The Washington Post Co. has announced it is putting Newsweek up for sale, which probably signals its demise and would leave Time as the only general newsweekly standing.
Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz points out that newsweeklies, once useful digests of the week’s events, now have to compete for attention with up-to-the-second online news and commentary from all quarters. And they have struggled. That means unless a billionaire or two who don’t mind losing money step forward, Newsweek will likely face the same future as U.S. News & World Report.
Writes Kurtz:
Editorially, though, I’ve always liked Newsweek (it is based in New York and editorially separate from The Post, and we see ourselves as competitors). I’ve enjoyed reading Meacham, Jonathan Alter, Howard Fineman, Evan Thomas, Mike Isikoff, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Samuelson and others. But the Web site was stuck around 1999, and in a digital world, that’s an unforgivable sin.
Newsweek has had its ups and downs but is intertwined with history. There was the tough story about Adm. Jeremy Boorda and his medals that led to Boorda’s suicide; the cover about Vice President George H.W. Bush and the “wimp factor”; the famous decision to hold Isikoff’s Monica Lewinsky scoop, which leaked to Drudge.
