Farewell, old Newsweek

So Newsweek's print edition is now officially gone, or will be by year's end. The news touched off the usual round of teeth gnashing. Another casualty in the inevitable death of print, some observers proclaimed (often in print publications, like an endangered-species bulletin from a Siberian tiger). Not really, others said, just bad management.

Whatever. Blame the Internet, blame Tina Brown, I don't care. The Newsweek I knew— the one I worked for— has been dead for years.

Once upon a time, Newsweek was a fixture of the nations' coffee tables and doctors' offices. I grew up with it, eagerly imbibed its weekly dispatches on Vietnam, civil rights, "the Permissive Society." Politics, foreign affairs, medicine, movies, sports, books "“ there was something for everyone, all wrapped in a glossy package and in prose at once slick, seamless and effortlessly authoritative.

Later, when I lived in the Midwest on an early newspaper job, covering fires and small-town councils, I'd slip into the paper's library and grab the magazine. It was my connection to a wider world and, professionally speaking, a seemingly impossible aspiration.

Glorified rewrite

And then, some two years later, I was working there: New York City, 50th and Madison, the Newsweek Building.

I was in my mid-20s and those were heady days. Somehow, in that odd, controlling M.O. stolen from Henry Luce's Time, I was churning out my approximation of newsmagazinese based on files sent by disgruntled correspondents in Moscow, Tokyo and San Salvador.

I'd been to none of these places, but never mind: The stories bore my name first, the reporters' second. It was rewrite, basically, but oh so glorified, and I was too high on it all for hair-splitting. I recall vacationing in Greece and, on an Athens newsstand, buying a Newsweek with the Cuba cover story I'd written the week before. Opa.

But it was a peculiar institution, this Newsweek. Every office has its culture; this one was top-down, exclusive, sort of editorial Ivy League.

Deadline pressure

The masthead editors were called the Wallendas, as in the Flying Wallendas, for their vaunted high-wire act. The late-week ramp-up in pressure took its toll. My first days on the job, I was edited by two genial fellows: one downing an endless procession of Tanqueray Gibsons, the other twitching so uncontrollably he appeared to risk whiplash.

As for the journalism: Well, at least on the foreign side where I worked, you could discern cracks in Newsweek's aura of authority. The magazine that served as a kind of liberal alternative to Time harbored a strange reverence for anonymous CIA sources. And from what I could tell, the multiple layers of editing, like the whisper-down-the-lane game, ensured that stories in Newsweek didn't always resemble reality.

Then there was the spending. Credit-card-wielding editors whisked writers out to restaurants where waiters named, say, Mario or Francois fawned over us, and no one's lunch cost less than $100.

If we had to stay late writing a major piece, we could check in to Leona Helmsley's hotel for a little shuteye on the company's dime.

(I did this once, and the Queen was definitely not standing guard when, as I turned down the covers, a VW-sized cockroach plunged off the pillow.)

Birthday bash

In 1983, the magazine threw a mammoth 50th birthday bash, busing the entire staff to Concord resort in the Catskills (another now-deceased icon) for a day of sunning, swimming and eating. At night there was a private dance with a live band: The Beach Boys.

Looking back, the bosses might have saved some of that moolah for a rainy decade or two.

As Newsweek's circulation slipped, the magazine, desperately seeking purchase in a whirlwind news cycle, tried other incarnations: an essay-heavy mishmash that was DOA; then the Tina Brown trendy-gossip treatment; and now, of course, the delusional last-ditch model of "Internet only."

Next to go?

It was sad, that announcement. I spent five fruitful years at Newsweek, learning story structure and grace on deadline, moving on only when the weekly deployment of leads, billboards and snappy kickers (which, when all else failed, said "Whatever happens next remains to be seen") had become an irredeemable grind.

I made good friends there too, and even met a smart, winsome young woman in the office down the hall who became my wife.

Now we both work for newspapers, which grapple daily with the same relevance issues that have long plagued weeklies.

Is print dead, or at least dying? Who knows? All I know is that the venerable magazine that informed my world as a kid, and then gave me a wondrous break into big-time journalism, is now but a digital shadow. I know that nothing lasts forever. But it still sucks.

The older you get, it seems, the harder it is to turn the page.