first newsweek cover, 1933, via taylormarsh.com
So after 80 years, umpteen awards, hundreds of little insights and major scoops, and (particularly lately) a lot of dross, Newsweek magazine will fold in December. The name will live on as a section within the DailyBeast.com website; but we all know this is an ending, not a “transition.”
It’s a shame. But it’s been a while in coming.
The Washington Post Co. unloaded Newsweek a few years back, just to have one fewer money-losing journalistic enterprise on its books. It was propped up for a little while by audio-equipment tycoon Sidney Harman; but he died last year, and his family stopped subsidizing the mag.
That left Newsweek at the mercy of DailyBeast, the punditry and gossip site run by media mogul Barry Diller and serial failed magazine editor Tina Brown.
Circulation, at 3 million a decade ago, dropped by more than half. Brown imposed several sleaze cover stories this summer and autumn; these only led some former fans to wish it put out of its misery.
No one, except laid off employees and their kin, will mourn what Newsweek had become.
But many of us will mourn what it had been.
When News-Week: The Magazine of News Significance began in 1933, Henry Luce’s Time had been publishing for a decade. Many readers, particularly at the dawn of FDR’s New Deal era, had grown weary of Luce’s unabashed conservative slant. News-Week gave these readers a similar formula of digests and analysis, but with a nonpartisan, sometimes even pro-Dem POV.
The Washington Post Co. bought Newsweek in the 1950s, and beefed up its original reporting. It never overtook Time in circulation or revenue, but frequently outshone its rival in getting the biggest stories and the most insightful angles on the same stories.
These days, there are any dozens of websites and blogs and aggregator algorithms serving up customized, bubble-ized, non-threatening headlines and punditry and spin about the national political/economic sphere.
But there’s less and less original reporting for these sites to slice, dice, and interpret.
And there are fewer big places that serve a variety of points of view, challenging readers to think outside of their respective ideological boxes.
We need more of what Newsweek, at its peak, served up every seven days.
