The real story behind Newsweek’s demise is one of mismanagement and corporate incompetence. Of course, the weakening of the magazine-advertising environment didn’t help, but neither did changing the editorial, redesigning the look of the product or charging higher prices for subscriptions and at the newsstand during the worst recession in recent history.

Though other newsweeklies are hurting today, both U.S.News and Time seem to be in recovery mode rather than in sharp decline. Number three U.S.News has switched to a monthly frequency and focused more on its blockbuster ranking issues. Time, the leader, has left its editorial product alone while cutting its rate base and other costs.

So why do journalists keep dancing around the truth? Just this morning David Carr of The New York Times sidestepped the reality of poor management, suggesting that The Washington Post Company is going to have to pay someone to take Newsweek while Associated Content, a virtually unknown online publisher, got a selling price of $100 million from Yahoo!

The Washington Post Company needs to shoulder the blame for Newsweek’s failure. While the newspaper, television and education-testing company stayed out of the way of Newsweek for many years as the magazine was under the able leadership of Rick Smith and Harold Shain, the company couldn’t resist stepping in a couple of years ago—when the magazine industry first started to feel the effects of the recession—to stir the pot.

The answer? Change everything: including people, product and price. The result? Someone has to call 1-800-GOT-JUNK to cart away the mess that was once a great institution.

For Newsweek alumni like myself, it has been sad to watch the demise, even if that demise was easy to predict. It was as sure a bet to short Newsweek’s success as it was mortgage derivatives, right from the moment Shain was replaced by new CEO Thomas Ascheim, who, by the way, had never spent a day in magazine publishing prior to his employment at Newsweek.

The moment Newsweek executives started talking about The Economist as the publication they most admired and wanted to emulate, it was obvious things were getting really ugly. Add to that a scenario in which you upset a hard core group of almost one million long-term Newsweek renewals by totally changing how the publication looked and read—you don’t have to be a Harvard MBA or McKinsey consultant to figure out would happen next.

It is a dark day in magazine publishing to watch Newsweek being put out to pasture. But, it is more than the economy and the emerging digital publishing business that caused the wreckage.

It was just downright bad management. No one would argue that Newsweek’s circulation was too large, or that its staff didn’t need trimming or that its look didn’t need refreshing. But come on! Changing the editorial product, raising the price to the consumer and emulating a British publication all at the same time is not a smart formula when the economy tanks.

Someday, when Newsweek becomes a case history in a marketing text, I hope MBA students will learn that, while great products may sometimes need sprucing up, they don’t have to be totally reinvented when they already have a strong and loyal audience. They just need careful stewarding from people who have experience and knowledge of a complicated industry.