At a recent lecture at Columbia, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham bristled at his magazine's dental office reputation:

It's an incredible frustration that I've got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that's the challenge. And I just don't know how to do it, so if you've got any ideas, tell me.

Look, if we knew how to improve Newsweek, we wouldn’t be working from home in our pajamas. But we can judge insightfully.

To put it simply, it comes out once a week: There’s nothing in Newsweek that’s actual news.

It’s not that weeklies are inherent failures. But successful ones, like the New Yorker, offer something that goes beyond news per se. They offer great writing or surprising stories. Even People, which is also standard dental office fare, has access to celebrities that surpasses its competitors.

Newsweek is caught in the unfortunate position of offering the same information reported the same way as daily papers that came out a week before.

Also, all those pharmaceutical ads remind people that they’re going to die, and no one wants that while waiting to see the doctor.