Mediagazer: ‘Newsweek’ Is For Sale, But Buyer Will Be Hard to Find (Jeff Bercovici/DailyFinance)

11:15 PM ET, May 5, 2010

Top News:

Washington Post Co. to Sell Newsweek — Chairman Donald E. Graham cites multi-year losses. ‘We are exploring all options to fix that problem,’ he said. — Newsweek Web Exclusive — The Washington Post Co. announced today that it has retained Allen & Company to explore the possible sale of NEWSWEEK magazine.

John Koblin / New York Observer:

Meacham on Buying Newsweek: 'I'm Going to Take a Look at This' … Newsweek is up for sale, and Jon Meacham is going to explore the possibility of rounding up some bidders to buy the magazine himself. — “I believe this is an important American institution,” he said in an interview. “I just do.

Discussion: The Biz Blog, Publishing Executive News, Romenesko, Newsonomics, The Wire, New York Times, MediaPost, Media Money …, Gawker and On Media's Blog

Chris Rovzar / New York Magazine:

Can Jon Meacham Save Newsweek Now? — The news from this morning's Washington Post Company board meeting that Newsweek is being put up for sale is a public acknowledgment of a fact that has become increasingly apparent to everyone: The magazine is broken. Under Jon Meacham …

Discussion: Guardian

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent: Don Graham On Newsweek: 'We'll Get A Buyer'

Jeff Bercovici / DailyFinance:
‘Newsweek’ Is For Sale, But Buyer Will Be Hard to Find

Discussion: The Wire

Rafat Ali / paidContent: Newsweek by Some-Really-Crazy Numbers

Juli Weiner / Vanity Fair:
Washington Post Co. to Sell Newsweek; “Mood's Not Bad Here, Surprisingly!”

Discussion: Economy Watch, Romenesko, Media Week, Bloomberg, FOXBusiness.com, Mediaite, CBC News, This Just In and Reuters

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Time Inc. Publishes Good News: Ad Dollars, Subscription Revenue Up — Maybe the magazine business really did touch bottom last year. At least at Time Warner's giant Time Inc. unit: The publisher says ad revenue and subscription dollars actually increased in the first three months of 2010.

Discussion: Media Money …, FishbowlNY, Multichannel, Broadcasting & Cable, Guardian, rbr.com, Crain's New York Business, New York Observer and eMedia Vitals

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent:
Ad Recovery At Time Inc., Turner Helps Time Warner Beat Street

Discussion: MediaPost

Sharon Waxman / The Wrap:

Variety 2.0: Save the Good Stuff For Print — Variety appears to have settled on a strategy to change its declining fortunes, and all indications have been that in the age of online the trade is betting on print. — New evidence of this from Variety.com editor Chris Krewson's blog (which …

Discussion: Chris Krewson

Guardian:

Will Lewis leaves Telegraph — Editor in chief and digital managing director understood to have departed after disagreement with chief executive — Will Lewis has been pushed out of the Telegraph Media Group after a disagreement with chief executive Murdoch MacLennan over the future direction …

Discussion: Media Week, paidContent and Jon Slattery

Daniel Lyons / Newsweek Blogs:

Apple vs. the Web: The Case for Staying Out of Steve Jobs's Walled Garden — Long before Apple even announced its new iPad, media companies were going nuts about the device, for two reasons. First, they believed they would be able to create apps that would be gorgeous and stunning …

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider, Soup, MediaPost, DailyFinance, Gawker and VentureBeat

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:

Craig Kilborn to Return With a New Syndicated Show — Craig Kilborn, the original host of “The Daily Show” and then a late-night host for CBS in its 12:35 a.m. “Late Late Show” is about to return to television in a prospective syndicated show for 20 TV, the syndication arm of Fox's television stations.

Discussion: Show Tracker, rbr.com, Variety, Broadcasting & Cable and PopWatch

Steve Myers / Poynter Online:

PolitiFact Takes Lesson from Fast-Food Industry as it Franchises Fact Checking — When PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair went to Austin to train the people who would run PolitiFact Texas, the first state-level PolitiFact operation, he handed out the “Texas Truth-O-Meter Owner's Manual.”

Matthew Shaer / Christian Science Monitor:

Faisal Shahzad Facebook mixup highlights hazards of Web journalism — Earlier today, bloggers at the Huffington Post published a photo from Faisal Shahzad's Facebook page. One problem: They got the wrong Faisal Shahzad. — It was a testament to the hazards of reporting in the digital age.

Discussion: Geekosystem, Mediaite, Media Matters for America, WebNewser and Gawker

Tara Conlan / Guardian:

TV channels plan hi-tech election night — BBC constructs massive ‘coliseum’ set, while rivals also plan touchscreens and graphics to display possible hung parliament — Following the success of the leaders' debates, broadcasters are preparing for the most extensive and hi-tech general election coverage ever on Thursday night.

Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:

Newsy raises $2M for honest-to-God mobile video journalism — Newsy, a startup formed in 2008 and based in Columbia, Missouri, announced this morning that the company has raised $2 million from undisclosed angel investors. The money, president Jim Spencer wrote in a prepared statement …

Discussion: TechCrunch, Newsy Blog, LocalNewser, NewTeeVee, paidContent and WebProNews

David Carr / Media Decoder:

Janet Malcolm on Journalism's Long Con … In the current issue of The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm takes on what she sees as a broken system of criminal justice in a story about the trial of a Queens doctor convicted of killing her husband, but as is often the case in her work, there is a baked-in critique of the craft of journalism.

Discussion: Mind Matters

Joel Johnson / Gizmodo:

48 Hours, 1,000s of Contributors, 1 Magazine — Can you make a magazine in a weekend? Of course you can. But can you make it good? That's the question 48 Hour Magazine is trying to answer, using online media tools to make an old-school rag in two days.

Discussion: MetaFilter, nhpr.org and 48 Hour Magazine

Ben Smith / The Politico:

Washington Post shifts leftward online — The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence - through a combination of accident and design - into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times.

Discussion: Ezra Klein, Romenesko, AdAge, New York Observer, The Atlantic Online, Queerty, Mediaite, The Daily Caller and Ben Smith's Blog

David Kaplan / paidContent:

Irony Alert: Slate Group Claims Q1 Ad Revs Rose More Than 50 Percent — Not all of the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Company's publications are seeing a long list of declines: On the same day that its parent announced plans to sell struggling print Newsweek and Newsweek.com …

David Kaplan / paidContent:

CBS Interactive Display Revs Rise 19 Percent — As CBS and the other broadcast nets head into the heart of the upfront season, the ad recovery appears to be gaining momentum. The company's revenues and profits were up by healthy amounts. But one of the clearest signs of a turnaround …

Discussion: rbr.com and Broadcasting & Cable

Felix Gillette / New York Observer:

High Tide at ‘The Atlantic’ — In the winter of 2009, David Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic Media Company, and Justin Smith, one of his top executives, met for a late-night dinner at Kinkead's restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue to plot the opening gambits in a Beltway media war.

Discussion: Romenesko and FishbowlDC

Thomson Reuters Exposed:

Is Barclays Banking On Thomson Reuters? — On Friday, Guild members handed out informational flyers in front of Barclays Bank, a subscriber to Thomson Reuters news service, questioning Reuters' commitment to quality news. The flyers asked whether customers could be sure they were getting …

Discussion: The Wire and Talking Biz News