'Newsweek’s for Sale—What Would You Pay for It?'

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that Roger L. Simon is tipping his hand a bit in negotiations, by putting a figure on the table first:

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.)

But never mind. Isn’t Newsweek a brand name? Isn’t that what we’d be buying? Well, yes, but what could be worse than the word “week” attached to news these days? “Newsday,” speaking of another dying publication, is bad enough. Week is virtually lethargic. “Newsminute” might be more like it. (By the way, you can get into the “backorder auction” for that URL at GoDaddy.com for $15.99. I checked.)

What’s surprising is this would-be sale took so long. Newsweeklies have been considered dead since the Fillmore Administration. But now… with the advent of the iPad… there has been talk of a renaissance. It wasn’t enough for the WaPo apparently, which has its eyes on bigger things, like the aforementioned HuffPo and Kos. The newspaper wants to get into the blog business.

Since Roger is a no-go, Rick Edmonds of the liberal Poynter Online Website explores some remaining potential suitors for the ailing magazine:

Newsweek, put up for sale today by the Washington Post Company, has hardly any value left as a going business. It is a damaged property in a difficult category, badly trailing major competitors like Time, the Economist and the upstart The Week.

Which is not to say no one will buy it. Newsweek could be a fit for a well-off company looking for a name-brand extension as was the case when Bloomberg bought Business Week for next to nothing last October. Come to think of it, Bloomberg could be a prospect, as it has built a huge and high-quality general news operation, whose work is not widely seen.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham has indicated he will try to put together a buyer’s group. Rich investors who share Meacham’s editorial vision could sign on — though they are likely to be alarmed by the numbers and bleak prospects for profit.

There is a third kind of prospect, impolitely known as an “ego buyer,” who is willing to drop some part of a fortune earned in other businesses for the adventure and prestige of high-profile publishing. Real-estate mogul Morton Zuckerman probably has his hands full with the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, but he is not the only fish in that pond.

Post CEO Donald Graham told Newsweek employees Tuesday that beyond price there are “second and third criteria” that will be considered in choosing a buyer — someone who will take good care of the property and staffers that remain. So if Rush Limbaugh and partners wanted to bid (and I can’t imagine why), the answer would probably be no.