Newsweek: 1933-2012

Newsweek, the Pepsi of American current events journals to Time’s Coke, is murdering its print edition as of December 31, 2012. According to EIC Tina Brown, the mag recently reached “a tipping point” wherein Brown and Co. realized they could “most efficiently and effectively reach” their readers on the Interwebz. Newsweek will die at a robust seventy-nine.

I had a fondness for copies of Newsweek in my youth for they always dedicated at least one page to political cartoons from around the country (granted, I didn’t always get the jokes, but I loved the art). In my adulthood I found the mag’s general approach lacking but I have to hand it to them for going full bore with 2009’s “racist baby” cover, a point of no return that stands as one of the greatest reality/parody line blurs in history. I don’t think I LOL’d harder at anything that year. If you look close enough you can still see print journalism taking its final shallow breaths in that infant’s glassy, saucer-like eyes.

Fingers crossed Newsweek finds its own identity and somehow thrives online under the banner of The Daily Beast, if only to prove septuagenarian publications can make it in today’s iPad world. That would give all us old schoolers a little hope for the future, wouldn’t it? Also, I don’t think we ever found out if that baby is racist, and that’s something we gotta know. Baby, are you racist? If so, how much? Just a little, or are you already wearing a Klan onesie?