Newsweek

Newsweek is an American weekly newsmagazine published in New York City and distributed throughout the United States and internationally. Newsweek is a general interest newsmagazine and has sections covering American news, international news, politics, health, business, science, education, and entertainment among others.

History

Originally called News-Week, it was founded by Thomas J.C. Martyn on February 17, 1933. That issue featured seven photographs from the week's news on the cover. In 1937, Malcolm Muir took over as president and editor-in-chief. Muir changed the name to Newsweek, emphasized more interpretative stories, introduced signed columns, and international editions. Over time it has developed a full spectrum of news-magazine material, from breaking stories and analysis to reviews and commentary. The magazine was bought by The Washington Post Company in 1961. Newsweek is generally considered the most liberal of the three major newsweeklies, an assertion supported in a recent UCLA study on media point of view.

Newsweek Today

Style

The main sections of Newsweek are National and International Affairs, Business, Science & Technology, Medicine, Family and Arts & Entertainment. Regular weekly features include Periscope, My Turn, Conventional Wisdom Watch, Perspectives and Newsmakers. My Turn is a column written by readers. Each column is chosen from around 4,000 monthly letters. Newsweek boasts this is the only such regular column.

Reputation

Newsweek has won more National Magazine awards than any other similar publication. These awards include those for general excellence (1982, 1993, 2002, 2004), Reporting (1999), Single Topic Issue (1981, 1992, 2004), and Visual Excellence (1974). Prize winning issues covered Vietnam, and the American presidential elections of 1992 and 2004. Other awarded stories included ones on aging and the state of African-Americans.

Circulation and branches

It is the second-largest weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence, although both are much larger than the third of America's prominent weeklies, U.S. News & World Report. As of 2003, worldwide circulation is more than 4 million, including 3.1 million in the U.S. It also publishes editions in Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as an English language Newsweek International. There is also a radio program, Newsweek on Air, jointly produced by Newsweek and the Jones Radio Network (previously with the Associated Press).

Based in New York City, it had 17 bureaus as of 2005: 9 in the U.S. in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, as well as overseas in Beijing, Cape Town, Jerusalem, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo.

Best High Schools in America

Since 1998, Newsweek has periodically published a national list of high schools under the title "Best High Schools in America". The ranking of public secondary schools is based on the Challenge Index method of ranking, which ranks based on the ratio of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams taken by students to the number of graduating students that year, regardless of the scores earned by students or the difficulty in graduating.

Schools with average SAT scores of above 1300 or average ACT scores of above 27 are excluded from the list, categorized instead as "Public Elite" High Schools. In 2006, there were 21 Public Elites.

There has been controversy over this method of choosing the top schools because it only takes into account AP exam scores.

Controversies

Guantánamo Bay allegations

In the May 9, 2005 issue of Newsweek, an article by reporter Michael Isikoff stated that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay "in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet." Detainees had earlier made similar complaints but this was the first time a government source had appeared to confirm the story. The news was reported to be a cause of widespread rioting and massive anti-American protests throughout some parts of the Islamic world (causing at least 15 deaths in Afghanistan), even though both Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers and Afghan President Hamid Karzai stated they did not think the article was related to the rioting. The magazine later revealed that the anonymous source behind the allegation could not confirm that the book-flushing was actually under investigation, and retracted the story under heavy criticism. Similar desecration by U.S. personnel was reportedly confirmed by the U.S. a month later.

Regional cover changes

The September 27, 2006 edition of Newsweek in the United States featured a cover story titled "My Life in Pictures" based around photographer Annie Leibovitz and her new book, with the cover photo featuring her with several children. Foreign editions featured, instead, a cover story called "Losing Afghanistan" with a picture of an Islamic extremist about the U.S. fight and struggles in Afghanistan. The story was still featured in the American edition and was still mentioned on the cover.

In 2005 Newsweek had featured a picture of an American flag in a trash can on the Japanese edition, absent from all other editions.

Iraq war planning

Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek columnist and editor of Newsweek International, attended a secret meeting on Nov. 29, 2001 with a dozen policy makers, Middle East experts and members of influential policy research organizations to produce a report for President George W Bush and his cabinet outlining a strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and the Middle East in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The meeting was held at the request of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. The unusual presence of journalists, who also included Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic Monthly, at such a strategy meeting was revealed in Bob Woodward's 2006 book State of Denial. Woodward reported in his book that, according to Mr. Kaplan, everyone at the meeting signed confidentiality agreements not to discuss what happened. Mr. Zakaria told The New York Times that he attended the meeting for several hours but did not recall being told that a report for the President would be produced. Mr. Kaplan said much of the meeting was spent drafting and reworking the document, which in the end carried the names of all 12 participants and was "a forceful summary of some of the best pro-war arguments at the time." Kaplan told the Times that it would not have been possible for any of the participants to have been unaware there was a document in the making.

External links

• Newsweek website
• Newsweek Distance Learning
• The Washington Post Company
• History and Demographics of Newsweek

Credits

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