What asset does Newsweek have other than the copyright to the name and images?
Anybody could buy it and turn it into a conservative magazine overnight.
The problem is that even a conservative newsweekly just won’t last. The market won’t tolerate 3 anymore. There’s already Time and US News.
The irony is that nobody can run it as cheaply as WaPo can. They already have a stable of writers who can use their research to write a newspaper article and then a magazine article.
The problem: Newsweek over the past year has damaged their brand severely. All they had to sell was their reputation and that’s now worthless.
I would see a conservative weekly crowding out Time and USNews, just like Fox crowded out CNN and MSNBC.
It brand was damaged to conservatives, but if conservatives took over, that would be rapidly repaired.
Having these sit in doctors’ office around the country would be huge.
That mass audience is gone. Newsweek's circulation is half what it was two years ago.
The bizarre thing is that much of the decline was intended.
They discouraged renewals and new subscriptions and tried to charge more for the magazine, thinking that people would actually pay more for what was actually less and less.
They thought they could be like the Nation or the New Republic or National Review or the Weekly Standard -- an ideologically focused publication that didn't bother with people who thought differently. But those magazines look much more deeply at things than Newsweek does, and they still lose money! They're subsidized by wealthy patrons and contributions.
The business plan was ridiculous. Meecham and Thomas would go on and on about how they wanted a magazine for serious thinkers and opinion leaders, but they'd publish articles by Evan Thomas's twenty-something daughter who was straight out of college. So much for depth and quality. There was something bizarre about the whole episode, and few will shed tears over Newsweek when it goes under.
But even without the strategic fiasco, there just isn't a big audience for general news magazines. The news cycle moves too quickly, and the magazines are usually pretty superficial compared to what's available elsewhere.