Who killed Newsweek? Tina Brown can’t just blame the internet

The Spectator reporting:
So farewell then, Newsweek magazine, which published its last print issue this week. After 79 years — 15 of them as my employer — the venerable old rag is to disappear into an uncertain, web-only future.
Many newspapers and magazines have folded as advertising shrinks and readers go online but Newsweek is perhaps the first of the titans to fall. Its demise is all the more resonant because it was one side of one of the great twin peaks of the press: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Times and the Daily Telegraph.
In its heyday Newsweek was an essential part of America’s national conversation. It was controversial, liberal, usually half a step ahead of Middle America. In 1963, a year before Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, it dispatched 40 researchers to conduct 1,250 interviews for a special issue titled ‘The Negro in America’. It was a brilliant example of the kind of show-don’t-tell journalism that American newsweeklies used to do so well — a powerful indictment of segregation, told in people’s own words without polemic. In 1967 Newsweek published ‘Thanksgiving at Dak To’, a powerful report by Edward Behr with a photo-essay by Brice Allen which showed piles of American corpses in the carnage of Hill 875. It showed mainstream America the reality of failure in Vietnam years before it became a political commonplace.
...Things started to come unstuck under Jon Meacham, a devoted Episcopalian Christian with an eclectic interest in American history who became editor-in-chief in September 2006. It was under Meacham that Newsweek embarked on the fatal path from news to views. Columnists like George Will and Anna Quindlen had always been an important feature. But as profits began to slide, Meacham hatched a strategy to make Newsweek a ‘magazine of ideas’, with more blocks of text and fewer pictures to signal high seriousness. The idea was to compete with the Economist for the clever, rich readers....
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8802851/who-killed-newsweek/