…and pitchers and sugar and water and …, you have to make lemonade.

It’s sad to see magazines dying. The one I’ll eventually miss most is Playboy, but you know if something so established mainstream as Newsweek is hurting, the ad-supported mags going into even greater depth or expressing more diverse views probably can’t stand long. There will be exceptions, of course. I think Guideposts will always be available in medical waiting rooms.

Anyway, to the lemonade. Newsweek is soon going to be without much of its best talent. The powers said to their folks "hey, if you’ll vacate your cubicle, we’ll continue to pay you and maintain your benefits for the next couple of years." Who wouldn’t take a departing paid 2-year sabbatical from a dying industry? Lucky.

They’re writers and researchers: I predict that beginning about a year from now, there will be a <ahem> surge in new books published—fiction and non—a disappointing amount of which will be rather mediocre. Much of it will be about the death of the Fourth Estate or other closed barn doors. But there’ll be some good stuff too. Probably really good.

A lot of it will be about whatever they name modern communications’ replacement of the old media, what the company did wrong, etc. Some of it will reveal skeletons that the mainstream media will release with cover proportional to its sleaziness rather than its importance. But what I’m really looking forward to are the stories that admit they’re fiction.