[Reader-list] " Pakistan is 'epicenter of Islamic terrorism' "

[Kshmendra Kaul]

Dear Taha
 
He is not alllllllllllll that bad though I did think the "epicentre" piece I posted was rather poorly designed.
 
Zakaria is obviously professionally street-smart enough to find something or the other to pay for his bills. Pay well enough at that. That includes his making the right noises at the opportune time to be seen as 'more loyal than the king' OR 'more catholic than the pope'.
 
Post your post, I was looking up his Bio to check whether he is still with Newsweek. Here are some interesting snippets:
 
- In 2007, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines named him one of the 100 leading public intellectuals in the world.
 
- ..... and for one year, was a wine columnist for the webzine Slate.
 
AND somewhat bearing out my earlier comment on him:
 
- Zakaria has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, or a moderate. This is because he supported President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, but moved left during the 1990s. He currently self-identifies as a "centrist". George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He’s so well versed in politics, and he can’t be pigeonholed. I can’t be sure whenever I turn to him where he’s going to be coming from or what he’s going to say."
 
Kshmendra
 

--- On Thu, 5/6/10, Taha Mehmood <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com> wrote:


From: Taha Mehmood <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] " Pakistan is 'epicenter of Islamic terrorism' "
To: "Kshmendra Kaul" <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
Cc: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Thursday, May 6, 2010, 7:05 PM


I wonder where will brilliant journalists like Fareed go now???

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/with-newsweek-for-sale-an-era-fades/
With Newsweek for Sale, an Era Fades

May 6, 2010, 1:56 am

For generations, Time and Newsweek fought to define the national news
agenda every Monday on the newsstand. Before the Internet, before
cable news, before People magazine, what the newsweeklies put on their
covers mattered.

As the American conversation has become harder to sum up in a single
cover, that era seems to be ending. The Washington Post Company
announced Wednesday that it would sell Newsweek, raising questions
about the future of the newsweekly, first published 77 years ago,
Stephanie Clifford reports in The New York Times.

Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post
Company, said in an interview that the decision was purely economic.

“I did not want to do this, but it is a business,” he said. The
magazine would lose money in 2010, he said, and “we don’t see a
sustained path to profitability for Newsweek.”

The move comes as companies have been sloughing off and revamping
other mass magazines. TV Guide was sold for $1 to a private equity
firm; Businessweek was sold for $5 million in cash to Bloomberg L.P.;
and Reader’s Digest was given an editorial overhaul as it slashed
circulation.

The circulations of Time and Newsweek now stand about where they were
in 1966, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

“Those magazines had much more stature in those days,” said Edward
Kosner, who began at Newsweek in 1963 and was its editor in the late
1970s. “It was really important what was on the cover of Newsweek and
what was on the cover of Time because it was what passed for the
national press. They helped set the agenda; they helped make
reputations.”

“The era of mass is over, in some respect,” said Charles Whitaker,
research chairman in magazine journalism at the Northwestern
University school of journalism. “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.”

Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s editor since 2006, said the announcement was
not a surprise. “In the sense that we are all in an existential
crisis, it is not what I would call a stunning decision,” he said in
an interview. “You would have to have been hopelessly Pollyanna-ish
not to have suspected that there were fundamental shifts ahead.”

But, he said, “I decline to accept that Newsweek in some form does not
have a role to play going forward.”

Potential bidders were unclear. Bloomberg L.P., which just bought
Businessweek, was not exploring a purchase, said a spokeswoman, Judith
Czelusniak. Mr. Meacham said that he was considering putting together
investors to buy the magazine, and that he had received voicemail
messages from two billionaires after the sale was announced.

Newsweek had operating losses of $28.1 million in 2009, 82.5 percent
higher than the previous year’s loss of $15.4 million. Its revenue
declined 27.2 percent, to $165.5 million in 2009, from $227.4 million
in 2008, hurt by diminished advertising and subscription revenue.

Started in 1933, Newsweek was acquired by The Washington Post in 1961
after Benjamin C. Bradlee, then a Newsweek editor and later executive
editor of The Post, pitched the Post president Philip L. Graham on it.

Newsweek under The Post became a political counterweight to the
Republicanism of Time under Henry Luce. While Time took a conservative
stance on the Vietnam War and American culture, Newsweek ran more
youth oriented covers on the war, civil rights and pop culture stars
like the Beatles (though “musically they are a near disaster,” the
magazine said).

Mr. Kosner, the former editor, recalled weekly bouts of “controlled
anxiety” over what Time would put on its cover.

“On Monday mornings, on the advertising page of The Times, Time and
Newsweek took out sort of quarter-page ads that showed the cover and
everyone turned to that page on Monday mornings to see what each of
them had done,” Mr. Kosner said.

Slowly, though, cable news programs grew in number and popularity, and
the instant news of the Internet rendered weekly summaries stale
almost by definition. And the notion of a cultural common ground that
Americans could all share was changing.

Newsweek’s circulation was 3.14 million in the first half of 2000. By
the second half of 2009, that dropped to 1.97 million. Time’s
circulation declined from 4.07 million to 3.33 million in the same
period. U.S. News & World Report, the also-ran newsweekly, abandoned
its weekly publication schedule in 2008 to become monthly.

Meanwhile, The Economist, which offered British-accented reports on
business and economic news, and The Week, an unabashedly middle-brow
summary of the weekly news that began publishing in the United States
in 2001, were on the rise.

Both Time and Newsweek were aggressively redesigned. Time, in 2007,
changed its publication date from Monday to Friday and added more
analysis. Newsweek, in 2009, more or less ceased original reporting
about the week’s events, and instead ran essays from columnists like
Fareed Zakaria and opinionated analyses.

Mr. Whitaker of Northwestern said that editorially, the magazines’
reinventions had not worked well. “I don’t think Time and Newsweek, in
this transformation, had enough of a distinct voice to capture the
fancy of anyone in this incredibly polarized political environment,”
he said.

Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time, took issue with Mr.
Whitaker’s characterization.

“Our audience is bigger than the cable audiences,” he said. “What we
have embraced is point-of-view journalism.”

Mr. Stengel said that Time was “very profitable last year, and we will
be even more profitable this year.”

Both magazines increased their prices: Newsweek now sells for $5.95 on
the newsstand, and Time for $4.95. However, subscribers pay only about
50 cents a copy for either magazine.

Both also lowered the circulation guaranteed to advertisers: Time
guarantees a 3.25 million circulation, and Newsweek just 1.5 million.

In 2009, as the advertising slump hit magazines, Newsweek’s ad pages
fell 25.9 percent, about average for the industry, while Time’s fared
better, dropping 17.4 percent.

“The big factor is just the eroding advertising base — the loss of
automotive, financial, technology advertising,” said George Janson,
managing partner for the media-buying unit GroupM Print. “It’s not
going to go back to where it was anytime soon.” And, he said, many
advertisers prefer to run ads in niche publications, not broad ones.

“There are increasing challenges to being a single magazine company,
particularly one that is targeted toward a general-interest area,”
said Jonathan A. Knee, who oversaw the sale of Businessweek as senior
managing director at Evercore Partners.

But Mr. Meacham said that national coherence was still a worthwhile goal.

“I would argue the fragmentation in media makes a place like Newsweek
even more important,” Mr. Meacham said. “There are not that many
common denominators left.”