As a proud former staffer of Time Magazine, where I spent 16 mostly terrific years working with some of the finest writers and journalists who ever graced the business — you’re not going to get any snark from me about Time at the end of its glory years in the 1980s under the supervision of Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Grunwald and the magazine’s great managing editor, Ray Cave — I read the following story with a touch of sadness:

The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine.

The publishing industry has been struggling as businesses cut back on ad budgets during the recession. But Newsweek, along with Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report, faces a particular challenge finding a relevant niche in the age of up-to-the-second online news. Once handy digests of the week’s events, they have been assailed by competitors on the Web that pump out a constant stream of news and commentary.

NEWSWEEK FEB. 16 COVER

Despite staff cuts, Newsweek has remained a drag on its parent company, which is also struggling with ad declines at its namesake newspaper.

Translation: Newsweek is pretty much dead, and now the only question is who’s going to rouge the corpse for a few more years, if anybody, to keep its collection of Morning Joe talking heads with at least the fig leaf of meaningful employment before the final axe falls.

In the New York Times, David Carr has some thoughts:

Not much need be said about how the news cycle overtook Newsweek, but suffice to say that daily journalism began to fold in real-time analytics and then the Web came along and annotated every event before it was hours old, let alone a week. At $5.95 per issue, Newsweek is hardly a bargain. The current issue with an embattled soldier on the front — we will skip the jokey metaphor — has some great writing, including an adaptation from Sebastian Junger’s new book “War,” but at 56 pages, it seems thin and not very much of the moment.

Newsweek is your father’s magazine, and no amount of reinvention could fix that. The brand still has recognition, but beyond helping its editor, Jon Meacham, get on television and sell some books, it hard to tell what the brand is really worth at this point. The people at the magazine had been told that they had until the end of 2010 to figure it out, but with losses of more than $500,000 a week, the alarm clock rang on the early side.

Indeed it did — loud and long and clear.  Ever since its recent  ”reinvention” as an “opinion leader” — it was too poor and too lazy to any real reporting any more, so it offered the same tired collection of Washington and Manhattan bylines you can read, or hear, or see, everywhere else, as if the bylines mattered instead of the news  — the eternal second banana to Time really had no further reason for existence.  Except, as Carr notes, to support its editor, Jon Meacham, during his transition from day job to night job.

Meacham

Meacham, in fact, is one of those rumored to be in the running to buy Newsweek. From TheWrap:

Meacham, editor and public face of Newsweek, is putting together his own bid to buy the publication, according to the Awl. He can’t afford it himself on an editor’s salary (even with his Pultizer-prize-winning book deal advances) so he is said to be “lining up financiers” and “has already had inquiries from some very well-off types.” Meacham told the Observer: “We have to figure out what journalism is going to be as the old business model collapses all around us. And I want to be — I want to try to be — a part of that undertaking. Will it work? Who the hell knows. But I’m at least going to look at this.” But, according to New York magazine, it appears some younger people at Newsweek would rather that not happen.

ODDS: 3 to 1

It seems clear that the desperate gamble to turn Newsweek into a kind of American version of The Economist was doomed to failure all along, in large part because of the intellectual arrogance behind the scheme.  As New York Magazine notes:

The news from this morning’s Washington Post Company board meeting that Newsweek is being put up for sale is a public acknowledgment of a fact that has become increasingly apparent to everyone: The magazine is broken. Under Jon Meacham, the 40-year-old who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, the magazine has pursued an ambitious, risky strategy of going upmarket, taking the rate base down from 2.6 million to 1.5 million and creating an Economist-like thought-leader product.

The goal has been to go for what one top editor called “the better informed and more intellectually aspirational readers in the country.”

Guess there weren’t that many of them. Or maybe they were looking for them — for you — in the wrong place, since the “better informed and more intellectually aspirational readers” long ago abandoned dead-tree journalism for the web.

Given the difficult climate Newsweek faces, it’s not surprising that long before today’s announcement, many staffers — particularly younger ones— questioned Meacham’s leadership. In fact, in parts of the magazine, one senior staffer says, “morale couldn’t be worse. People are openly looking for jobs on their computers, visible to their colleagues and bosses.”

Vanity Fair’s media columnist, Michael Wolff, put the boot in to Politico:

“It’s just inevitable,” Wolff said. “I can’t believe for the life of me that people are surprised or that they didn’t know it was coming and expected it.”

“Newsweek had an opportunity but they really blew it,” he continued, dissing the magazine’s 2009 redesign and it’s decision to aim for a more elite audience. He’s pessimistic that anyone will take it off the Post Company’s hands, either.

“No, obviously it won’t find a buyer. This is just face-saving, this is just being nice. … Newsweek as we know it is over, finished,” he said.

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Hard to believe, huh?