Yesterday was a party for Newsweek and the liberal media. Sidney Harman, 91 and rich as Croesus, bought the ailing magazine out of passion if not avarice.

Today, the Daily Beast reveals that he bought it for exactly one dollar.

...make no mistake, Harman's pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn't a financial one. The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of the 66-page sales memorandum that the Newsweek seller, the Washington Post Co., gave to prospective buyers, and it paints a picture of a media property given to someone unequipped to fundamentally change the current trajectory.

Harman's goal is to break-even by 2013, which should scare Newsweek staffers all by itself, because the only reasonable possibility of doing that is cutting the expenses to the bone.

Dig deeper into the document and the numbers get worse. Newsweek lost money in all three of its core areas in 2008 and 2009: U.S. publishing, foreign publishing and digital. Even with the smaller guaranteed circulation, it still retains $40 million in subscription liabilities owed to readers. And then there's Newsweek's lease foibles: last year, it paid $13 million in rent, a startling figure for a company of its size.

Its seems likely that Newsweek's high-profile journalists will seek safe haven with whatever liberal-left media property that is still standing, leaving an empty shell, and perhaps that is the ultimate goal. The name means something, but the old way of doing business is toast. It seems to me that the best outcome would be for Newsweek to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes as a much smaller, more aggressive and more relevant on-line entity along the lines of Politico.