Newsweek’s for sale. What would you pay for it?
I’ll tell you what I would pay. Nada. Rien. Gor nicht. Mitte midagi. (That last is “nothing” in Estonian.)
In fact, worse than that. The Washington Post would have to pay me to take Newsweek off its hands – and a substantial sum, in the neighborhood of sixty million. You figure it out. In 2008, the magazine lost $16.1 million; in 2009, that went to $29.3 million. Not a promising proposition.
And what is Newsweek anyway? In recent years it’s been nothing more than a semi-leftwing propaganda rag for Upper West Side dentists – chock full of the kind of opinion you can get for nothing on the Huffington Post or even the Daily Kos. Newsweek is slightly better written, I admit. But if you’re looking for English prose, I suggest The New Statesman or an old paperback of E. B. White.
The magazine doesn’t offer much in the way of hard news either, at least news you’ve haven’t seen or heard days earlier in a variety of online or television venues. And when it does venture into the realm of the breaking, you get embarrassing disinfo like the supposed flushing of Korans down Guantanamo toilets by our military. For that one, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, avid for an anti-American scoop, didn’t even bother to find out if they even had flush toilets in Gitmo. They didn’t. Before long the tawdry reporting had led to Muslim rioting. (And they say blogs are sloppy.)
Newsweek is a relic of the 20th Century. The editors have turned it into a laughing stock. It should have been sold sometime around 2003. That was about the time when the MSM was losing its respectability with its center-left audiences. Newsweek was left with a solidly left readership—and that is a surefire recipe for financial disaster. The situation is too far-gone. There is little reason for investors to take a chance. Moreover, it is even doubtful whether the Washington Post can even be saved.
The irony is that the legacy journalistic community eagerly embraced Barack Obama. On a gut level, these professional journalists were convinced that he would save them. The exact opposite has occurred. They groveled at Obama’s feet—and this has resulted in their losing the respect of the purple state citizenry. Many of these journalists will soon seek lesser paying opportunities outside of the industry.
“Many of these journalists will soon seek lesser paying opportunities outside of the industry.”
Ah, yes, the law of unintended consequences! Does this mean they will join the ranks of Americans supporting Arizona’s new immigration law? After all, they might find themselves competing for very low paying jobs.
Nah, my guess is they will all consider law school, thinking that they can do good works, sitting in a swanky downtown office, while making six figures and telling the world how it should run.
Some will even deign to attend a “top tier” law school institution, viewing the whole affair with mild contempt from the outset–a mere stop along the road to even higher prestige. They will then be utterly shocked–and more than a bit angry–when they are six figures in debt from student loans, jobless except for a punishingly unpleasant law firm contract opportunity, and three years older.
Law school. Mark my words…
Just wondering here, but how does one go about figureing the scrap value of a magazine?
In Newsweeks case, it’s like trying to figure the scrap value of a turd.
There is no value in a chapter 7 liquidation.
I get more news reading three blogs (Contentions, Pajamas Media, and NRO) than I get reading any newspaper. In fact, since I have become more politically active I have canceled my subscription to the Economist (which is really different now that a bunch of left-wing zealots have infiltrated that rag), I canceled Newsweek after I started picking up a huge Leftie bias, and I no longer subscribe to Foreign Affairs. Who needs them? When I read those three websites (and occasionally Town Hall and Weekly Standard) they all link to stories that if I find interesting I will read. There is no need for a weekly magazine. If these fools believe in global warming they should stop printing them so they can save some trees.
Mr. Bolts, Rantburg.com is a good place to peruse foreign affairs. There are some people with interesting backgrounds who post there.
“Newsweek? You mean there’s a magazine that will tell me everything that happened last week?”
Yes, an old joke. But somebody had to post it.
I agree, Chris. I stay informed by reading the same three websites and then I throw in ACE for humor and Hotair for a quick look and Allah’s headlines like “BOMB SHELL STUDY: Men attracted to pretty women” I love that! But, PJMedia has some of the most articulate, well reasoned commenters (not to mention contributors) and I find that I am more politically astute than at any other time in my life.
I also watch Morning Joe to pick up on the “talking points” for the liberal media day. (So, I guess I have always been following Obama’s recent advice! Ha! ) John Meecham, the editor of Newsweak is a regular contributor; talk about being the architect of your own demise! I think it was his idea to make it a Salon like, liberal leaning, Barack Obama worshipping pamphlet.
A shame that the Washington Post and Newsweek aren’t based in Oregon; perhaps the Death with Dignity Act could be applied to them in that case.
Maybe I should cash out my gold and silver mining shares and put in a bid? Or would that be a sucker bet?
Newsweek et al. are failing because of their dishonest, biased reporting. But it does have an established distribution network and presses, which have intrinsic value. So if one were willing to flush all the editors and writers and hire new talent, it might be profitable.
Is Murdoch interested?
There is some question that newsweeklies would be viable in any case. Life and Look magazines died with the advent of TV. The short story magazines, which had excellent writing, died along with them People used to read. Now they sit and stare at the boob tube. Time had a sharp style that I liked but that has been gone for years. Without doctors’ and dentists’ offices, they would have been gone five years ago.
Now, the Washington Post has decided to turn even farther left with new blogs, hiring people from Talking Points Memo, etc. That should work. Somebody at the Post said “We don’t want to be MSNBC.” I should say not. Have you looked at their ratings ? Look out below !
My parents subscribed to Newsweek for many years for reasons I have no idea. About five years ago I moved them to a nursing home and had their bills and other mail forwarded to my home. A short time later Newsweek informed me that the subscription was coming due for renewal. I can’t stand the magazine and simply throw it in the trash. Nevertheless, we continue to receive the magazine like a bad penny. I think they continue the subscription to boost distribution counts to keep up their advertising rates. If the companies placing adds really understood their lack of reach Newsweek would really be in the tank.
I’d swap it for the Detroit Silverdome
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/detroit-stadium-or-new-york-studio-the-silverdome-sells-for-58/19243225/
It is funny, I had a free subscription a couple of years ago. I called to cancel it because I grew tired of throwing it out. The stories they covered were drivel. It is so funny to watch all of these organizations try to mimic the Hufpo and MSNBC when the real winner is fox. These people can not get over the idea that more people have a perspective closer to Rush that Kieth Olberman. They show what dolts they are because they are there to make money and win an audience but they don’t realize that…
Who wants to hire of former writer from a liberal magazine? Most of these “journalists” were flunking out of their first major in college until they found the school of journalism. Not exactly equipped for working in the real world. Good luck!
Pay for Newsweek? It’s free at the dentist’s office, and online.
Rot in hell, Newsweak.
I’m sitting in a doctor’s office looking at the April 19 cover the Newsweek…trumpeting “America’s REMARKABLE economic recovery”…how positively Pravda-like. Are you kidding – remarkable recovery? Only if “remarkable” means getting worse…or not happening.
It should be clear that what Newsweek needs is a new 5-year plan.
I love the “dentists on the upper west side” category. And yes, there is no Joe Cocker in that crowd. Just sell it for a symbolic fee of 1 Zimbabwean dollar to a Pyongyang dentist if there are any left.
“They are an imitation, sort of like white men singing the blues.”
What an ignorant, if not downright racist comment. Even as humor, it’s banal. For all his admirable political evolution, in some ways Simon is still a bleeding-heart lib.
Lighten up, Francis.
Pay for Newsweek? Why would anyone “pay” a nickle for a magazine that has nothing to offer its readers but outdated leftwing opinions. I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.
In my youth, I had a subscription to Time and then I switched to Newsweek. This was in the days of three broadcast channels on TV and even before the advent of personal computers.
Newsweek is DEAD. Time is DEAD. They just haven’t quite accepted their demise yet.
Imagine what a GREAT NewsWebSite could be developed if someone took ten percent of the millions poured down the “rathole” of these liberal rags and provided real NEWS and Intelligent Commentary without a politically correct or leftist bent.
There are so many excellent sources of INSTANT News and commentary today that provide a realistic perspective of the world. No thinking person reads Newsweek or Time or left wing commentary except to see how twisted and self-delusional they’ve become.
Watching the demise of the Lame Stream Media in print and on the airways is like watching the Mammoths and Dinosaurs sink into the LaBrea Tar pits. It isn’t a pretty site, but it is observing history happening.
Newsweek should simply re-brand itself as political satire.
I recall some years ago a blues club operating in Toronto’s tony Yorkville (“Blues on Belair”). I even went there once – saw more designer brands than the Bal Harbour Shops. Sadly, the venture didn’t last because nobody would book there.
Newsweek’s conventional wisdom section never seemed to be anything but the conventions of the upper-west side of Manhattan.
And that’s simply not enough on which to build a business when the market for knocking down conservative straw-men is very competitive and the margins are razor thin.
My dentist office has gone video, so it’s not even needed there. Watching HD Blue Planet is much more interesting than anything Newsweek or Time did visually. As for the propaganda . . .
It’s funny that I hadn’t made that connection. I had to accompany my boyfriend to his dentist(very high end, Beverly Hills) and noticed that there was a wide-screen HDTV not unlike the one we have at home. The only magazines were things such as People, and US. They’re at least interesting in that I enjoy discovering how many pages I can go before I see someone I recognize. I did look some of them up on the internet once I got my woozy, Valium infused boyfriend home in the taxi.
Why buy a separate copy of Newsweak when everything in it is an exact copy of what you would find in Time? There might be room for one Democrat party organ periodical, but certainly not two. If they want to make money, then they should consider making something different from everyone else. Dare I suggest that they emulate Foxnews ( you know them as the “network that makes money and grows market share” ) and give people an alternate voice from what everyone else is saying. If they did, you could justify buying one over the other. I know its crazy, but you could (dare I say it) compete with one another in the marketplace of ideas…
Naaaaaaaahhhh.
That said, does anyone actually buy magazines anymore? Specifically why would anyone buy a news magazine for news thats already a week old by the time you get it? And on top of that, why would anyone buy a news magazine when you already know what the writers are going to say before they say it. Ive been doing a bit of “signals analysis” on the writers at Newsweak and Time. For some time now, Ive been convinced that the “writers” are not actual writers, as in “people who write” they are actors who portray writers. Their written content is output that comes from a computer program that was commissioned by the Democrat party. You feed it a subject and it regurgitates the platitudes, half baked ideas and the utopian bongwater that forms the core of the logic of the left. Take any subject matter and you can almost see the flowchart that leads you through decision point and logic arrows but always puts you in:
“It Was Reagan screwed it all up”,
“Right Wing America Threatens All Life On Earth”
“The only thing stopping the ERA from finally becoming law is that man down the street with the gas guzzling Hummmer”
“Bush was standing on the oxygen hose of wounded Lady Liberty when he lied to us about Iraq (and he was drunk too)”
The program assures that there are no “incidents” such as happened in the past where an actual writer would notice that their long held leftist arguments didn’t actually hold up under scrutiny and would then step outside the party line and say something like “welfare is bad and it needs reform”. The other added benefit of the “generator” is that anyone can be a “Writer”. How else do you explain the celebrity content at the Huffpo? You don’t think the half wit Hollywood actors actually wrote that stuff do you? They might believe it, but they believe just about anything, except the idea that “America is a good thing”.
That of course, is where they draw the line.
The reason why the “generator” is necessary is that this sort of “Free Thinking” cannot be allowed under any circumstances, lest the “lumpen proletariat” start to get the idea that they can actually think for themselves and decide whats right and wrong without proper guidance from party central.
Howard Fineman? He’s Chet Handley, summer stock player from Chautauqua. Got his start in “the Front Page” and really liked the role of “Big Time Writer”. I dont think Chet is even aware what the “generator” program has written under his characters byline. Eleanor Clift? come on, the central casting office worked overtime on that one. They found that actress working the swing shift at Krispy Kreme in Moline Alabama. You have to admit,its a great role, the mad shrieking harpy. Not since George Costanza’s mother has an actress been able to get away with that kind of mindless shrieking on the stage. ( I think Elsa Lanchester would’ve been better, but she was not available.)
You don’t really think that she believes the stuff she says, do you?
Newsweek’s conventional wisdom section never seemed to be more than the conventions of the upper-west side of Manhattan.
And that simply isn’t enough when the field of suppliers of knocking down conservative straw-men is very crowded and competitive, and the margins are razor thin.
We re-subscribed to Time for my father who, approaching ninety, doesn’t get out much Didn’t want to break his routine.
They discounted a supposed $200 plus bill to $15. We took it.
Apparently, that circ number is becoming pretty thin that they have to pay me to take the rag.
You can’t use back issues like the old Montgomery Ward catalog was used, but it works pretty well starting a fire on a cold day.
If they’re selling, then it’s probably to concentrate on their core product, which for years has been Kaplan test preparation. I have taken a kaplan course, and what I found odd is that when you enroll in kaplan (for the MCAT in my case), they give you a subscription of the Wall Street Journal so you can read up on current events. Funny they don’t have much faith in their own paper.
TIME is almost as bad as Newsweek. Joe Klein is so predictably left-wing that I do not even need to read it. At least Andrew Sullivan hasn’t written lately. I was amused about a year ago when they had a cover story predicting the extinction of the Republican party–TIME will be extinct well before the Republican party is.
No, the execrable Mr. Sullivan isnow over at The Atlantic Monthly, another foremerly great and relevant magazine trashed with the onset of Boomeritis editorial control. Fortune is another one. It used to be 500 pages, and I read it cover to cover every week for over 20 years. Now it’s maybe 90 pages, filled with snappy, snarky lefty groupthink. The Economist, as someone else mentioned, same thing. Leftist conventional boilerplate. It’s all about as fresh, relevant and informative as CBS News or…well, Newsweek.
I surf the web from my blackberry. Main thing that is irritating is the extended load times. Then you have the problem here at PJM and other sites of breaking up articles into multiple pages thereby multiplying the load times.
Maybe something to do with the business model?
I grew up reading TIME not realizing it was straight progressivist propaganda. Always thought Newsweek was too left wing. Haven’t read either one in decades!
More pages = more advertisement loads = more revenue. Simple law of the web. In the case of sites that are truly useful, like PJM or Thinker or Spectator, I have no complaints whatsoever; they earn my time.
Pay? Less than nothing! I went to the extra effort to cancel my ‘free’ subscription to Newsweek forced on me when I last donated to my local public radio station.
Why? They went to journalism school and those who have done that in the last 40 years likely didn’t learn what news is. They learned to distinguish news value, but not how to differentiate between news, information, and opinion.
On the more mundane question of what I’d pay for Newsweek, the answer is no better. In order to allow Newsweek into my home, they would have to pay me to take a subscription. It’s not worth the dead trees its printed on, nor do I need any more clutter in my life. Its news is neither new or relevant, and its information is neither timely nor accurate. It’s junk mail. I might take an issue of it if they paid me $2 a week for it.
What’s worse is that I would put a junk mail filter up on it if they tried to email it to me for free. I don’t have the time nor inclination to read the rantings of someone trying to tell me what to think. Propaganda has no inherent value and even dictatorships understand that its distribution must be paid for and its consumption legally enforced. The real reason that old media is dying is they destroyed their own value by becoming willful propaganda arms of various political groups.
<b<“They are an imitation, sort of like white men singing the blues.”
What an ignorant, if not downright racist comment. Even as humor, it’s banal. For all his admirable political evolution, in some ways Simon is still a bleeding-heart lib.
NOT. A cultural poseur is an unfortunately ubiquitous sort in this day and age. There are too many blokes and blokesses tricked out in bits and pieces of tribes they weren’t raised in and whose rules they don’t follow. If you don’t like Roger’s example, try folk dancers, who learn all the nifty moves for dances, but in no way would live subject to the learned, shared behavior of the oh-so-interesting ‘others’ whose dances they imitate.
I know it’s politically incorrect to notice such poseurs, but the best way to send PC to the dustbin where it belongs is to focus on it, mock it, and point out that its emperor has no clothes.
I hate the “white men can’t – or shouldn’t – sing the blues” stuff. Because if we apply that kind of thinking across the board, then Wynton Marsalis needs to stap away from the Mozart trumpet concertos right now. Silly on both sides of the spectrum.
Dave Bromberg? Yeah that white guy singing the blues sounds pretty “forced.” But John Mayer sounds real. So does Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, the late, great Paul Butterfield, Tom Waits, and man, many more. For that matter look up the late Eva Cassidy on YouTube and play her version of Chain of Fools. Aside from Aretha, I defy you to find a more kick as version. How about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gkTF-vZ_bM&feature=PlayList&p=5350F3E8454C8F41&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=37r
Sound forced to you? Me neither.
Hank Williams.
I contend that there’s still a market for a paper/internet hybrid periodical news publication; they just need to find unique and interest news. Dammit news media, do some footwork! Data mine, dumpster dive, clandestently investigate, talk to people walking on the street and working in the cubicals to find out what’s going on in the world that the collective whole doesn’t know about! Stop copying and pasting from the newswires and politicans’ press releases, screaming “Donkey good, Elephant bad”, and calling it “news”. No one’s going to pay to hear your opinion unless you’re Malcolm Gladwell, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or someone else who actually studies and thinks out their views and offers a unique perspective on the world.
(BTW, Newsweek/Time/etc. jumped the shark when every other magazine cover had Jesus or the Virgin Mary on the front, with articles inside that talked about churchgoing Christians like they men from Mars.)
Actually Frank, I continue to subscribe to Reason magazine. And I never would have but I noticed that I was going to Reason.com so often that I figured I’d get it as a donation. But I tend to always have something to read around in case I need to be standing in line at the DMV or something like that.
I think the last time I was in a dentists office without any of my own reading material I chose to read “Highlights” instead of newsweek.
Reason is the only magazine to which we subscribe, and for the same reasons(pun unintended). First it was out of habit, as my boyfriend had subscribed from its inception, but now it is something to carry along on car and bus and air trips. Leaving it behind is a lot less expensive than leaving a laptop.
Gee, Roger, I think you should buy it. Put up a contribution link and see how much people will chip in then offer The Washington Post the few hundred dollars you collect. As soon as you take over, fire all the liberal hacks who work there and then print a sort of “Best PJM of the Week” and send it off to the current subscribers just to see if it makes their heads explode.
If you could do that before the election in November it would be better still.
Eventually you will have to shut it down because a weekly news magazine is an outdated business model but you might have some fun with it first.
A poll: Which left-leaning legacy media outlet do you most want to see go out of business?
http://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=1206
Y’know, it would be very intestesting if Fox or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck bought it and turned its fortunes around. Would be a hard lesson for the rest of the industry…print the facts and be highly regarded as the judicious, highly factual and dependable news source. Sounds like a reasonable business plan.
Of course, you would need to fire the entire reporting staff and start over.
You’d also have to fire any editors you could find.
More like “What would they have to pay me to take it off their hands?”
MSM blogs are equivalent to Disney-owned Miramax. Just another tentacle of The Man…topus.
The Boston Glob seems to fill my parrot cage and puppy training needs, thank you very much.
Newsweek has always been the me-too brand to Time in any event. They gave lip service to trying to become a me-too brand for The Economist for all of a week or two– which even they didn’t believe they had the intellectual capital to pull off– but never put resources into it and quickly became a me-too brand for The New Republic instead. Except they don’t have that level of intellectual firepower, either.
Now they’re Yet Another Left-Wing Opinion Rag. Why would a dentist bother subscribing when they can pick something less controversial? Not to mention better-written and more interesting.
The New Republic, National Review, Reason, etc etc all survive partly because they’re used to having minuscule circulations, but mostly because they’re subsidized by their political foundation sponsors.
I can’t blame WaPo for trying to get something for their investment, but I’d be surprised if they manage to pick up a buyer who wants to do more than scrap it. WaPo would be wise to note that their flagship newspaper is heading down the same path as Newsweek, and there’s no reason to think the outcome will be any different.
Newsweek dribbles in week after week courtesy of my father-in-law. I assume they badgered him for subscriptions until he is paid up to the year 2020.
It is sad to see the news so perverted with bias.
I still get the Economist and Foreign Affairs, but that may be a fading hope too.
Scientific American is owned by Germans and has a shrill editorial slant. They are in-the-tank for Gore’s fraud and still pushing it.
National Geographic is still hot for Global Warming.
Science has sold out backing Mann and the CRU and IPCC.
The list goes on.
This is what liberals do.
Orwell knew this.
But it is sad to see.
There is quirky Popular Mechanics, maybe Wired is so edgy it will print the truth, and there is the great internet where the whole world is at your feet.
Newsweek will be missed by some, but not by me.
Great minds think alike, Roger!
I’d actually pay to make sure Newsweek goes into liquidation, but that’s just me.
“But I tend to always have something to read around in case I need to be standing in line at the DMV or something like that.”
That is the only reason I buy newspapers or magazines, and why I hope they don’t completely disappear.
I gave up on Newsweek, Time and the like long before the Internet became a news source. Time and Newsweek were obviously biased and virtually identical, and US News & WR was boring. However, my one and only published letter to the editor was in Newsweek – or maybe it was Time.
The funny thing is if George Soros were to write a check for a start up magazine and authorize hiring the present day cream of the MSM, the result would be something very much like Newsweek or Time. At some point the idea of making a profit became anathema at newspapers and magazines and they wrote off trying to appeal to the 80 percent of the American public who consider themselves middle of the road to right of center. It then became just a matter of time for the die off to begin.
You’d lose money if you settled for a measly $60 million. It’d cost at least $200 million to legally dispose of that much bio-waste.
A coalition of conservatives buying Newsweek and turning it into an honest weekly is a terrific idea. Hire Joseph Farah to run it. Use all those White House press passes they now have to flood Gibbs’ press events with real reporters and ask real questions. The cachet of a name news magazine still has tremendous power even in the internet age, and to waste it would be to miss an opportunity to show the MSM what reporting is supposed to be, a new standard to demonstrate the paucity of their journalism. Besides, why deprive the right of the joy of listening to the millions of little popping sounds as the left wingers’ blood pressures blow past critical upon hearing that Newsweek is no longer theirs.
“Print is dead.” — Egon
Sad in a way. It was a 60′s icon.
It was left wing in the 60′s and 70′s. Remember it describing “youth” as totally enamored of McGovern (who lost) and drugs, and what not? Well if you don’t, it did. “Youth” as NEWSWEEK defined them weren’t studying or working; that was for squares. “youth” was ” demonstrating, taking buses to D.C. to demonstrate against the hated Nixon, taking drugs, rebelling against authority, and insisting on “relevant” courses. Well, no, they weren’t.
With the cold war gone, it went totally partisian on domestic politics. No “united front” was expected there. It was like listening to any college commencement speaker–tediously liberal, assuming moron staus or fascist tendencies of anyone that’s not.
Like the LA Times, it fancied itself a magazine for liberal “Beltway insiders.” It must have been edited out of georgetown. You could feel it gritting its teeth at reagan’s win (he was an “amiable dunce” to them), the Sandinista’s loss, and even moaning about the loss of the USSR since it kept the US “in check.” Every democrat was full of “promise,” and every GOP office holder was a moron. The low tax crowd was “angry” like the people who “inexplicably” declined to listen to their Betters, and opposed ending the death penalty.
Its also amusingly incompetent: Its reporters could never intelligently comment on the looming housing crash, loose money, the sleeping SEC and FDIC or the immigration problem (not anecdotes but the problem leading to the Arizona law). How about the unionized schools or the exploding pensions? Nope. It was giving us last week’s liberal nostrums. Endless doses of Meg Greenfield.
Internet aside, they could survive if they offered something worth buying. I am sure they haven’t the foggiest idea how to do that.
News weeklies in general have long passed their shelf life. We’ve lived in the age of the 24-hour news cycle for the better part of the last 20 years. At best, the only thing a weekly magazine can contribute is news analysis. Now, that isn’t necessarily a bad proposition in itself. The Economist, for example, does quite well doing just that. The thing is, a general interest magazine put out by journalists is overwhelmingly likely to be devoid of the subject matter expertise that would add much in the way of value to a news analysis source. Adding in the fact that they have an almost uniform set of experiences and worldviews only exacerbates the problem.
If I felt that the ability to put certain headlines and pictures in on nearly every checkout counter in America allowed me to do a favor for the crony capitalist that currently occupies the WH and holds power in congress, would help my business in a significant way, I would pay a lot.
Why did Carlos Slim buy into the NYT?
Look what GE got our of supporting Obama through NBC and MSNBC and notice that the chairman of GE brought the crew of CNBC in for a lecture regarding their anti-Obama coverage. The current incarnation of the Tea Party movement started with a rant on CNBC.
I blogged about the Newsweek sale this morning myself on my apolitical business journalism blog. My overall take, that Newsweek’s experiment with making who is writing the stories as important as the stories, didn’t work. Yeah, Dan Lyons and even Sharon Begley will throw you a great story every once in a while but way too often news was secondary.
My post is here: http://seanreadsthenews.typepad.com/seanreadsthenews/2010/05/new-york-times-newsweek-for-sale.html.
Roger, not to pick nits with you but here’s picking at one.
All the detainees do have flush toilets at Gitmo. Just not the kind you and I are used to.
Each one is set in the floor, about 4 or 5 inches deep and is stainless steel. The drain pipe is only about 3 inches across. You would have to tear the book into three or parts in order to flush it.
If you ask how I know, I was a Company Commander down there from July 2004 to April 2005.
As for Newsweek, I haven’t bought an issue in well over 15 years and don’t intend on buying another in the near future. It can go the way of the dodo and I won’t shed a tear.
They don’t have enough money to pay me to take it. That’s my answer, whether we’re talking about one issue or the entire company.
Buy Newsweek?
This, my friends, is pure capitalist (sort of) opportunity.
Can you imagine how much MORE time people will spend waiting in doctors’ offices when ObamaCare kicks in?
If you manage it right, Newsweek will be required reading…at the least, there will be regulations about what magazines will be allowed in the waiting zone…
I may have been one of the last non-liberals to cancel my subscription with this outfit. Reading it for years I was aware that it was left leaning but did find some value in reading new analysis from someone with a different world view than myself.
The jump the shard moment came with Obama. After several issues raining praise down on hime they did one of his spritual development – my guess about 10,000 words on how he developed his beliefs. In that, they found a way to include about one non specific sentance about Rev Wright. It was then that I realized the entire magazine was an insult to the intelligence of anyone reading it – and cancelled the remaining portion of my subscription.
To remain a reader of this glop, you’d need to not only be a liberal, but one who was completely devoid of any semblance of open mindeness.
Sorry, I’m not rich like Obama. I can’t afford to lose $500K/week.
I know the business model very well. Surf the web for stories. Add some leftie opinion. Download some images from Getty and print the magazine for mailing.
They quit sending out reporters after Bush retired. They stopped sending photographers to the Golf War. Obama didn’t see a need to cover it.
Newsweek has been bland, predictably slanted lefty crap for years. Goodbye, don’t let the door hit you on the butt when you leave. Newsweeklies are definitely becoming a thing of the past…. On the other hand I have been a US News Subscriber for 5 years and when they went to an on-line version with a monthly magazine version. The weekly PDF is written well and has good graphics and the perspective seems fairly centrist; and I don’t mind a recap of the previous week with some good analysis. I don’t want to sound like an advertisement but…. its a good product for me. At the end of the day its is the quality of the product and the packaging; newsweek does neither well.
Unless you publish local grocery store coupons, publishing anything, is becoming the 21st century buggy whip.
Forget about left-wing … have any of you read the international edition of this magazine? I have when visiting my in-laws in South Asia. The international edition is out and out anti-American — there’s no other way to say it.
I bought an issue of this fascist publication back in January or February, whose cover story was titled “The Myth of Rogue States”, above cardboard cutouts of Mahmoud Arabdinejad, Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong-Sick. While I expected to read something about more bark than bite on the part of those foes of democracy, who would might be more paper-tiger-like than we’d expect, what I found was a cultural-relativist load of nonsense according to which “Western countries should stop referring to any nations as ‘rogue’ states, since the population and leaders of those nations could also see developed nations as ‘rogue’ because of their own actions.”
Sure… Criticizing sharia, banning minarets, granting equality for all of a country’s citizens before the law (regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion), criminalizing pedophilia and fighting against the possession of nuclear weapons by deranged lunatics that might end up using it to usher in an Armageddon, in order to bring a so-called 12th imam out of its (not his) Saddam-Hussein-style hole in the ground (not that the current US president, Buraq Hussein Osama, has been doing any fighting towards that end, but you get the drift)… Such moves should make us really think before we call any other country in this world a rogue nation, shouldn’t they? Well, to the editorial board of Newsweek, they should indeed, without any sarcasm in the question.
Why not buy Newsweek and fire the editors? Wouldn’t conservative/libertarian investors do well to snap up as much of the MSM as a way to put an end to the leftist bias?
I sent an email to my dentist not long after the Sarah Palin cover asking why, if they feature Newsweek in the waiting room, they don’t also feature National Review and/or the Weekly Standard. I offered to pay for subscriptions to NR and the Standard. Never heard back, but the last two times I was there no copies of Newsweek were to be found (and I went digging around for one). A small victory, maybe.
The Washington Post loses money on the paper. The only thing keeping the company afloat is Kaplan which does SAT schooling.
I have been getting the daily paper free for over 4 years now. I kept cancelling my susbscription and they kept giving me “6 months free” again and again just to keep their circulation numbers up.
I like newspapers but the WaPo has become increasingly unreadable. Not a day goes by without some minority/gay/immigrant sob story or how some governmental unit is stretched to the breaking point.
They bought out all their old staff over the past 10 years (the guys who would call themselves reporters) and replaced them with a ‘diverse’ group of J-school grads.
As my brother-in-law would say as teenager attending farm auctions in the seventies…
“I’ll give you a neeekle!”
Heartless.
When I lived in Europe over two decades ago, Newsweek International Edition was my American news lifeline (no internet back then, of course). It was biased in general, but not exclusively so. There was some variety. Nowadays, it reads like an angry People magazine. I used to enjoy reading Fareed Zakaria, who was intelligent and thought-provoking even if I didn’t always agree with him. In my last few attempts, it seems that they have neutered him too.
Atlantic Monthly has never been the same since Michael Kelly died. But it did take a while for it to collapse.
As an American currently living in Europe, I gave up on most msm publications on both sides of the Atlantic to keep me in the loop ages ago. Now, if I buy an English language paper, it is usually the WSJ since 99% of British Press is stuck in a continual shark jumping loop with the Benny Hill theme song playing in the background. If not for the internet, I would be completely cut off from news not found relevant by German press, which is a considerable amount of news. I agree with you. The last few times that I’ve leafed through Newsweek, I felt like I was reading a highly politicized gossip rag.
I hear you. These days I’m living in China. The English papers are far less censored than the Mandarin ones (so far as others tell me, I can’t read Chinese characters), but they don’t have much international news. They do still manage to have the same stale Garfield cartoons When will he ever die? No hope for that, I suppose, considering that you can still find the even older Alley Oop and Andy Capp in papers too.
Actually, the quality of those comics pretty much equals the quality of the news in contemporary publications like Newsweek. Not sure what I’d do without the internet….
My disconnect with msm publications began while I was living in France. French media is rated as having only a slightly higher “diversity of opinion” rating in its newspapers than China; Garfield was the most informative thing they had.
Newsweek is too expensive for me; I have got to buy my toilet paper to squeeze the Charmin. Perhaps the DNC could officially purchase Newsweek? Therefore, the DNC could appoint Howard Dean as executive editor? They could afford to spread the cheese. I’ve got better things to do with my pennies…
Roger, please, please, puhhhhhlease say you bid only a penny!
The Veterans will come and pick up donated stuff right off of your porch if you give them a call. Newsweek may want to keep that on the list of options.
Thread winner, hands down.
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The only time I read Newsweek is when I am waiting in the dentist’s office. Even then its a five min. throw away magazine.
I stopped reading Newsweek and Time in the 1980s. The only “newsweeklies” I bother with now are World magazine (which truly gives you insight and coverage that you get no where else) and the Economist (which keeps upping the depth quotient, even as they continue to slide leftward editorially they are at least honest lefties).
Newsweeks problem is that lefties don’t like to pay for anything. They want someones to pay for them (witness NPR/PBS). The ad revenues to HuffPo and Kos are actually donations, not reflections of value earned for the advertisors.
My parakeets are very upset! They love to go on the pictures(is there anything else)of celebrity libtards featured in discarded “News”weeks.Whenever they become “irregular” I always show them pictures of MICHELLE OBAMA; it never fails to scare the crap out of them without resorting to laxatives.
I’d buy it just for the pleasure of putting Eleanor “Rodham” Clift onto the street.
There would be a certain satisfaction in gathering the editorial staff and “talent” for a first meeting with the the new owner and announcing “you’re all fired,” wouldn’t there. But I’m afraid even that wouldn’t be inducement enough.
Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt suggested that if Mark Steyn tossed in 50 cents to match Hugh’s 50 cents, they’d probably have enough, but Steyn declined.
i stopped reading both “time” and “newsweek” when they both ran almost the same scare cover of a muzzle on view of a loaded revolver in simultaneous special “gun control” issues. i have never missed either and if/when “newsweek” finally goes toes up i won’t even bother to urinate on its grave.
I loev de Newsweek,I wanna buy it;I follew dey advis, in the ruling of my counrtri;it the kind of magazine that can help me! Robert Mugabe Presidential palace,Harare, Zimbawe.
Before I read one word of the article, I laughed out loud at the title.
Then Derek’s comment made me dribble my soda:
Classic!
I’d rather buy Greek municipal bonds than “Newsweek.” In an Internet age, the “news” in those magazines is old when its’ published, so there has to be some reason to buy it. Thier brilliant business model – swing hard to the left and alienate half of their marketplace, attack conservatives relentlessly, dumb the writing down and fill the pages with hacks and put Obama on every other cover – is an Epic Fail.
In 2008, they started sending it to us for free (we’d had a brief subscription for our son about 4 years before). We think it was just an attempt to boost their numbers and influence the election at the same time. We just threw it in the trash.
I expect that The Washington Post Company will find that there are no buyers for Newsweek as was the in efforts to sell several newspapers.
The left wing political advocacy of Newsweek was a big factor in its failure. It was certainly a major reason why twelve years ago I stopped my subscription, after reading Newsweek since the early 1960s.
“What would you pay for it?”
Okay, how about if they throw in a side of fries?
I’d like to see a complete transformation to Newsweek.
1. Split the writing staff. That is to say fire half of them(which half is a tricky question, tell them the plan and see who walks out first) and hire a right-leaning or conservative half. (may be advisable to keep them physically separated)
2. Pull out news stories for the week and let the staff pick out what interests them most to write about.
3. Slap a counter-part with an assignment to write a counter-story for each article complete with fact-checking and such. Allow rebuttals until it degenerates to name calling.
4. Publish(not the name calling parts).
Suddenly instead of a magazine for a section of the population its a magazine for everybody.
I’m afraid Mark (#33) is right about the outdated business model, which is also true of newspapers. When the SF Chronicle — a hard-left monopoly paper in a hard-left market — is losing $1M a week and is on the brink of extinction, you know the model is broken. For that matter, the center-right Washington Times would have folded years ago without its subsidies (now in jeopardy) from the Moonies. And the Christian Science Monitor is now online-only. Even joint operating agreements no longer help — witness the recent demise of the Rocky Mtn. News and Seattle P-I. So it isn’t just the leftist bias.
Still, it’s darkly amusing to watch the leftist MSM outlets wither and die. I lived in the Metroplex in 1991, and still recall saying “goodbye and good riddance” when the ultra-liberal Dallas Times Herald folded that December. What a bad month for that Marxist shill Molly Ivins — both her employer and her favorite country (the USSR) went belly-up in the same month!
Back in the 1960s when I was an undergraduate, Newsweek boasted that it could separate fact from opinion. Today, alas, it can’t tell the difference (which is about par for most of the so-called MSM). How the mighty have fallen.