Washington Post to Sell Newsweek

The Washington Post Co. announced this week that it would sell the highly influential but financially suffering Newsweek, despite the fact that the company overall still makes a profit.  Shudders reverberated through the media industry in the wake of the weekly publication’s announcement.  While most people touted the magazine’s reputation, media critics remain skeptical whether or not it will find a buyer.

“I did not want to do this, but it is a business,” Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, told the New York Times. The magazine would lose money in 2010, he said, and “we don’t see a sustained path to profitability for Newsweek.”

Jon Meacham, appearing on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart on the day of the announcement, called it a “rational economic decsion,” but remained defiant about Newsweek’s future potential to drive the public discourse. “I decline to accept that Newsweek in some form does not have a role to play going forward,” he said to the Times,.   

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"I do not believe that Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye beteween democracy and ignornance but we're one of them, and there are not that many on the edge of that cliff." Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek.

 

Edward Kosner, a former Newsweek editor, lamented over the loss of an institution that has driven the public debate since 1933.   

“Those magazines had much more stature in those days,” he told the Times. “It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and what was on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the national press. They helped set the agenda; they helped make reputations.”

Porter Bibb, a former White House correspondent for Newsweek, not only predicted the magazine’s demise, but the apocalypse of print media in general.

“I don't think you're going to find newsstands at airports or anywhere else in 10 years because print is really on its last legs,” he told NPR’s Jeremy Hobson.