First Person: Reflections on Newsweek

• Newsweek is closing its print edition after 80 years
• It has been supported by wealthy individuals for years
• Is The Daily Beast the next Newsweek?

I worked at Time Inc. from 1977 until 1982, starting when I was just out of college. We used to drink with the Newsweek people — the two magazines' headquarters were only a few blocks away. Two years ago, the website I work for — 24/7 Wall St. — put Newsweek on its list of dying brands - a decision about which I had mixed feelings. The Newsweek staff immediately wrote to tell me that they would dance on my grave. Now, Newsweek is gone, but I am not dancing.

It was announced today that Newsweek's print edition will cease publication after nearly 80 years. The magazine was not profitable and was sold two years ago by its parent of nearly four decades, The Washington Post Company. Shortly thereafter, it was effectively taken over editorially by Tina Brown, founder of The Daily Beast with which Newsweek was merged.

It is a sign of the times that Brown's reign at Newsweek's print operation is over, even though she had presided over the print versions of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker at their remarkably successful peaks. Each of those magazines continues to thrive.

The debate over whether Newsweek could ever have survived will go on as long as there are news journalists. Newsweeklies are on the wrong end of the print spectrum — the end where instant information and sensational stories rule the media, and the place were the Internet is the perfect conduit. It is better to be The New Yorker with its poems and long essays is at the other end of the print spectrum: a print magazine for people who want to take the time with this content.

Newsweek was supported by blue bloods for most of its existence. First in 1933, by some of the richest men in America - John Hay Whitney, and Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon, and then by Philip Graham, who was head of The Washington Post Company in 1961 when he bought the magazine. Another wealthy man — audio company billionaire Sidney Harman — tried to save it when he bought it from the Post in August 2010. Harman died less than a year after he took ownership. By then, he had merged Newsweek with Tina Brown's Daily Beast, the new operation financed in part by one of the most clever media bosses of his generation — Barry Diller. But Newsweek had lost its string of rich benefactors with Harman's death. Diller may be wealthy, but he is not known as to be a man who throws money away. He hinted months ago that Newsweek's print edition was on its way out.

Diller and Brown may have closed Newsweek, but what they have left — The Daily Beast — is the equivalent of what the newsweekly was to the magazine industry for years. Newsweeklies
were meant to summarize and add context and detail to the week's news, particularly for those people in the U.S. and overseas who did not live in New York and London with access to the world's great dailies. Brown and Diller operate in a world much more competitive than the one in which Newsweek had to worry about Time magazine, and Time about Newsweek. The Daily Beast competes minute-by-minute with larger rivals like The Huffington Post and Drudge Report. Closing the print magazine will only get them so far in a world in which huge headlines and clever essayists are all over the Internet. It may be that The Daily Beast will become the next Newsweek because it is too small and not financed well enough to survive.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a co-founder and editor of the financial opinion website 24/7 Wall St. From 1983 to 1995 he was publisher of Financial World magazine and later chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, a video compression company.