failures go back several administrations and really one of the undercovered stories. thanks for joining us. in the second half of reliable sources, on the auction block with newsweek up for sale, we will ask editor john meachum what went wrong and whether the magazine can survive. host of at the movies on the treacherous landscape for film critics and demise of their show. are conan speaks, letterman snipes and leno flops why are these guys still sniping at each other? i just want fewer pills
i love the washington post company. as you said, i have worked there since i was 24 years old. the grand family has been enormously kind and important to me and my life and my family s life, but we were a one-magazine company. the washington post is a newspaper. as you well new york the other divisions of the company don t have anything to do with magazine publishing. unlike time warner which publishes a lot of magazines including your rival. now, it was one year ago, john meachum, you made a deliberate decision to cut the number of describers to 1.5 million, redesign, focus more on opinion and analysis, people compare it had to the economist and new republic. was that in, in retrospect, a failure? i don t think so it may not have been a terrific bet but i think it was the best bet and i would love to hear from people who think we could go back and say, well, i would have zigged while you zagged. i ve not heard a compelling case
good choice. only meineke lets you choose the brake service that s right for you. and save 50% on pads and shoes. meineke. it is one of the great brand names in american journalism and now in danger of disappearing. newsweek magazine was put up for sale this week after the washington post company concluded there was no wait 77-year-old weekly could make money. the magazine of john meachum, howard fineman, jonathan atlantaer, fareed zakaria and many others now reduced to hoping for a deep-pocketed buyer. newsweek has battled for decades against the larger time magazine owned by cnn s parent time warner and that era seems to be fading. i spoke earlier to newsweek s editor in new york. john meachum, welcome.
reporters would have been lauded on the best reporters on the planet if it didn t work, they let the terrorist go away. these two megastories these week, the time square bombing and the gulf oil spill we will talk about an american city was under water, the flooding in nash service horrible, at least 27 people were kill and that did not become a national story. i wonder whether it was overshadowed or because there was no political storyline, we didn t have anything to argue about so it didn t become cable and network news fodder. let me get a break. when we come back, we are seeing the same kind of partisan flame throwing over the gulf oil disaster. the anchor does a heck of a job on brownie and his wild accusations. later, newsweek editor john meachum on his last-ditch effort to save his magazine.
too authoritarian and the magazine reflects my the other criticisms you can dig up is the magazine too too much like me. david car actually wrote last year, i think, that they might as well have gone ahead and called the thing meachum i don t see how you can have it both ways. am i not, you know, doing my job or and therefore, the magazine is all my sensibility and also, i i just i just don t buy that but i wouldn t. okay. i have got half a minute f newsweek survives, if you find a bier to get rich guys help you out, does it have to change yet again? is its role as a mass-market newsweek ly basically over? i don t know. and that s the conversation we have to explore. what is an exiistential crisis has become a transformational one. stay tuned. john meachum grappling with that existential crisis and still trying to put out a magazine. thanks very much for joining us. thanks, howie. news on the television front, cnn and cbs, which have