I was reading the New Yorker on the subway the other day, and saw this ad. It took up a full page, and there was a full-color shot of Michael Phelps, dripping wet, on the facing page.

They’re really milking that swimming metaphor, huh? If anything, I’d say we “swim” in the Internet and “surf” magazines (regardless of the origins of those terms), and for better or worse, the Internet envelopes, immerses and embraces us in ways the ad tries to claim for print—but I admire the attempt to be generous about the medium that is in so many ways its competition. Still, it’s a pretty jarring plea for relevance, parked in the middle of the very thing whose relevance is in question.

So it was almost a little too perfect to hear, a day or two later, that Newsweek is up for sale (though maybe the ad foreshadowed it, since there’s no letter from that magazine in the little “Magazines: The Power of Print” logo at the bottom…and in that case, maybe the nine magazines represented will be the last ones standing?!). “As the American conversation has become harder to sum up in a single cover, that era seems to be ending,” the Times article on the impending sale pointed out, surprisingly directly. It went on to quote Charles Whitaker, research chairman in magazine journalism at the Northwestern University school of journalism: “The era of mass is over, in some respect. The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.”

Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, defended his belief in the importance of print to The Observer: “I’m not living in a fantasy 1965 world…This is not a Mad Men romanticism about the news magazine. I’m entirely realistic about our prospects for economic success and the possibilities of finding a consistent audience for our journalism.” At least that sounds a little more grounded than the smiling copy on the “Magazines” website: “We hope to dispel many commonly held myths about the state of our industry, and to share the exciting story of magazine advertising’s outstanding value, unmatched recall and vast cultural impact. Enjoy!”