FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW TO CLOSE
Dow Jones has announced this morning it plans to close the 63-year-old Far Eastern Economic Review in December. Six editorial staff at the Hong Kong-based English language magazine will be offered positions elsewhere within the company.
FEER's own data showed a circulation of 12,500 subscriber copies as of June 2006. Rate card advertising for one page, before discounts, is quoted at US$10,185.
The magazine's uncompromising style has often landed it and its journalists in hot water. The magazine was banned in Singapore, and in February 2002 two of its Bangkok-based staff were deported and two others barred from entering Thailand for publishing an article that was deemed to have threatened national security.
3 comments:
No bean counters ever respect any aspect of a product's heritage that cannot be exploited for financial gain, so it should be no surprise that the Murdoch boys have finally decided to let this one go.
This is a sad day for a lot of fans of old-fashioned, well-written, well-researched journalism by quality writers wedded to their task. In the mid-80s I was in Seoul at a time when the military government was a cabal of profiteering thugs who tramped on human rights as if they didn't matter in the least. Outside Korea, the media made token efforts to report the problems, but mostly took the view that Korea was growing, Korea was not communist, Korea was paying its bills - so better the stable dictatorship than the unpredictability of a young democracy. Yes, just about as patronising as you can get.
FEER was one of the few publications that told it how it really was. Koreans read FEER to learn what was going on in their own country, much of it reported by a fearless South Korean reporter called Shim Jae-hoon, a real professional operating under the ugliest of threatening conditions. In a small way, FEER helped South Korea get the democracy it deserved, and in many other parts of Asia where regimes tried to keep an iron grip on information that cast them in a bad light, it served a similar vital purpose - doing, effectively, what The Economist still does in certain countries where certain topics are off-limits.
The loss of FEER as an honest unbiased source of REAL public information is what makes this a tragedy for Asia and Asians.
ron mcm
Ron, thanks for your comments.
You're right, sadly, but the truth is that no company is going to support (for any length of time) any publication that cannot pay its way. I'm a little surprised it's not been taken online, howver that alone is a clear indication of just how tough things are right now in the publishing world.
FEER has had an online presence for quite a while, though obviously it was never going to pay the bills...
http://www.feer.com/home
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