Faith and a media icon: Newsweek's unconventional new owners

• Owners linked to college founded by controversial pastor
• IBT's chief content officer endorsed article that said gay people can be cured



Newsweek's relaunch has focused new attention on its young and relatively inexperienced publishers. Photograph: John Gress/Getty

Jon Swaine in New York
theguardian.com, Friday 28 March 2014 12.54 EDT

It was meant to herald the triumphant return to newsstands of a venerable 80-year-old American media institution with a proud journalistic record.

Newsweek’s 4,500-word relaunch cover story on Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a California engineer who, it claimed, was the creator of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, gripped readers from Silicon Valley to Manhattan and delivered a frenzy of follow-up coverage to rival some of the biggest scoops of the magazine’s heyday.

“Everyone is really excited to start this new chapter,” Johnathan Davis, Newsweek’s new co-owner, told the Guardian earlier this month, before it went to press. “It’s a great honour. Newsweek has a storied history of great storytelling and hard-hitting journalism both in the United States and around the world”.

Since then, however, the article has come under an onslaught of criticism, as Nakamoto “unconditionally” denied that he was "the face behind bitcoin", as Newsweek’s cover had proclaimed, and said that he had not even heard of the currency until he was contacted by a reporter.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/28/newsweek-new-owners-background