In the short term, that amusing comment ought to please Newsweek’s roughly 300 staffers, as it suggests that Harmon, a print traditionalist, probably won’t eviscerate the company as, say, a private equity firm would. But Harmon is also about to turn 92—and his heirs aren’t likely to be sanguine about losing money, which has been Newsweek’s problem for the last few years.

For a long time, there simply was no better place for a journalist to work than Newsweek. I say better because we didn’t just report stories on the most important domestic and foreign issues of the day, we also had to write about them with clarity and style—a hard-won process that basically involved a small group of very bright people (tall, urbane Ivy Leaguers mostly) working over your copy for a trial period until you either learned to produce smart stories yourself…or got kicked out of the magazine.

I was lucky, because my first 10 years at Newsweek turned out to be the last of its halcyon days—when “group journalism” was still economically viable and there were but a handful of organizations atop the news pyramid. In those pre-Internet days, we were loaded with advertising, had piles of money—and spent it lavishly. We had a huge staff (researchers and librarians and proofreaders, in addition to many reporters and writers), and spent a small fortune annually on photography (It was nothing to send a photographer to, say, Kenya for a week for a modest, two-page story.) The foreign bureaus were in the very best neighborhoods—on Rue de St. Honoré in Paris, in the Ginza in Tokyo (where I worked for a time) and Mayfair in London. The perks were many—sedans at our disposal, trips to Europe, raucous, alcohol-soaked Friday night dinners, to name a few. Yes, we were spoiled—happily so.