David Brooks thinks the Great Recession may help Newsweek to thrive:
A verdict has been reached about the bubble age: people got shortsighted. There is now a countervailing desire to be a little more serious, to think about the long term more, to return to fundamentals. There’s been a broadening of the national attention span.
In this climate, there should be room for a general-interest magazine to reinvent the old middlebrow formula. There should be room for a magazine that counterprograms against the ceaseless ephemera of much of the online world and offers things you will remember, a magazine that doesn’t endlessly chase buzz, that isn’t coastal urban journalists writing ceaselessly for each other, that doesn’t aim for insider-ish horserace gossip when covering politics, that doesn’t chase the same upscale liberal audience that every other media outlet is chasing.