PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

PRINT JOURNALISM KEEPS GETTING HIT UPSIDE THE HEAD BY A TWO-BY FOUR just about every other day. Now, the Washington Post Company says it wants to sell Newsweek, a magazine that was once its flagship reach into the big time of national and international journalism. The magazine division lost something like 29 million dollars last year and the struggle continues into 2010.

Anyone want to take odds that the magazine will be closed? I wouldn’t bet on survival with found money. In fact, the question immediately pops into mind: who would buy it? Murdoch has the Wall Street Journal and just about everything else, why would he want or need Newsweek? Gannett, which a long time ago used to buy anything at all, is not much in the buying business any more. The Times-Mirror Company is in bankruptcy. None of the major media companies with cash on hand appears to have any bold, forward thinking leadership, so it doesn’t take long to run out of potential buyers.

Hey! Listen up out there! Who needs a loss leader? I know where you can find one.

This is yet another sign that the glory days of big time journalism are not just over, they are being buried, deep. We are looking at a wake and there is no place to go for a free shot of Irish wiskey..

A major part of the problem with the two major weekly news magazines, Time and Newsweek, is they lost their way a long time ago. No one knows what they are any more or what they are supposed to be. In their prime, they were a compendium of all the news from everywhere with the intention, bit by bit, of advancing news stories, giving the reader insight along with their comprehensiveness. That went out the window a long time ago.   In fact, they have been               “re-designed” and restarted so many times they really stand for, and amount to, nothing.

Here is an anonymous quote in the Washington Post story about the planned “sale” of the magazine, provided by “one person close to the situation”:

"They destroyed in five years what it took decades to make by a series of mistakes, the last of which was trying to turn the magazine into the New Republic. They lost sight of what a news magazine is, something that gives you the whole   world."

That quote pretty well sums up the deal. I have my own theories about why this sort of thing happens. In part, we have too many very clever, academically sharp people pushing their way into journalism and they want to make an impact. As the fortunes of print go downward, the academically sharp leadership of companies like the Post, often having attended the same schools and flittered around in the same social circles, want to give the up and comers a chance. Some, but not all, of the sharpies coming along aren’t really grounded in journalism all that much. They feel they are grounded in thinking and they want to share that vision with the world.What the public needs, even wants, some people think, is to understand the news, forgetting that millions of people stiff need a news summary.

Too much change means too much decline in existing readership and, most of the time, the new readership is smaller and never equals the breath and depth of the old. The same sort of thing applies to programs like the CBS Evening News. Katie and Company very nearly managed to take all the news out of the program during her first year there and the audience fled as if from a very stinky, crowded room. They seemed to want to make it the “Katie Couric Show” with a little news thrown in. It didn’t work and she  and the program have never fully recovered, although it is a better news show now than it was at the start.

Here is the basic question for Newsweek: in the age of the Internet, do we need a weekly summing up and looking forward in news? If we do, who will pay long enough and hard enough to take it into basic profitability? The answer to the first part is maybe. The answer to the second part is likely no one. Donald Graham and the Washington Post Company just signed a death warrant for one of their greatest accomplishments.

Doug Terry, 5.5.10

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