“Scramble the jets!” our late editor, Maynard Parker, would shout, and all over the world dozens of correspondents and editors swooped and dove on a Friday afternoon to cover the big, late-breaking story of the week. As Don Graham, his mother’s successor, liked to say, “We’re the pirate ship and they’re the stately ocean liner sailing off.” Pirates had fun-not raffish newsroom amusement (our offices looked more like an insurance company) but a spirit of adventure every week. Newsweek was always the scrappy, risk-taking underdog, Avis to Time’s Hertz. Last week, workers replaced the Time Inc sign outside its downtown Manhattan headquarters with Meredith, an Iowa-based company with little interest in news. Now that magazine is perilously thin and was recently sold. News but trailing Time, which had a weekly readership of 20 million in the late 20th century, with more than $600 million in annual ad revenue. And we were a distant number two, well ahead of U.S. The paid global circulation of today’s print edition of Newsweek is said to be 100,000 well into the internet age, ours was at least 30 times larger-3 million paid subscribers and 15 million readers, which encompassed the “pass along” rate in families, doctors’ offices, and foxholes.
Dinosaurs still roamed the media earth, and the Grahams were satisfied with modest profits at best. 57th) in New York, where travel and expense accounts were generous and even researchers often had their own offices.īeginning in the 1980s, newsmagazines were written off as dinosaurs, but it didn’t matter. While more publicly identified with The Washington Post, she would hold monthly editorial lunches at our plush headquarters at 444 Madison Avenue (and later 251 W. We got that and a lot more from Katharine Graham, now immortalized by Meryl Streep in the film The Post, who until her death in 2001 was the best proprietor imaginable. Journalists are sometimes compared to the horses in Black Beauty-all we want is a nice master, a little hay to lie down on, and a sugar cube once in a while. Many of my colleagues also worked there for the better part of their lives-unheard of nowadays. I stayed for nearly three decades as a national-affairs writer, media critic, and political columnist. Sometime in the early 1990s, when I wasn’t yet 40, the Village Voice joked that I’d have to be carried out prone-and they weren’t far wrong. I went to work at Newsweek 35 years ago last month. Matt Cooper, who also worked at the old Newsweek, resigned from the latest incarnation Monday with a letter saying that in three decades in journalism, “I’ve never seen more reckless leadership.” Ed Kosner, editor in the late 1970s, wrote on Facebook Tuesday, “Time to begin always making the distinction between our Real Newsweek of sainted memory and this shameful Fake Newsweek.” In the last five years, Newsweek produced some strong journalism and plenty of clickbait before becoming a painful embarrassment to anyone who toiled there in its golden age. for $1 in 2010, and sold again in 2013 by Barry Diller’s IAC to a shadowy company called International Business Times. Whatever its shortcomings, the country lost something with the demise of classic Newsweek-a magazine with guts and heart.Īfter years of survivable financial struggles, the magazine-founded in 1933-cratered with the economy in 2008, was sold by the Washington Post Co.
This was the cinematic coda to a decade of collapse. Newsweek is in the news-raided by the police last month as part of a probe into the owners’ shady finances, then subjected to a crude purge on Monday, when the owners sacked the editors and reporters who tried to write about the scandal.
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