Tina Brown Now Claims She Knew Buying Newsweek Was Going to Fail In The First Week

April 18th, 2014 6:39 AM

Former Newsweek boss Tina Brown was incredibly candid -- or wildly spinning in retrospect -- in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. Why would The Daily Beast try to absorb Newsweek? "Our hope was that we would reanimate the moribund Newsweek, but nothing could actually reanimate Newsweek because it was a wholly different ball of problems."

So why buy it? Her Bloomberg questioner asked: “When did you realize it wasn’t going to work?” She replied:  “In about the first week." Even folks at Time noticed that one.

Brown announced "Trying to reanimate a weekly news magazine at a time the whole market in weekly magazines has collapsed, it was really a bit too quixotic, even for me."