The first blow came on Monday, when the estate of the late billionaire Sidney Harman, which co-owns the Newsweek Daily Beast Co with IAC/Interactive Corp, officially announced that it would no longer be investing in the loss-making venture.

The second landed yesterday, when IAC’s Chairman Barry Diller let slip during a quarterly earnings call that “the transition to online from hard print will take place,” ostensibly giving this fall or sometime next year as the point by which the company would have come up with a plan to bury the 79-year-old weekly print magazine, transforming it into a web-only presence.

Naturally, this drove the Twittisphere into a frenzy, with some commentators more bereaved by the alleged news than others:

In the wake of Diller’s comments, Tina Brown, Editor in Chief of Newsweek and its digital bedfellow The Daily Beast, conducted damage control in the form of an email to all Newsweek Daily Beast Employees yesterday with the subject line “Scaremongering.” The email, obtained by Politico, begins: