(
)
Buying Newsweek was a big mistake, Barry Diller admitted yesterday.
“I wish I had not bought Newsweek. It was a mistake,” Diller, the CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, told Bloomberg TV.
The 71-year-old media mogul, who already owned The Daily Beast, the online publication led by Tina Brown, said he was approached by Newsweek owner Sidney Harman in 2011 — and was pitched on combining the two money-losing publications.
Shortly after the deal was done, Harman died and his family decided to cut off funding.
With losses mounting in October 2012, Diller said he was going to end the print version and go digital only for 2013. The magazine was estimated to have lost $40 million in 2012.
“We decided to do it because printing a single magazine is a fool’s errand if that magazine is a newsweekly,” said Diller of the move to an all-digital version.