Jon Meacham Tells The Daily Show ‘We’ve Made it as Hard as Possible’

“The good news today is we did not close today, we went up for sale,” Jon Meacham told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night.

There was a dark edge to Mr. Meacham’s humor, but he seemed realistic about the challenges facing his magazine.

“We’ve made it as hard as possible,” Mr. Meacham said. “We’re a one magazine company, about the news, general interest, in a time when people don’t want to pay a lot of money for that news.” His proposed response: elevate the role of digital (hello, Gabriel Snyder!), and reposition the book as more of a weekly greatest hits from the Web.

Mr. Meacham echoed his earlier comparison of Newsweek to a catcher in the rye, preventing the American people from tumbling over the precipice into ignorance. “I don’t think there are many on the edge of that cliff,” he said.