Ansen to Leave Newsweek After 30 Years

The deadline for 146 staffers to accept or reject a handsome buyout offer from Newsweek was March 25. The offer was too good--including a sweetened pension, health coverage until age 65, and two years salary-- for 30-year Newsweek veteran film critic David Ansen to refuse. "It was a good deal," he said. "They didn't want me to leave, which put me in a nice bargaining position. They may have been shocked at how many people took the offer."

While many of the 111 Newsweek employees who did accept it will leave May 30, the 62-year-old Ansen negotiated to continue reviewing for the magazine until year's end, at which point he starts a year-long contract as contributing editor delivering reviews and longer features.

As Newsweek prepares to move its Manhattan offices downtown near Ground Zero, "obviously the climate at newsmagazines is not great," said Ansen. "More cost-cutting, more trimming." Ansen looks forward to writing books, teaching, and "not going out to screenings every night," he said. "I want to watch DVDs of movies I might actually like and read a book or two. Face it, a lot of movies are not that interesting to write about these days."

Radar initially reported the Newsweek buyout.

The current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday's John Anderson, The Village Voice's Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News' Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Some have retired and some have been pushed out. "It is scary; they're letting a lot of good people go these days," said Ansen. "It's like a return to the hard old days when I was growing up when anybody could be a movie critic, and they'd take somebody off the sports desk."

[Newsweek critic David Ansen, right, with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment's Bingham Ray, at this year's Indie Spirit Awards.]

Comments

[Daryl Chin]

And don't forget Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour over at Newsday, which happened two weeks ago.

(Though the recent death - Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - of Paul S. Arthur has brought a void, in that he was one of the best critics dealing with experimental and documentary media.)

So it is a time of film critics as an endangered species.