Buried in the New York Times’s story on the news that the Washington Post Company was to put Newsweek up for sale was this fascinating detail:

Newsweek’s circulation was 3.14 million in the first half of 2000. By the second half of 2009, that dropped to 1.97 million. Time’s circulation declined from 4.07 million to 3.33 million in the same period. U.S. News & World Report, the also-ran newsweekly, abandoned its weekly publication schedule in 2008 to become monthly. Meanwhile, The Economist, which offered British-accented reports on business and economic news, and The Week, an unabashedly middle-brow summary of the weekly news that began publishing in the United States in 2001, were on the rise.

If The Week counts as “unabashedly middle-brow,” what does that make Time and Newsweek, I wonder? There was a time within living memory when these publications would themselves have been the very examples which those inclined to intellectual snobbery would have cited of “middle-brow culture”—one cut, perhaps, above Reader’s Digest, which the very highbrow poet Randall Jarrell once described as having a level of meaning “so low that it seems not a level but an abyss into which the reader consents to sink.” Autres temps, autres moeurs, I suppose. The Times’s reporter, Stephanie Clifford, hardly mentions last year’s makeover that turned out to be the prelude to the announcement that the magazine was for sale, only mentioning that “Newsweek