Be Your Own Publisher, Magazine Edition

It seems like only yesterday that Newsweek went strictly digital.

Not exactly yesterday, but close enough. In 2010, Sidney Harman bought the hoary old rag for one dollar and liabilities, which isn't the sound of a going enterprise. That he then died the following year has nothing to do with the stress of turning around a sinking ship. He was 92 years of age and may not have been in his right mind when he thought to merge Newsweek with The Daily Beast.

Media guru Barry Diller has a big piece of the merged pie and he is willing to part with his stake under the same terms: one dollar U.S. and assumption of liabilities.

This is your chance to become a publisher if you've ever dreamed of being the 21st Century version of Thomas J. C. Martyn or Henry Luce. This being the modern age, you'd be publishing your creation digitally, which would save on the sort of printing costs that the founders of Newsweek and Time had to tackle back in their day.

You might be wondering why Mr. Diller is keen to unload the news magazine after such a short period of time. Could it be that it is impossible to turn this thing around, and it isn't a very good investment after all?

The difficulty with operating Newsweek is that no one really knows where publishing is going. Digital may not be the answer that everyone thought it would be. Not everyone who likes to read can afford an iPad, and older readers who are not tech savvy wouldn't know what an iPad is. All they know is that they can't get a copy of Newsweek at the public library anymore so it must have gone out of business and there's only Time left to inform and analyze world events.

How does going digital make sense if parents prefer to buy their children hard copies of books? Are they not training the next generation to value the physical version of reading material instead of acting as if there is only the ebook? If you were to buy Newsweek and hang on for twenty years, perhaps you could catch the next wave of readers.

Or does it all boil down to content? Could you become Newsweek's publisher and make a hard right turn? Step out of what they call the mainstream media and skew the reporting slant, and perhaps that would be the key to success.

Who can say? No one can predict. Mr. Diller thought he saw into the future but after a couple of years, he's decided that his vision was unclear and he does not wish to pour money into a losing venture. Someone else with a different perspective could make a go of it. Maybe.

It's only one dollar. And a boatload of debt.