• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, May 5, 2010

Recent glimmers of hope for consumer magazines came too late for Newsweek; the beleaguered newsweekly has been put up for sale by the Washington Post Co., according to the Newsweek Web site, which posted a brief article about the decision. Now that it's public knowledge, the Newsweek auction will almost certainly be viewed as a barometer for the fortunes of the magazine business in general.

The owners of distressed media properties usually try to put a positive spin on their decision to sell, but Washington Post Co. chairman Donald E. Graham minced no words about the extent of Newsweek's woes.

The article quoted him as saying: "The losses at Newsweek in 2007-2009 are a matter of record. Despite heroic efforts on the part of Newsweek's management and staff, we expect it to still lose money in 2010."

The magazine's ad pages fell 6.7% in 2007, 19% in 2008, 26% in 2009, dropping from 1,991 in 2006 to 1,117 in 2009 -- an overall drop of 44% in just three years, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Over the same period, the title's official rate card revenues fell by half, from $483.3 million to $241 million. In the first quarter of 2010, ad pages fell another 20.4% to 208.

The Washington Post Co. has hired Allen & Co. to determine the feasibility and handle the logistics of a potential sale.

Newsweek is one of the biggest magazines to hit the auction block in years, a telling sign of a changing industry. Earlier this decade, the prolonged auction of the Tribune Co. became a symbol of the declining fortunes of newspapers, as months passed with the massive media company failing to elicit viable bids.

More recently, McGraw-Hill reportedly sold BusinessWeek to Bloomberg for less than $10 million -- an almost nominal sum testifying to the dire state of business magazines.