Newsweek, the rusting hulk of a news magazine that was once a gleaming media flagship, has been off-loaded by the Washington Post Company to a man who made his fortune selling car stereos and hi-fi equipment.
Sidney Harman, the 91-year-old founder of audio electronics manufacturer Harman International Industries, becomes the new proprietor of Newsweek, after the news weekly was put up for sale in the wake of years of sustained losses – including a $28m operating loss last year.
No figure for the sale was disclosed but the Washington Post Company said it "will not have a material effect" on its balance sheet, suggesting the price tag was insignificant. To make the deal sweeter for Harman, the Post has agreed to pick up redundancy cost for lay-offs the new owner makes, as well as staff pensions.
Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor since 2006, said he will step down when the sale is finalised.
"In seeking a buyer for Newsweek, we wanted someone who feels as strongly as we do about the importance of quality journalism," said Washington Post Company chief executive Donald Graham after the sale was announced, setting the bar low.
The New York Times's Media Decoder blog was unimpressed:
What a sale to Mr Harman would suggest, perhaps more than anything else, is that the right owner for a struggling media property like Newsweek is someone who can afford to lose tens of millions of dollars a year while the magazine tries to find a more successful approach.
Politico reported that Harman plans to keep Newsweek as a conventional newsmagazine, with a weekly print edition, and wants to keep the majority of the magazine's 300 employees.
The Washington Post Company – an educational services company which also publishes the Washington Post newspaper – has owned Newsweek since 1961. But its accumulated losses caused the Post's management to shed the magazine, which has seen its circulation slip from 3.14m copies in 2000 to fewer than 2m by the middle of 2009, and advertising revenue shrink to $70m last year.
Harman is the husband of Jane Harman, a Democratic representative for California's 36th district. Harman himself was a member of the Carter administration.
