Breakfast Meeting: Bowing to Pressure, Newsweek Will End Print Edition

“It was a mistake to take this one on,” Barry Diller said Thursday. He was referring to the melding of Newsweek magazine with the Daily Beast Web site, an integration that by many accounts wasn't working (and Newsweek had some $40 million in losses to prove it). So Mr. Diller's IAC/InterActiveGroup bowed to the inevitable, Christine Haughney and David Carr write in The New York Times, and said it would cease Newsweek's print edition at the end of this year. It will live on in a digital edition, but the decision ends 80 years of print versions for Newsweek, which in headier times fought tooth and nail with Time magazine to be the standard bearer of news for the American reader.

The book by a former Goldman Sachs trader, Greg Smith, has been highly anticipated, in a nerve-racking kind of way, among those in the financial world, but bootleg copies that are circulating have eased some the concerns, Nelson D. Schwartz writes on DealBook. The book is said to have few n ew details of the “toxic” culture that Mr. Smith said prompted him to quit.

Dylan Byers on Politico reports on a controversy at The Seattle Times over the company's decision to sponsor an advertisement supporting a Republican candidate for governor. More than 100 staff members signed a letter of protest on Thursday that was delivered to the paper's publisher, saying the decision threatens “the two things we value the most, the traits that make The Seattle Times a strong brand: Our independence and credibility.”

President Obama appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Thursday night and talked about the attacks in Libya, his debate performances, taxes and civil liberties. The Atlantic Wire has a rundown of the 15-minute interview. The president, meanwhile, appeared with Mitt Romney at the annual Al Smith charity dinner in New York, and as Richard A. Oppel Jr. reports in The Times, jokes about Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were big winners.