If you’ve been following the story of Newsweek‘s demise (click those two links if you haven’t), then this Politico piece on Tina Brown’s ill-fated editorship is required reading, both for what it says, and for what it doesn’t say.
What it says is that Brown was a creative, involved editor who hired good writers and worked long and hard to make the magazine a success. It also says that she was a spendthrift perfectionist who called people at 3 AM, expensively redid things at the last moment and never had a solid business plan for putting the magazine back in the black. She also had sensibilities that only rarely aligned with the world of news, and readily fell back on stale tabloid topics that were only slightly more hip than disco (Regis Philbin, Jerry Seinfeld, Zombie Princess Diana).
Because Politico is part of the Democratic media complex, one thing they barely even allude to is Newsweek‘s decision to change itself into a liberal opinion magazine, in essence alienating (at least) half its readers. Brown did nothing to change the magazine’s disasterous, naked liberalism, and indeed abetted the trend (like her desire to make Michelle Bachmann look crazy on the cover). Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal. The course may have been laid in before she climbed into the cockpit, but Brown never veered from it. In plane crash parlance, this was “controlled flight into ground.”
Saving a declining newsweekly was always going to be a difficult job in the Internet age; the relentless liberal slant and Brown’s feckless ways just made it an impossible one.
