Tina Brown, media critics weigh in on the new Newsweek

As media critics pored over the pages of her redesigned Newsweek, which arrived on stands Monday, Tina Brown went on ABC's "The View" to talk about the changes she's made to the magazine.

"Newsweek needed to be really modernized," said Brown, formerly editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the short-lived Talk. "We've really sort of recharged it, redesigned it, made it much more exciting visually, much more picture-driven, much more expressive of the moment, and also, much more a factor for women."

Indeed, Brown's first revamped issue includes a package on "150 Women Who Shake the World," with Hillary Clinton on the cover, just as she was for the debut issue of Talk back in 1999. (The Secretary of State is also slated to appear at this weekend's Women in the World Summit, hosted by Newsweek's online companion, The Daily Beast, which Brown has edited since its creation in 2008.)

Brown officially took the reins of Newsweek on Feb. 1, when the magazine finalized a long-simmering agreement to combine forces with her Daily Beast. But she has slowly been putting her stamp on the embattled newsweekly since November, when the deal was first announced.

This week's issue marks the culmination of those efforts, with bylines by some of the key hires Brown has made over the past several months gracing its cover (as well as some yanked right out of Brown's Rolodex of famous friends). You can watch part of Brown's discussion of the reinvented Newsweek below:

As for what media watchers are saying: "Perhaps the best way to describe the new Newsweek is to say that it's essentially a print version of the Beast, which will work to its advantage where lengthy articles are concerned," write Business Insider's Caroline Shin and Glynnis MacNicol.

Others have been more harsh in their reviews, despite glowing assessments from insiders.

"The general impression: staleness, meaning a lack of both a) editorial imagination and b) news," writes Mickey Kaus, who took his blog over to The Daily Caller in February just several months after it had landed at Newsweek. "I had expected that some of the desperate hit-crazed undercurrent of the Daily Beast might carry over into Newsweek's initial presentation. But desperation would be an improvement. Desperation is a form of vitality."

"There's much about this week's issue that looks like a rushed-out work in progress," writes the New York Post's James Covert. "The magazine hasn't clearly defined its sections or fully sorted out its jumble of columnists."

Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha had this to say: "Mmm, it's like soaking in a nice warm bath of a comfortable yesterday—a happy, mature place of sort-of kind-of powerful people (the kind of people who have 'power' at Michael's restaurant, or certain overpriced bistros in D.C.) explaining things simply and calmly (and sometimes correctly), with the occasional stroppy quote on the big proposition of last week. ... This is going to electrify the waiting rooms of dentists all over Scarsdale."