Newsweek

- "Gladwell is pale skinned but famously Afro-haired."—Tim Adams, The Guardian, November 16, 2008.

- "Gladwell, who is slight of build, with an exuberance of hair and an oddly diffident manner..." Jerry Adler, Newsweek, November 15, 2008.

- "Slender, with elfin cheekbones and a distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair, Gladwell is one of those clever people who actually looks clever."— Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell was a soft-spoken guy with a cafe-au-lait complexion and a halo of frizzy hair."— Mary Ann Gwinn, The Seattle Times, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell is a poufy-haired showman with a knack for explaining anything to everybody, from dog whispering and fads to disposable diapers and snap judgments."—Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly, November 12, 2008.

- "Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn’t have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library."—Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine, November 9, 2008.  read more »

In this week’s giddily Obama-centric edition of The New Yorker—you had the illuminated O in “Yorker”; the “ELECTION SPECIAL” tab on the outside cover flap; and more than 35,000 words inside about the election—the longest story in the magazine was assigned to none other than the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. His 12,000-word opus on race and politics included dispatches from two different trips to Chicago and one to New Orleans.

It was filed in the magazine under: “A Reporter at Large.”

“As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically” said Mr.  read more »

Politico's Michael Calderone reports that Richard Wolffe, who covered the presidential election for Newsweek, will write a book called Renegade: The Education of Barack Obama for the Crown imprint of Random House.

Sound familiar?

That's because just yesterday the Media Mob reported that Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post had signed with Crown to do a book called Rejection: Why America Isn't Ready for A Woman President.

Ms. Kornblut and Mr. Wolffe, who told The Observer in early October that he had plans for an election book but no contract, will both be edited by Crown's Sean Desmond.

According to Politico, Mr. Wolffe's book is scheduled to come out in June 2009, and will include material from Mr. Wolffe's campaign reporting and interviews with President-elect Obama and members of his inner circle.

And now the fun part begins.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has an A1-promoted story headlined Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps, in which she reveals all about the Republican candidates' failed bid for the White House. This comes a day after Newsweek broke new ground on the Governor's campaign trail spending spree and Carl Cameron told FOX News (FOX News!) that the woman New York Times columnist Bill Kristol favorably compared to Andrew Jackson didn't know what countries were in NAFTA or that Africa is a continent. (This clip comes via Andrew Sullivan.)  read more »

Last Thursday, at the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ annual conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped by the Waldorf-Astoria to deliver brief remarks to a ballroom about two-thirds full. Having just finished with a press conference on the fiscal crisis, he targeted his opening joke at The New York Times with a quip that seemed to capture the newspaper industry’s woes.

“Now it costs a $1.50, and it’s about an inch-and-a-half narrower,” Mr. Bloomberg said of a daily copy of The Times. “I think you must have misunderstood—in this economy I’ve asked New Yorkers to do more with less, not charge more for less.  read more »

These are bleak economic times. Everyone who's not listening to John McCain and Sarah Palin talking about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright knows that. But amid bank closings, job losses, and belt-tightening, there's one field that's experiencing a bump.

We're speaking, of course, of stock photography from the Great Depression. Photo agencies like Getty Images, Corbis, The Associated Press, and others seem to be doing just fine if recent press clippings are any indication.

Let's just hope this isn't a bubble.  read more »

Let's address the question we asked last week: Does print matter? Today's example: The Rick Davis story.

Yesterday, The New York Times printed a front-page story by Jackie Calmes and David D. Kirkpatrick on how McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' lobbying firm has received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac since 2005. This is after Senator McCain claimed on Sunday in an interview with CNBC and The Times that Mr. Davis has had no relationship with the company for years. (Newsweek and Roll Call also had the story).

McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb responded on John McCain's Web site. In it, he quibbles with The Times' facts and argues that (a) Rick Davis has received no money from the arrangement or from his lobbying firm since 2006 and (b) the piece is a perfect example of how the paper is out to get them.  read more »

Spinoffs are well known in television. Sometimes they work: The Jeffersons spun off from All in the Family and ran for 10 years. Sometimes they don't: Look at Joey. (You didn't while it was on.) Slate, the Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive's wonky, contrarian Web site of politics and pop culture, isn't a sitcom—if it were, Christopher Hitchens would surely be Archie Bunker—but it's launching a spinoff of its own today with The Big Money, a business site.

This is the first new site from The Slate Group, which was created in June and is overseen by Jacob Weisberg, the former editor of Slate. It encompasses the flagship site (which, amazingly, is on its second owner, third editor, and fourth presidential election since it was founded by Michael Kinsley for Microsoft in 1996), the video site  read more »

Big news events like the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention usually spark new media technologies and breakthroughs.

Here's one, pointed out to us by Lost Remote. Washington Post reporter Ed O’Keefe recorded the clip above using his cellphone and streamed it live onto WashintonPost.com.

"This is one of the first times a newspaper organization has had the ability to bring this level of live video coverage to viewers," according to a WashingtonPost.com publicist.

The Washington Post and Newsweek.com equipped its journalists with cell phones featuring an application produced by Comet Technologies. According to the company's Web site, the technology has been in development for four years and is the first and only technology that allows reliable video to be transmitted to and from common cell phones. Cool stuff.

The bus line that is shipping reporters from the media tents outside the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field is getting awfully long, but it's moving fast. David Carr, who was right behind Lynn Sweet, and directly ahead of Newsweek's Andrew Romano, was on line for only about five minutes before he got onto the bus. Mr. Carr was smoking a Camel and thrilled that his new book, The Night of the Gun, would land at #11 on The New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list this Sunday. But, he added, it was only a matter of time before he was going to get kicked from the list once Labor Day hit and an avalanche of campaign books flood the market.  read more »

Surprisingly, no one caught wind of this early, but Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has apparently signed on to write a biweekly column for Newsweek. Like Mr. Weisberg's long-running on-again-off-again Slate column—which last appeared in January, and has not been a regular feature since April 2007—this new one will be called The Big Idea, and it will run in Newsweek and Slate simultaneously.

The first edition of the column appears as part of this week's special issue on the DNC, along with pieces by Princeton professor Sean Wilentz and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, both of whom will, according to Jon Meacham's editor's note, contribute to Newsweek occasionally.  read more »

To reach Babak Dehghanpisheh, Newsweek's Baghdad Bureau Chief, you have to dial an twelve-digit number (that's minus a series of zeros that you sometimes need to dial first) which rings him on his satellite phone in the house the magazine shares with two other media organizations inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.

Mr. Dehghanpisheh, who's been in and out of Iraq since 2003 in rotations that usually last two months at a time, sounds pretty upbeat as he talks about the challenges of reporting a war that in five years has gone through so many different phases. "In '03, '04 movement was pretty much unrestricted, I guess self-restricted," Mr. Dehghanpaisheh says through a slight delay. "You'd jump in a car and go to Fallujah and report a story. You could get away with a pretty bare bones security set up in those early days. Maybe just a guard. But in general, relatively low-key."  read more »

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria. W. W. Norton, 292 pages, $25.95.

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is one of those peculiar volumes public thinkers of a certain disposition, upon reaching a certain popular standing, seem compelled to write: an omnibus summation of the recent trajectory of their thinking—and, by extension, the state of the world.  read more »

And, finally, Newsweek has a home.

After months of hemming-and-hawing with a move to the Financial District, Newsweek is offically moving a little farther north to 395 Hudson Street in Hudson Square. They'll be packing into an increasingly crowded media neighborhood, moving alongside New York Magazine, Clear Channel, Viacom, Miramax, NPR and CBS Radio.  read more »

Newsweek gives big play this week to Rupert Murdoch's early maneuvers at The Wall Street Journal. Point: He's the general who has declared war on The New York Times.

This is something we've been talking about around here for a while now, and rumors of war aside, we haven't quite heard the first shot around here.

That doesn't change much with this week's story, but there's still lots of juice here.

Here are the highlights:  read more »

Felix Dennis, the billionaire publisher of Maxim who was the first person to say the word “cunt” on live British television, cut right to the chase last night at the Columbia Journalism School.

“Let’s get the murder thing out of the way,” he said in his refined British accent, alluding to his outrageous, and subsequently retracted claim in The Times of London on April 2 that he had killed a man 25 years ago.  read more »

Did a recent Times story borrow from a 14-month-old Newsweek story on the Buenos Aires party scene?

Fishbowl NY, which links to an Argentinan blog which makes the original case, passes no judgment but presents the blog's case.  read more »

The terms of Karl Rove's contract with Newsweek: It's a 2-year-deal, 8 columns per year and 16 overall.

A Newsweek spokeswoman confirmed this to Media Mob; editor Jon Meacham had let it slip out on Feb. 7, when a Columbia J-school student asked him about Mr. Rove (and right before Mr. Meacham asked an entire lecture-room full of Columbia students why they didn't like Newsweek).

After about an hour, there seemed to be no more questions for him, so Newsweek editor Jon Meacham turned to his audience—about 100 graduate students at Columbia journalism school—and said he had a question for them: Did anyone in the room read Newsweek or Time? There was a small, awkward rumbling before finally, a man shouted, "No!"

Mr. Meacham scanned the audience for his quarry and then asked the journalism student, clad in a black turtleneck, whether he read The Economist. Yes, he did.  read more »

Newsweek is poised to be the first major publishing firm of recent years to move from midtown to downtown, as the magazine has a lease out for about 200,000 square feet at landlord Alex Sapir’s 100 Church Street, according to a s  read more »

Newsweek is close to striking a deal that will move the magazine out of its midtown headquarters and into 100 Church Street in downtown Manhattan. The Observer's Eliot Brown is reporting that Newsweek has reached a lease agreement at 100 Church Street, which is two blocks from City Hall. Brown is being told that a final deal should be reached by the end of the month.

Newsweek, which for decades has called midtown its home, is nearing a deal that would move its offices downtown to 100 Church Street.  read more »

Newsweek is looking to leave its headquarters at 1775 Broadway near Columbus Circle and is fishing for new office space around Manhattan, the Post reports.  The newsweekly is considering 100 Church Street in the Financial District, which sits at the foot of the World Trade Center redevelopment site.  read more »

This week's issue of Newsweek contains a story by DC investigative reporter Michael Isikoff on Rudy Giuliani's ties to terror-financing outfits in the Middle East. The piece treads much of the same ground as a Village Voice story by Wayne Barrett published last week. Today, in a blog post that drew attention to the two pieces under the heading "Giving Credit Where It's Due," The Voice appeared to argue that its reporting should have been credited by Newsweek.

Media Mob asked Mr. Isikoff about the decision not to credit The Voice. His emailed response after the jump...  read more »

Via Huffington Post, Washingtonian magazine (which is kind of like the New York magazine of Washington but worse, in a weirdly exact mirror of the way Washington is worse than New York) reports that The Washington Post Company makes more than half of its revenue from Kaplan, its test-prep division, according to the company's latest financial report. Maybe The Times Company should think about making an offer for Princeton Review.

We also learn that Newsweek's revenues were down 16 percent from last year. But not to worry: Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas will no doubt turn things around.

That didn't take long.  Karl Rove's first column for Newsweek, titled "How to Beat Hillary (Next) November" (by the way, why the parentheses around "next"?) is now available.   The advice doesn't get too much more specific than "be bold in approach and presentation," but this seems to be one of those hires where the actual content of the writing matters less than the byline.  read more »

Newsweek has hired Karl Rove as a contributor for the 2008 election. On Tuesday, the magazine announced that it had hired Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog The Daily Kos, in a similar role.

Newsweek press release after the jump...  read more »