Newsweak

It's been a long time since I have actively sought out Newsweek. The magazine. You remember, right? The Burger King to Time's McDonald's? Over the past few decades, Time has gone on to make billions of dollars with its Batman movies and cable TV, Newsweek has been losing bushels of money even after separating from that other print-monster, The Washington Post. All that news had to find someplace to go, and so it will now appear in  a digital-only version. On Al Gore's Internet. Right next to Nickelodeon.com.
So, what's the big deal? We save a few trees, and we won't have Michelle Bachmann staring at us from the coffee table. That was the one that caused me to wonder how I ended up with a subscription after years of eschewing all that news. I had moved on by then. I was now a committed Entertainment Weekly reader. It is only now that it occurs to me that I have unwittingly slipped into the corporate vortex that is Time-Warner. They're the guys who are putting the words into Wolf Blitzer's talking head. Well, at least they're paying for those nice suits.
Back in the day, it was a big deal when Bruce Springsteen made it on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week. These days, as you are more likely to see the Boss on the AARP publication, and soon there won't be cover to Newsweek. Now there will only be a splash page. "Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013," editor Tina Brown wrote in an email to employees last Thursday. "As part of this transition, the last print edition in the U.S. will be our December 31st issue." Thanks for the heads-up, Tina. In a twenty-four hour news cycle, we can only assume that if the news we are reading has been on our coffee table for a week, it's no longer news. And if this is news to you, maybe you should consider subscribing to this blog instead of the new web-based Newsweek.