[jgfoot]

Was the problem that they were "unable to adapt to the new world," or was the problem that they editorially went off the deep end? Readers abandoned Newsweek as Newsweek's quality declined. Perhaps the one drove the other--with fewer readers, it was tougher to fund expensive journalism. But, from the link: "Last November, she featured a cover story about sex addiction, and in May President Obama was shown wearing a rainbow-colored halo with a headline that read ”The First Gay President.”" The Internet didn't do that; Tina Brown did.

[jes5199]

I agree.

There's some kind of blindspot with traditional media: people say "oh, they couldn't handle the competition from the blogs" but that was only after decades of reducing the local papers into skeleton crews - if your newspaper is little more than a platform for syndicating Reuters stories verbatim then yeah, you're asking to be disrupted.

[glhaynes]

I've seen so much derision toward them for the First Gay President thing but I don't really understand why. It's an obvious play on First Black President Bill Clinton, made poignant by Obama being the actual first black President.

Now, their recent "Heaven is Real" cover on the other hand…

[nollidge]

I'd say they went off the deep end in an attempt to adapt to the new world.