Newsweek

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 »