Washington Post Co. puts loss making Newsweek up for sale
06 May 2010
The Washington Post Co. said yesterday that it is putting its popular, but loss making, Newsweek up for sale after having failed to stem losses from 2007.
Newsweek is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the US after Time.
The Washington Post Co, which bought Newsweek in 1961, said yesterday that it had hired investment bank Allen & Company to find a buyer for the magazine, although it did not say what it would do if no buyer came forward to acquire the 77-year-old magazine.
Like a string of other newspapers and magazines in the US that have been making heavy losses since the past three years, Newsweek also has been incurring losses since 2007 as the print media has been losing advertising revenues to the web as people prefer to read constant stream of news on the Internet rather than a newspaper or a magazine.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham told The New York Times in an interview last year, "If we do not have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable."
Advertising revenue for Newsweek was down 30 per cent in 2009, with operating losses of of $29.3 million compared to a loss of $16 million in 2008.