Newsweek (original print run)

» see newsweek.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

newsweek was one of the two big american news weeklies. time was the other. together they defined a particular kind of glossy centrist reporting for the second half of the 20th century, and turkish bookstores would sometimes carry a stack of international edition copies next to the times atlas and the paperback rack. i never subscribed. i read the odd issue at havaş at the airport in the 2000s when i had a long layover and nothing on the phone yet.

thomas martyn launched news-week (with a hyphen) on 17 february 1933. it was rebranded to newsweek without the hyphen in 1937 after a merger. the washington post company bought it in 1961 and held it for 49 years. through the 1990s it was clearing over 3 million copies a week. by the late 2000s the ad market had collapsed and the internet had swallowed the news cycle newsweek was built around.

the washington post co sold it on 2 august 2010 to sidney harman for one dollar plus assumption of pension and financial liabilities. harman was 91 and made his money in high-end audio (harman kardon). he died three months after buying it. by the end of 2010 the harman estate had merged newsweek into the newsweek daily beast company with tina brown running editorial. it did not work. on 18 october 2012 tina brown announced the print edition would end at the end of the year. the last us newsstand issue shipped 31 december 2012 with a cover reading "#lastprintissue" and a photograph of the old midtown manhattan office building.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the one-dollar sale ~

the harman sale is the piece people remember. the washington post company had held newsweek for half a century. by 2010 the magazine was losing tens of millions a year. graham (donald, running the post co at that point) put it up for sale in may. no buyer wanted to pay for the losses. harman took the one-dollar deal in august, on the condition of assuming the pension and severance liabilities. the newsroom got a stay of execution measured in months.

~ the death, then the zombie ~

ibt media bought the brand from iac in august 2013 for an undisclosed sum. they relaunched a smaller print magazine on 7 march 2014 with a bitcoin cover story that turned into a public embarrassment when the "founder of bitcoin" the piece named turned out to be someone else. newsweek has been printing on some cadence since then, under changing ownership. the newsweek that mattered as the second-tier of american news reporting, the one that arrived weekly next to time, is dead. what runs under the masthead now is a different product with the same name.

~ what got left ~

the archive. seven decades of political reporting and cold war coverage sit in the newsweek back catalog and get cited in academic work and google books. the current newsweek does not own the same cultural place. the one-dollar sale is what stuck.

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