Let's say you own a candy store. For years, the store has been a viable enterprise. It was worth holding on to through cycles of bust because the boom times always returned sooner or later. Part of what made the store worth hanging on to was the fact that it had become so much a part of people's lives that it was half a commercial and half a civic institution. That comforting familiarity was one reason you knew the store would pull through hard times. That, and the certainty that hard times always came to an end.

Sure enough, another bad stretch hits the store. But this time, economic recession is compounded by a new trend: Rival candy stores are giving away treats and other stuff for free! All the neighborhood candy stores are hit. They all lose money and customers to the new "free" candy stores. Your certainty that the cycle will come to an end is being assaulted by loud local gossip to the effect that this crisis is unprecedented, and that the free stores are a revolution in candy.

What do you do? Do you close a store that during its almost 80 years of existence has become a neighborhood institution? Do you try to sell it at precisely the moment when the very fact of putting it up for sale is the strongest argument against buying it? Do you ignore decades of experience of cycles of boom and bust and believe the hysterical cries announcing the end of retail as you know it? Or do you calm yourself, take a look around and notice that all the nearby stores are doing badly but that yours is doing the worst of all? In that case, instead of closing the store, you might replace your brother-in-law, whom you hired to run the store because you've known him forever, because you appreciated his ingratiating style and felt flattered by the fact that he sounded so smart in public and had lots of glamorous friends. So what if your sister won't talk to you for a while; she'll get over it.

It is scandalous that the Post Co. has decided to sell Newsweek before replacing the editor under whom the magazine has foundered so badly. Can you imagine the Sulzbergers doing that? Murdoch? Can you imagine any group of people who have, as the Grahams are legendarily said to have, journalism running through their veins preserving an individual over a valuable and viable journalistic institution?

Newsweek is bleeding money. By every law of capitalism, Jon Meacham should have been replaced. And yet rather than replacing him, Mr. Meacham's overlords allowed him to strip the magazine, precious component by precious component. They stood by while he bought out and laid off some of the magazine's best editors and writers, reduced the magazine's guaranteed circulation base in order to attract a more exclusive class of advertiser-a fancy accounting gimmick that had the effect of  alienating advertisers looking for a large, guaranteed circulation base-and completely transformed the magazine's decades-old identity, a gimmick that had the effect of bewildering advertisers eager to match their product or service with a magazine's familiar identity.

AS NEWSWEEK WENT under, Mr. Meacham went higher. The quarterly financial reports brought news of impending ruin, and yet there he was, night after night, beaming before the cameras on every talk show and comedy show you could think of. It was as if Mr. Meacham had decided that rather than save the ship from going under, he would turn it into his own private submarine. His editorial policy mostly amounted to his publishing famous friends and acquaintances, whose shopworn names did nothing for the magazine's fortunes but everything for Mr. Meacham's expanding quid pro quo. There is nothing wrong with being a political animal: on the contrary. But Mr. Meacham's deft maneuverings reaped him recognition and acclaim while his magazine tumbled toward irrelevancy.

Full disclosure: My wife worked at Newsweek for many years and she was one of the two dozen or so people Mr. Meacham laid off. The fact that she worked at Newsweek was why I never took after Mr. Meacham, as was the fact that he laid her off. But another reason I never criticized Mr. Meacham in print was that I had high hopes for the new format he introduced last May. The instant denunciations of him when he explained that he, in effect, wanted to create a counterpoint to the Internet and run longer, more reflective essays in the magazine made me bristle. The American public is restless by definition. It is only a matter of time before people flock to the Internet to find an antidote to the worst and most undeveloped aspects of the Internet, one of them being amateurishly written "news" that is as inaccurate as it is superficial. What appeared to be Mr. Meacham's daring seemed right on the mark.

Indeed, in light of The Atlantic's rising profitability, Mr. Meacham's vision for Newsweek now seems prescient. The Atlantic, borrowing in part from The Economist, has turned itself into exactly the right blend of long-form and short-burst journalism that Mr. Meacham seemed to want. And Mr. Meacham once had more resources than The Atlantic. He hit the ground with overseas bureaus, and seasoned Washington reporters like Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, and established commentators like Jonathan Alter and Fareed Zakaria. For a while, even Mr. Meacham's boyish poise on camera seemed to bode well; his self-effacing thoughtfulness fit the anti-intellectual atmosphere even as it seemed to elevate the discourse. The guffaws that greeted him when he threw down the gauntlet to the new-media age struck me as automatic responses to a successful media personality and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

But Mr. Meacham proceeded to hamstring his own vision and create the magazine in his own image. He hobbled Newsweek with star-struck careerism on the one hand and self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuality on the other. In his lead essays, Mr. Meacham babbled inexplicably on about religion while the world burned and churned around him, or flaunted "contrarian" positions-e.g., America is essentially a conservative country-that had been tested countless times before and were uncontroversial in the extreme. (His most recent adventure in thinking: "America's failure to commemorate the war dead has a corrosive effect on our country." Wild.)

At the same time, Mr. Meacham was dropping names left and right. You scratched your head when Mr. Meacham informed readers in the Newsweek issue guest-edited by Stephen Colbert that he knew Mr. Colbert's in-laws in South Carolina. If there is anything that puts off the contemporary reader, it is the feeling that rather than being invited into something, he is being waved at from an exclusive cocktail party on the other side of a wall. By the time you read Mr. Meacham's fawning review of Christopher Buckley's latest book, in which Mr. Meacham proclaimed his intimate friendship with Mr. Buckley, you began to fear that Newsweek was disappearing into its editor in chief's head. He seemed to be running his own private dinner party, publishing only his famous pals. What James Baker was doing in the magazine was anybody's guess. Mr. Meacham even commissioned an essay from his friend Barbara Bush extolling the movie Precious. Yes, Barbara Bush. She loved Precious.

IT TURNED OUT that the slower, more reflective pace of the magazine actually just gave Mr. Meacham more time to spend trimming his sails outside the office. You began to see that the boyish poise on camera was actually an opportunistic blankness, interrupted by "thoughtful" pauses and punctuated by an occasional smug smack of the lips, as though he could not resist planting one on himself in gratitude for being ... himself. And that earnest cock of the head! It recalled a seabird listening for the next half-eaten loaf of bread to fall off the media garbage barge. Such eager intellectual servility is no doubt why Jon Stewart enjoys having Mr. Meacham on his show. Mr. Meacham performs seriousness the way Mr. Stewart performs a pundit performing seriousness. And why in heaven's name did Mr. Meacham think that allowing Mr. Stewart to mock his magazine when it was on its knees was going to help it? The truth was that allowing Newsweek to be mocked was Mr. Meacham's ticket to The Daily Show. 

In his Monday Times column, David Carr presented the conventional wisdom about Newsweek, which is that time has passed it by. The very idea of a news "weekly" is obsolete, people want instantaneous news, etc. (On its Tumblr account, Newsweek misread Mr. Carr's article as an attack on Mr. Meacham and defended him, in the process endorsing Mr. Carr's argument that Newsweek is fated to fail.) The fact is that in the midst of the worst advertising recession in perhaps 80 years, and the worst general economic circumstances in about as long a time, any kind of prediction about where any type of business is going is irresponsible. In the case of The New York Times, I would pay several hundred dollars a year to read it, but one aspect of the paper that I cannot take seriously is its reporting on other news entities. At a time when The Times is nearly hysterical over The Wall Street Journal's competition, when the paper has anxiously postponed the implementation of a paywall again and again, when panicking editors are driving their reporters crazy, the expectation that The Times can report objectively on the economic side of the news business is irrational. On the unconscious level, The Times wants every competing news organization to fail. And by this point, even the smallest news Web site is The Times' rival.

So much proclamation of print media's imminent doom is driven by self-interest, whether on the part of rival news organizations, threatened establishment journalists, established journalists who just want to stay in the game or jealous bloggers. What is truly happening is much less certain. Almost two years ago, the banks were sinking, the automakers were sinking, the country was sliding into a second Great Depression. Well, the banks are flourishing, the automakers are doing fine, more and more people are managing to get by. One man's hysteria, it seems, is another man's stock option.

But the Grahams, like just about everyone else in journalism, have succumbed to the loudest voices. Never mind that Newsweek still has the vast resources of a storied magazine that has operated effectively for nearly a century on several continents. David Carr, The Times' very own Oswald Spengler, says that according to history, the magazine is dead. Therefore, it is dead. Would it have made a difference if the Grahams had, for example, not bought Slate and then proceeded to blur Slate into Newsweek by blending the tone of the two magazines and sharing writers between them? Or if they had had the cojones to beg Tina Brown to take over Newsweek? (She would've doubled its paid circulation in six months.) It doesn't matter. Don't ask questions.

Strange how the mainstream news business is the only realm in American life where the Calvinist doctrine of predestination is alive and flourishing. That must be the secret of Arianna Huffington's success. She believes in free will! On the other hand, a neighborhood candy store makes more money than the HuffPo. In love and business, the fundamentals still apply. What a world-historical shame. By the time the media moguls realize that they have been listening to Chicken Littles driven by ulterior motives, there will be nothing left in the media world worth either buying or selling.

editorial@observer.com

It has been only a week since Washington Post Co.'s chairman, Donald Graham, announced that Newsweek was on the block, but already a few big media players are taking an early look at the newsweekly.

Thomson Reuters and Politico owner Allbritton Communications have expressed interest out of the gate, according to people familiar with the situation. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has also taken a look, though a spokeswoman said, "Not us" when asked about being on the short list. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham also said he would consider trying to pull together an offer with investors.

People involved with the Newsweek sale cautioned that it's incredibly early and that rich folks tend to congregate around big media properties, but that doesn't mean they're close to drawing up an offer sheet.

PREVIOUSLY> Meacham on Buying Newsweek: 'I'm going to take a look at this'

Of the names that have emerged on the short list so far, Thomson Reuters is the most surprising. The company, a huge player in Europe, has only recently stepped up its game in the U.S., and has never before been a contender for a U.S. property with Newsweek's profile.

Last year, when Bloomberg was about to purchase BusinessWeek, Thomson Reuters threw itself into that bidding very late in the game, joining up with ZelnickMedia to make a play for the business weekly. Bloomberg, a rival to Reuters, ultimately bought the magazine.

While Reuters is best known for business media-it recently announced plans for a finance Web video service called Reuters Insider, reported to cost $100 million-it also has been beefing up its consumer reporting, a buildup that would fit in well with a Newsweek purchase.

The company lets finance blogger Felix Salmon do what he likes, and last year it hired Jim Impoco, from Condé Nast Portfolio and The New York Times before that, to beef up its long-form reporting team.

And what would Thomson Reuters want to do with a magazine like Newsweek? Perhaps the company is just kicking the tires, or maybe there's a plan at work that is more substantive. Last year, Newsweek cut its rate base from 3.1 million to 1.5 million, hoping to serve a far more elite audience. Maybe the people at Thomson Reuters feel like they can have their own version of The Economist.

Staying competitive with Bloomberg, which has a monthly and just added a weekly magazine to its holdings, could be another reason.

"We do not comment on market rumors," said a spokeswoman for Thomson Reuters.

Bloomberg told The Times last week that it didn't have interest in the newsweekly, but one person familiar with the Newsweek sale said that it may be reconsidering, especially after Thomson Reuters decided to throw itself into the mix. Bloomberg didn't show interest in BusinessWeek until a week before the deadline approached for bids.

The New York Post reported that Carlos Slim was interested in buying Newsweek two days after the magazine went up for sale, but a Slim spokesman immediately shot that one down.

Robert Allbritton, chairman of Allbritton Communications, did not return a call looking for comment.

jkoblin@observer.com

PREVIOUSLY> Meacham on Buying Newsweek: 'I'm going to take a look at this'

“Let’s get the murder thing out of the way,” he said in his refined British accent, alluding to his outrageous, and subsequently retracted claim in The Times of London on April 2 that he had killed a man 25 years ago.

“What they didn’t notice was the date that this front page London Times article came out. It was the same day The Guardian made a front page that had pictures of penguins flying from Antarctica to South America. It was also the same day another newspaper in Britain had a wonderful front page story that President Sarkozy of France was undergoing daily stretching on a rack so that he could become as tall as his new wife." (Those stories actually ran the previous day, and it was The Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph that carried the penguins story, but point taken.)

“I have a lot of books to sell, do you understand?” he said. Mr. Dennis recently published Island of Dreams, his fourth collection of poetry. “Anybody who thinks that story is real needs a sense of humor check.”

And in fact that's just what Mr. Dennis delivered to the J-school's ongoing Thursday evening magazine lecture series, which are sometimes tedious affairs, with speakers who muse wistfully on their long hard journeys to the tops of prestigious publications, and then offer seemingly canned advice to the journalism students seeking reassurance that their pricey degrees will eventually pay off. Mr. Dennis slayed the audience—which included a bevy of suit-clad Dennis Publishing employees, among them William Falk, the Pulitzer-winning editor-in-chief of the company’s weekly news aggregate, The Week—with his witty and theatrical speech that drew frequent bursts of laughter.

In one exchange, a student cited a passage from Mr. Dennis’ 2006 bestseller, How To Get Rich, in which he writes about how money vastly improved his sex life.

“Is there any hope for those of us who aspire only to be poor journalists?” the student, a fellow Brit, asked.

“Yeah, because you’re young, and so you’re hung like a horse,” Mr. Dennis replied, to the crowd's roaring amusement. “For those of us who are old, fat and bald with glasses, wealth is the only way.”

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was when Mr. Dennis took a swipe at Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who at the J-school in February, lamented the fact that the young journos in the audience preferred The Economist to his own publication.

“I hear there is a certain person, whose name I will not repeat, that was here recently bleating on about how upset he was that not one of the 100 aught students in attendance read his magazine,” Mr. Dennis said. “Here’s my plea. Until you are earning a decent salary, can I please ask you NOT TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK!?”

And then he started offering the bribe:

“However, should you wish to receive a free year’s trial subscription, just give me your name and address after this lecture and I’ll take care of it ... I look forward to seeing every one of your names in print real soon, at the top of the masthead.”

Mr. Meacham scanned the audience for his quarry and then asked the journalism student, clad in a black turtleneck, whether he read The Economist. Yes, he did.

"It's the most talked about and least read magazine," said Mr. Meacham. "Have you looked at Newsweek?"

"Sure," said the J-schooler.

"And it's not up to your standards?"

"I find less useful honestly. The news? I don't get it from Newsweek. The Economist is more courageous," he answered.

"The success of The Economist—the fact that you read it, a black-turtlenecked guy at Columbia," Mr. Meacham began. But then he changed tack.

"Look, I need you," said Mr. Meacham. "And I need—I've got people out there risking their lives right now. The Economist is not, by the way ..." He changed tack again. "I've got four people in Baghdad who could be killed at any moment who are trying to tell the truth the best they can of that story. We have people in 13 different countries. We have a guy in Afghanistan who has Taliban sources who the federal government has asked about because we have better intelligence than government does—he's risking his life."

"And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It's an incredible frustration that I've got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that's the challenge. And I just don't know how to do it, so if you've got any ideas, tell me."

The grad student suggested they try re-branding. Mr. Meacham said thank you, and a few moments later, the lecture was over.