Newsweek's new owners might consider renaming it Tonedeaf.

Newsweek’s plan to shoo away half their customers by discouraging renewals and to raise prices on the remaining half– a move described by editor Jon Meacham himself as “hugely countintuitive“– has come to a very intuitive conclusion about one year later: The 77-year old magazine is a failing enterprise and parent company Washington Post has put it up for sale.

Jim Treacher writes,

The news that the Washington Post Company is selling off Newsweek is the most shocking development in the media world since the cancellation of Buggy Whip Monthly. The magazine’s editor, Jon Meacham, has been making the media rounds, explaining why it’s not his fault. If you don’t recognize his name, don’t worry. Nobody remembers who the captain of the Titanic was either.

UPDATE: Ace of Spades has more:

Newsweek’s most famous innovation is the oft-parodied “conventional wisdom watch,” which is perfectly emblamatic, because, like that little colored box of up and down arrows, Newsweek itself was simplistic, fluffy, light-on-substance and uncritically reflective of standard-issue first-impulse soft-liberal conventional wisdom.

It wasn’t real politics. It certainly wasn’t serious-minded, or wonkish, or challenging, or inventive, or daring, or contrarian.

Newsweek, in short, was the “news” magazine you read (or looked at the pictures of, at least) when you were at the chriopractor’s waiting to have your lumbar realigned and someone else had snagged the Star with Jessica Simpson’s boobs on the cover.