shop talk

From the New York Observer, word that the failed negotiation between nonogenarian millionaire-not-billionaire Newsweek bailer-outer Sidney Harman and Daily Beast proprietor Barry Diller didn’t actually fail; it seems likely to produce a deal by which Newsweek and the Daily Beast will merge, with Tina Brown editing the whole online-offline shebang.

WELLS: His competence and genuine interest in the subjects he’s covering have been too often underestimated

WELLS: Australian election coverage is a funhouse-mirror reflection of the way things work here

Paul Wells on the reporter who got NATO’s top soldier in Afghanistan into hot water

Paul Wells takes a run at the now-for-sale Newsweek magazine

A fascinating article in The Atlantic Monthly explains patiently why weekly print newsmagazines are certain to vanish from this earth, unless they are The Economist. This has caused a series of tense emergency meetings at Maclean’s. Just kidding. Actually I don’t know whether anyone else on staff has read it. I could give you my reasons why I think we’re going to be basically OK, and indeed rather better than that, but if you don’t believe it you won’t believe it, and anyway I can’t control the comment boards, so over to you.

The Wall Street Journal prepares to launch an arts and culture section. This, while most other papers are hacking their arts coverage to ribbons. But then, the WSJ is bucking all kinds of trends these days.

Jon Meacham, who’s won a Pulitzer for his Andrew Jackson biography and who is, grumble grumble, younger than me, relaunches Newsweek. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow, or as we say in Canada, “Thursday.”

Times Co. said to consider closing Boston Globe

One of our U.S. peers/competitors prepares a bold experiment in strategic shrinkage. In a lot of cases, I think retrenchment makes good sense: while it may once have been possible to put out a bit-of-everything product that everyone in your market area would pay to read occasionally, in many cases those days are simply gone and they are really not coming back. It’s actually safer (sometimes!) to abandon most of your readers because they have already abandoned you, and fall back to a defensible niche where you can provide unique value to a smaller group that takes a more active interest in a narrower set of topics. Somewhere on the website for his very interesting consulting firm, our old friend Richard Addis makes that argument.

… south of the border. Personally, I blame the Aspers. Social tip: Never invite Jon Meacham from Newsweek to your bridge game.

Where would you expect an industry buffeted by technological change to make headlines? Detroit, of course, and indeed it is so this weekend. But I’m not talking about the car industry, I’m talking about my own: The Detroit News and Free Press are considering a novel response to free-falling circulation: stop even bothering to try to deliver the paper on most days. Other news about the newspapers, which may help explain why you haven’t been seeing much news in a lot of newspapers: