About 20% of Newsweek's staff took a recent job buyout offer, according to a Wall Street Journal story today. That's a pretty big number, but nothing all that new in the news business.

The real news IMHO is the fact that magazines publishing on a weekly basis still exist at all.

Think about it. TIME. Newsweek. BusinessWeek. Just about the only thing that differentiates them is their weekly schedule.

Now, once upon a time this was indeed a differentiator. But today, with both up-to-the-minute news and context/opinion available from myriad sources, what's the point of a "weekly?" The Journal story picked up on this point somewhat:

On TIME magazine's website you can see the covers that the magazine prints in its various editions around the world. This is what April 2 offers:

Note that the edition on the left -- the one for U.S. audiences -- talks about the whether to teach the bible in public school. The rest of the world -- Europe, Asia and the South Pacific -- gets to read about the growing influence of Islamic militants in Pakistan.

I've been trying to think of what to say about TIME's choice of "You" -- as in Web 2.0/social media -- as its Person of the Year.

The magazine wrote:

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.