The "explanation" of Newsweek's problems are shoehorned into the stale old rightwing rhetoric, and it's pretty much valueless.

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But technological change is more to the point. I saw Meacham's interview on the Daily Show, and it sounds like he has plans to adapt. He knows that he's handicapped by the time delay in a weekly publication, and plans to recast the operation so that their Web site is their rapid-response outlet for the news, while the magazine then serves as a digest, and a platform for analysis. The weekly digest has an important place, I think, because it can assemble individual events into patterns. Like, at the end of the week just past, there's a larger story about New York, about the bombing attempt and the copycat, and the crash at the ferry terminal, and the weird stock market gyrations. New York itself, when you assemble events, is sort of a metastory: "Weird week in New York City".

The speculation from the 1840s imagined having to specialize in either analysis or rapid news delivery, but there's no inherent reason to not have two outlets working simultaneously. Newsweek has some catching up to do, but electronic outlets like CNN are already trying a variant on the idea, with their "iReporter" concept; and that's a remarkably close analog with the situation from the 1840s.

When it comes to news-gathering, in our world that means news recording, and let's face it, anybody can whip out a cellphone camera or one of the new cheap Flip video cameras, and record any event for posterity. That's our equivalent of the 1840s telegraph. The incredible strength of the concept is ubiquitous coverage, and in heavily-trafficked areas like Times Square, likely multiple viewpoints of the same event.

CNN's iReport system is exploitive, because they count on ego gratification to induce people to turn over the copyright on their recordings to CNN in exchange for a tiny note on the crawl. They need to get serious, perhaps in conjunction with a syndication marketplace, where people with news recordings can put them up for a quick auction, to determine a fair price for a person acting as, in effect, a stringer for the news organization. This isn't "checkbook journalism", it's contract employment for stringers. You can no more expect to get by on volunteers forever than you could expect to get by solely on interns.

Such a syndication marketplace would bring forth a lot of recordings, and when multiple recordings are available for a given story, give an editor a chance to pick the best one, or to pick several for complete coverage. If multiple news aggregators participate, they'll all end up with some kind of recording to use in their stories.

The traditional skill in journalism is to meld observation with writing skills to produce a written narrative. In a world in which the news itself is delivered by a recording, the skill set shifts slightly to an ability to weave together a coherent story from the raw images. It's not falling back exclusively on analysis as the 1840s folks fretted, more like a senior reporter working with multiple "cubs" and research assistants.

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The political hit piece was based on the premise that everybody in the country shares the writer's bias, so "nobody wants to read Newsweek any more". You really need to let go of the idea that perceived political viewpoint has anything to do with the fate of modern news organizations that don't agree with you. That's both shallow and self-serving; that technology is the cause is glaringly obvious.

Newsweek will survive quite handily by adapting its operational and business model, and attempts to spin their troubles into some sort of political validation for the far right are going to look pretty damn silly.