Since put-upon, soon-to-retire film critic David Ansen officially has nothing to lose by prattling on at length over at Newsweek, expect a lot more pieces like the one in the magazine's current issue. To wit: Hollywood movies have lousy endings! And: Here, let me give them all away!

Not that we're merchants of gloom, the latest figures for magazine advertising are dismal. Tallies of the number of pages carrying advertising in the first quarter, an early indicator of publishing woes, are down by double-digit percentages at news weeklies such as Time and business magazines such as Business Week. The only surprise is that Keith Kelly, who published the figures in today's Post, didn't tweak Mort Zuckerman, proprietor of a rival tabloid. Zuckerman's pet news magazine, US News & World Report, fell 37.5%. One perky spot: Martha Stewart's Everyday Food, now the last best hope of the magazine industry, as well as frustrated cookie-bakers.

Should we be worried that The New York Times, Newsweek and The Washington Post are buying out their old seasoned writers and leaving behind a bunch of young reporters who possibly don't know what they're doing? "No!" says Jack Shafer. According to Slate, these voluntary buyouts (also known as "If we pay you a large sum of money, would you please leave already?") are going to end up revitalizing journalism.

"Both men share what could be called 'Economist-envy.' In 2007, the Economist newsmagazine, published by U.K.-based The Economist Newspaper Ltd., saw an 8.5% increase in advertising pages compared with 2006, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. By contrast, Newsweek's advertising pages dropped 6.7% and Time's fell 6.9%." [WSJ]

The Newsweek buyouts have happened and they're more extensive than originally predicted. Let us remember that a buyout is a far better fate than layoff. These fallen writers are in a better place now. A place with The Golden Girls and The Price Is Right. After the jump, a bit more about those who have left Newsweek for a retired journalist heaven.

The Great Film Critic Euthanizing of 2008 continued over the weekend with its highest-profile casualty yet: David Ansen, the highly respected 30-year veteran at Newsweek, joined 110 colleagues in accepting a buyout that Variety's Anne Thompson reports included "a sweetened pension, health coverage until age 65, and two years' salary." Plus he keeps a contributing editor title at the magazine, chipping in occasionally with reviews, features and whatever else Newsweek's fast-shrinking newshole can accommodate starting in 2009.

Back in the early aughts, moving to Buenos Aires was the totally hip thing to do. But now everyone's doing it. God, it's like you can't drop "independent studies at Brown" without 12 people turning around. And it's just like that in the media, too. First the Times plagiarizes, and worse exaggerates the coke situation in Argentina, and now the paper is lifting articles from Newsweek about the artist scene. Well, maybe. The Times ran a travel piece on Buenos Aires by Denny Lee two weeks ago that featured similar passages as the January Newsweek story. Lee quotes many of the same people, but seriously, those 12 Brown kids represent the entirety of the ex-pat scene there. Most egregiously, one of the people Lee quotes had moved to the U.K. in Spetember and claims that Lee never interviewed her. Ugh, Argentina is so tired anyway. Let's all move to Santiago, Chile and start news scandals from there. [via Mediabistro]

Breaking: Young people are more used to being filmed than earlier generations! And in fact they feel obligated to share their stories on video, so much so that they've "blurred the lines between reality and 'reality,'" according to Newsweek's new trend piece. The changes come because everyone has a camera now, as well as blogs and MySpaces to turn temporary emotions into permanent records. Good news for reality show producers, great news for Media Studies majors, but fantastic news for young people destined to become famous (and we all are totes gonna be famous, dude).

For years, Barack Obama was simply an affable guy called "Barry." "When Sen. Barack Obama moved from using the name Barry to Barack, his formal name, it was part of his almost lifelong quest for identity and belonging-to figure out who he is, and how he fits into the larger American tapestry. Part black, part white, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, with family of different religious and spiritual backgrounds-seen by others in ways he didn't see himself-the young Barry was looking for solid ground. At Occidental College, he was feeling like he was at a 'dead end'... 'that somehow I needed to connect with something bigger than myself.'"

Such is the plight of the dying magazine business: Newsweek paid what's rumored to be a high-six-figures ransom not to keep Steven Levy, its star tech writer, but to unburden itself of him just so he could join Wired. The Washington Post-owned weekly is offering editorial staff generous buyouts, up to two years' salaries, to reduce its headcount. Levy smartly leapt at the offer, knowing he could easily get a job elsewhere. Something seems backwards in this labor market: Don't acquirers normally pay a premium for control?

An internal memo from Wired executive editor Bob Cohn says Steven Levy, Newsweek's tech reporter for 13 years, is joining the magazine as a staff writer. Cohn says Levy is reporting a book on Google. [Romenesko]

What could dislodge Steven Levy from his perch at Newsweek, the ever-diminishing magazine where he's been the main tech writer for 13 years? An offer from Wired, we hear. Levy has been contributing to Wired since before he joined Newsweek, and he regularly writes features for it on the side. Also in the works: another book. Could it be on Facebook, the subject of a rushed Newsweek cover story last year? (Photo by Teresa Carpenter)

"Is user-generated content out?" Newsweek recently asked (four days before profiling a user-generated magazine as a "brave new magazine model"). The trend piece lists a few companies that pay writers and editors, then call them a trend, ignoring that user-generated sites like Wikipedia and YouTube still have climbing traffic. I'm gonna go Twitter about this, but here's a quick outline of Newsweek's double-talk about the "trend."

We realize that former mag queen Tina Brown is still a "name" and Hillary Clinton's last week was a compelling story (resembling though it did so many of her previous weeks) but isn't there a wee bit of favoritism involved in a newsweekly running a front page story on a presidential candidate written by a woman who needs that candidate to become president in order for her forthcoming book to actually sell? [Newsweek]

Popularity among dentists doesn't count for anything anymore. Newsweek is planning to buyout an estimated 10 percent of its staff this spring. The actual number of Newsweek employees is kind of confusing, what with contract workers and random bureau chiefs. One writer guesses that about 40 people will take a deal and doesn't think there will be layoffs. "Like everyone else, they're trimming the staff. But since it's the Post Company we're not going to fuck anyone."

An internal memo alerted Newsweek staffers that funds collected during the Tip Sheet Holiday Sale in December are missing. Donations to the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund—who would have guessed that a Washington Post property would be donating to the New York Times?—have been compromised, along with Newsweek staffers' bank accounts. Newsweek offers to reimburse any associated banking fees. But much more intriguing than this goof are rumors of an upcoming buyout. Know anything? Drop a line. Full Newsweek memo after the jump.

Michael Kinsley's column about the reaction to the Times' story about John McCain's alleged lobbyist romance is annoying, because it is a Michael Kinsley column in Slate, but it is also pretty spot-on in its parody of New York Times Kremlinology: "I may be creating the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that I have created the appearance of suggesting that the New York Times has created the possibility that some people might worry that other people might think that McCain has created the appearance that some people might worry that other people might think that there could be an appearance that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist." Funny cause it's innuendo! Meanwhile, Michael Isikoff's Newsweek story on same suffers from having its most newsworthy scoop sacrificed to the web last week, but it has a couple entertaining details:

Newsweek put hope-monger's wife Michelle Obama on the cover this week, and they offer a lengthy interview and story that remind us all how Ms. Obama is very smart and outspoken, and also pretty sarcastic. In fact the cover story is basically identical to recent profiles in both the Times and the Wall Street Journal! But obviously there's a lengthy lead time for the newsweeklies, and hey, there are only so many ways to call a woman "sarcastic." This many ways:

If you're running a media property with an aging audience, there is nothing as depressing as talking to a room full of students, as Newsweek's Jon Meacham discovered. On discovering none of his audience read the magazine, the news weekly's editor summed up his hopeless challenge: "How to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get." (Try avoiding depressing covers like this.)

A bad-tempered Clay Aiken got a lesson in the modern media, during his recent Q&A with Newsweek. The American Idol contestant, who was trying to promote his part in Monty Python's Spamalot, was irritated by a reminder of his televised teasing by Kelly Ripa. "It was a year ago. This is Newsweek. It's not the National Enquirer." Can we talk about something fun? asked the interviewer. "No, we're done. I thought Newsweek would be more reputable. I'm surprised." Honey, as Kelly Ripa would have addressed the pop singer, nobody's reputable any more. (Bonus: a webcam shot of Aiken from Star Magazine, another unreputable publication.)