Newsweek Kills Off Its Arts Staff

The ailing news magazine is buying out 111 staffers, including several senior critics. David Gates, who wrote about music and books; movie critic David Ansen; and Cathleen McGuigan, the magazine's senior arts editor, covering architecture, books, theater, design and culture; all are gone.

There was a time when the news magazines at least made a stab at covering culture. But that has dwindled in recent decades.

This is the second major buyout at Newsweek in six years. The first one claimed senior staffers like Lucy Howard, art critic [and NAJP member] Peter Plagens, long time religion editor Ken Woodward, Jean Seligman, Joan Engels, and David Alpern.

Plagens still writes occasionally for the magazine as a contributing editor, and David Ansen (the magazine's senior--and much-loved--movie critic since 1977) and Cathleen McGuigan may also continue to contribute after they cease to be staffers this year.

2 Comments

We live - and can not be otherwise - a post-ideological devoid of confidence for the great narratives, years in which dominates a vagueness design and selfless unable to determine its identity, its role.
System of corrupt and arbitrary, as critics voracious merchants, museums as places of promotion by directors agreed victim and accomplices of greedy collectors, art as investment, it has contributed to the disappearance of real from the horizon of virtuous culture, needs of man who looks and sees.
Dell'arte spolpato skeleton remains the logic of the market, and still generate rivers of works by maquillage globalized from China to India, from Russia to Mexico.

Stefano Rollero,Turin-Italy

Is there no end to the bloodletting?

I fell in love with reviewing reading TIME and Newsweek.

Let's all bow our heads ... in shame.

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