Newsweek is up for sale. Hope the company sells better than the product, which couldn’t even move half its issues if it ran a “Win a Date with Obama” contest. We called it “Newsreek” in high school, clever speech-and-debaters that we were. (There was also “Useless News & World Distorts,” and “Slime.”) I grew up in a house that didn’t take newsweeklies; there was the paper, and the evening news, and that covered it. Even then, in the 70s, a newsweekly seemed a bit superfluous. If a friend’s family had Newsweek around the house, it meant they were one of those Parallel People – Hunts Ketchup instead of Heinz, RC Cola instead of Coke. Even then I knew Time was the leader, and Newsweek was the Avis of magazines.

Flash ahead a few decades. I’m waiting for my car to be repaired. Forgot to bring reading material, so I’m reading Newsweek. The ads: old-folk pills, mostly. Half the ad space was taken by legal disclaimers warning people that this drug for nausea might cause heartburn, and this other drug for heartburn might give you nausea. Or a nine-hour erection! Consult your doctor. It felt like every other issue of every other newsweekly, a recitation of stale news fed through the digestive system of the mainstream media. There wasn’t anything it did that other mags didn’t do better, either by specializing or by applying a cheerfully up-front ideological bias.

This was before Newsweek decided to go full-liberal on everyone, an act that must have shocked the staff: we’re going to be write from a proudly liberal stance? Good heavens, where will be find liberal writers?

Somehow they found enough to put the book in the graveyard. It’s not dead but it’s not looking hale, either.

Can’t imagine why anyone would buy it. Newsweeklies are dead – in print form, anyway; they can live on the web or iPad apps, but then they’re a brand, not a species. It could survive if Murdock bought the title, and ran it like a Weekly-Standard-flavored newsmag, but why not start that one from scratch? Issues would land in current subscribers’ mailboxes with covers like WHY SOLAR POWER ARE INFERIOR TO NUKES, and half the subscriber base would clutch their chest and topple off the stoop.

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