Newsweek Magazine Dead

Newsweek Magazine will print its final edition in December after 79 years of print publication.  Newsweek's newsstand print publication has been pronounced dead.

Newsweek Global is moving to an online digital-only format in 2013, promising increased profitability for The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, co-owned by the estate of Sidney Harman and IAC/InterActiveCorp, the company run by Barry Diller.

"We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it," said Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown. "We remain committed to Newsweek and to the journalism that it represents."

The magazine that readers have enjoyed throughout eight decades of history has died because not enough readers enjoyed it enough to purchase a copy.  Many are getting their news online, with much of it at no cost across the Internet.

The digital-only non-print publication, supported by Newsweek Global paid subscriptions, will appeal to a "highly-mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context," added Tina Brown, who serves as editor of both Newsweek and the Daily Beast news website.

World-renowned publishing superstar Tina Brown, 58, is the award-winning former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. 

She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Diana Chronicles, the 2007 biography of Princess Diana.

Newsweek Magazine was founded in 1933 by Thomas Martyn, a foreign-news editor for TIME. 

Now that the print version of the magazine is being cast into the dust bin of history, Tina Brown is getting blamed from all directions for not "turning it around."

Others think Ms. Brown should be flattered by those who believe that she alone made the Internet so compelling for billions of users. 

A grand compliment, though humorously misguided.

The best of good fortune to Newsweek's newest incarnation, Newsweek Global, and godspeed to Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown, CBE.