will never be a large money maker ever again. It will be a left-wing novelty for a few people, but like all left-wing enterprises it will fail miserably (just look at Air America if you don’t believe me). The shame of it is that if Newsweek had remained a fairly objective weekly news magazine with hard news instead of liberal puff pieces, it could have done really well on line as a free news source. But nobody wants to read biased far-left feature articles that aren’t important unless you’re a liberal living in New York City or Los Angeles.
So once Newsweek goes on line, they may as well just close shop if they maintain the current format. And I, for one, will be happy to see them go. Like a bad relative who has over-stayed their welcome, Newsweek needs to go.
Hey, Newsweak! AMF! You won’t be missed!
Any reference of Newsweek should not include imnply it was a “magazine” Ceased being a “magazine” several years ago. What will cease publication is Newsweek Brochure or maybe Newsweek Pamphlet.
For months now, Newsweek print edition has been available for free from those magazine promotion companies…when I kept getting those offers, I knew it’s last days were almost here. May it go quickly and be forgotten even faster.
Should’ve let a conservative buy it instead of selling it to a left/liberal stooge for $1.