Actually Some Newsweek Employees Will Be Fired

Newsweek cheers the firing of teachers, so I can't say I am sad to sad to see Newsweek employees feeling anxious about their jobs:

Sidney Harman may have been picked because he wanted to keep more of Newsweek's roughly 350 staff members than the other suitors did, but that doesn't mean all jobs are safe.

Business Insider's Joe Pompeo talked to some Newsweek staffers soon after the deal was announced:

The tone inside the newsroom, meanwhile, is a mix of relief and anxiety. Harman is seen as a more suitable owner than other finalists, like the hedge fund Avenue Capital, which was knocked out of the running because of its stake in National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. (AMI), and Fred Drasner, who was reportedly uninterested in "maintaining a huge editorial infrastructure."

But the uncertainty lingers.

"There's a little bit of a sense of relief, but now people have to wait another three to six weeks to know if they'll be offered a job with the new employer, and even longer to find out who the new editor will be," one insider said.

"The notion that lots of people are going to stay is a bit misleading," said another. "More people who currently work at Newsweek will have jobs in this scenario than in the AMI scenario, but I don't think there's a huge collective sigh of relief."

Frankly I think they should ALL be fired.

Newsweek is losing $45 million this year alone.

It has lost money every year since 2007.

It is an absolutely unreadable publication (other than Isikoff) that parrots Village culture and points of view with little to help it stand out from other Village entities.

It isn't going to turnaround under Harmon any more than it did under Kaplan Test Prep.

Time to pull the plug and send Jonathan Alter, Evan Thomas and all the other ed deformers to the unemployment line.

Or maybe the rubber room for journalists.

Poor Newsweek...

...the test prep guys took their swanky new offices:

Newsweek staffers, having suffered through layoffs and the struggle for the title’s future, have to endure yet another loss: their new offices.

Scarcely a year after they moved from their unglamorous Midtown offices to cushier Tribeca digs, staffers were told they would have to pack up again, to relocate uptown.

Newsweek will trade places with Washington Post Co. sibling Kaplan, the test-prep unit, which is outgrowing its Midtown space, according to a March 31 staff memo from Newsweek chief executive Tom Ascheim.

Staffers will make the move in August from 395 Hudson St. to Kaplan’s current space at 888 7th Ave., down the street from Newsweek’s old digs.

In the interim, Newsweek employees will have to endure construction and some internal relocation to make room for incoming Kaplan employees.

Ascheim tried to put a positive spin on the news, pointing out that after the move, staffers will be closer to Central Park.

The news comes at a particularly tough time for the newsweekly. Ad pages fell 26 percent to 1,117 in 2009. With ad revenue declining, the title cut its rate-base guarantee twice in the past year, to 1.5 million in January from 2.6 million a year earlier.

How ironic that both the Washington Post and Newsweek - which are publications at the nexus of the education deform movement with eduwankers like Jay Matthews and "reporters" like Evan Thomas pushing for the privatization of public schools, the wide expansion of charter schools and the busting of teachers unions - are owned by test preparation company/for-profit school operator Kaplan.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Even more ironic that Thomas, who says "bad" teachers who do not raise the test scores of their students need to be fired immediately can't seem to keep the circulation or the revenue of his weekly "news" magazine from plummeting.

Under his own guidelines for teachers, Thomas ought to be fired for failure.

I believe it was Thomas (or his headline writers) who said about teaching: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability."

I dunno, given the performance of Newsweek over the past few years, that anybody from the editorial board has still got a job looks like a failure of accountability to me.

But I have a feeling that oversight will be rectified soon enough.

Moving the test prep unit to Newsweek's office and moving Newsweek to where Kaplan used to be - that's a sign, I'll tell you what.

Maybe after they finally shut Newsweek down, Thomas and the others at the magazine can go into test prep.