RIP, Newsweek

I can't let this day pass without noting the passing of a once-great magazine that was my professional home for 16 years. Though it will supposedly enjoy an afterlife as "Newsweek Global" online--and under a paid subscription model (good luck with that, Tina!) -- the nation and the world have lost a once-brilliantly edited news magazine, one that employed an unparalleled staff of great Washington correspondents and writers, a superb foreign and domestic correspondent corps, the gutsiest and most noted photographers in news, and the best and brightest in the business up at its New York headquarters. Reprinted above, as a kind of memorial, is an international cover I'm particularly proud of (I helped report it from Washington and wrote it, but it was inspired largely by fantastic reporting from Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai on the ground in Afghanistan). It was the first big account in any publication, in late September of 2006, to detail the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The article was so far ahead of the curve that it prompted a 12-point rebuttal from Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department, which was still insisting at the time that Afghanistan was doing just fine.

True, there is a sense of inevitability about this move, given the decline of print, but that's not the real story. Personally, I've happily moved on, but part of me will always remain a heart-and-soul Newsweeker. So I want the real story to come out. Two articles in recent years have done a better job than any others in detailing the magazine's decline. They are linked below. Read and, if you harbor any lingering sympathy at all for the erosion of great journalism, weep a little:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/newsweeks-depressing-decline-2012-08-24?link=home_carouse

http://observer.com/2010/06/newsbleak-or-is-it-grahams-succumb-to-panic/