Will Newsweek Survive?

2010 seemed to be a bright year for media: magazine foldings have come to a halt, layoffs have decreased, and ad sales are on the upswing. But one niche seems to still be suffering: the national newsweekly.

Last Wednesday, the Washington Post Company announced that they are selling 77-year-old Newsweek magazine. "Despite heroic efforts on the part of Newsweek’s management and staff, we expect it to still lose money in 2010, " explained Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham.  On the one hand, Ed isn't too surprised: daily papers and other news organizations have been hit hard by the internet's cheap and fast ability to cover breaking news. On the other, Ed's sad to see such an esteemed and established publication go the way of other popular magazines he grew up reading.

New York Times media columnist David Carr has a number of theories for why Newsweek is being sold. Ed gives you the scoop after the jump!

1) Unappealing price.
"At $5.95 per issue, Newsweek is hardly a bargain."

2) Out of touch reputation.
"Newsweek is your father’s magazine, and no amount of reinvention could fix that."

3) Unsustainable operating costs.
"The people at the magazine had been told that they had until the end of 2010 to figure it out, but with loses of more than $500,000 a week, the alarm clock rang on the early side."

4) Too high of a subscription base.
"Newsweek is up against the tyranny of big numbers. One of the magazine’s assets – with almost 2 million subscribers, it has great reach into the culture – is a disadvantage at a time when a general interest read of the news has become a niche activity. Part of the reason that The Economist (813,240) and The Week (517,037) have done well is that both titles have smaller circulation bases and more manageable costs."

5) The rise of real-time news reporting on the web.
"Not much needs to be said about how the news cycle overtook Newsweek, but suffice to say that daily journalism began to fold in real-time analytics and then the Web came along and annotated every event before it was hours old, let alone a week."

Ed hopes that this will not become a trend among other newsweeklies.

What do you think, Edsters? Will Newsweek survive the sale? Do you subscribe to news magazines anymore? Have news magazines outlived their usefulness?