Almost exactly one year ago, Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham was telling me that deliberately cutting its circulation in half — from what had been a high of 3.1 million to 1.5 million — would not destroy the money-losing magazine. He and his staff had decided to go upscale. The question, he said, involved advertisers: “Will they accept a more affluent Newsweek demographic, given that they’ve been acculturated all these years to think of us as a mass vehicle?” The answer is now apparent.
Part of the strategy was a radical redesign. I was not a fan of it, and neither, I can tell you, were a number of people who work there. By lumping a bunch of columnists together, playing up opinion and analysis in what [Newsweek editor Jon] Meacham called the “reported narrative” and the “argued essay,” he transformed the magazine into an odd hybrid. In practice, it did seem to turn Newsweek into a version of the New Republic or the Economist.
Sometimes the cover stories were politically or culturally sharp, sometimes not, but they increasingly seemed to lean left. I lost track of the number of Barack and Michelle covers, one of them based on a Meacham interview with the president. And a couple of its top political writers double as MSNBC commentators.