Fareed Zakaria Leaves Newsweek, Joins Rival Time

Slate, citing Folio mag, notes the new direction of Newsweek's prominent blowhard.

Time magazine is scheduled to announce on Thursday that it has snatched Fareed Zakaria from one of its biggest rivals, Newsweek. Zakaria, a columnist for the Washington Post, editor of Newsweek's international edition, and host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, will be named a contributing editor for Time and will pen a column that runs in the print edition of the magazine every other week. "The departure of Mr. Zakaria, a well-known columnist and television presence, is another blow to Newsweek, which was sold to Sidney Harman, an audio equipment mogul, at the beginning of the month," the New York Times' David Carr wrote on the paper's Media Decoder blog. Since the magazine was sold, Jon Meacham, the magazine's editor; Michael Isikoff, an investigative reporter; and columnist Evan Thomas have all announced they would be leaving. "Fareed is one of a small handful of global public intellectuals, and he has proven how important his thinking and writing is, over and over, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11," said Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time. "He is a kind of spokesman for a post-American world, and we think he represents an important piece of the puzzle for us." Zakaria said that moving from Newsweek to Time made sense because the magazine is owned by Time Warner, which also owns CNN, where his foreign affairs program airs every Sunday. "All of my work will now appear at one company, and instead of a kind of awkwardness, there is a very real synergy," he told Carr over lunch. Zakaria is also taking on a role as a consultant for HBO's documentary film unit, according to Folio. HBO, too, is owned by Time Warner.

Reporter sacked for Belief in Objectivity

Georgia on my (objective) mind...

Added to the list of reasons why journalists now lose their jobs: a belief in "objective reality." Slate notes today that Atlanta Progressive News senior reporter Jonathan Springston was let go last week after he failed to live up to the paper's standards, namely, by reporting on events based on facts. In a statement issued to the Fresh Loaf blog, the APN explained that "[Springston] held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News." The statement added that Springston would be better suited for other media outlets, like Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It also gave readers something else to look forward to: "we have already begun drafting a more programmatic statement on our editorial position regarding objectivity, inter-subjectivity, and news." According to Springston's Twitter feed (he goes by the moniker LegendOutlaw) he's currently looking for work.

Numbers Game - do the math, hacks!

The big brouhaha over the number of anti-Obama rally-goers in Washington on 9/12, with media estimates varying from "tens of thousands" up to "a couple million", is worth examining. Particularly because these days tweets can repeat and recycle erroneous estimates and the real number of aggrieved folks who attended these tea-parties gets lost in cyber-cobwebs of misinformation. The result is hysterical, not historical, statistics. Experienced reporters know that organizers tend to overestimate the turnout, while officials often underestimate crowds, at least at unticketed events.

Consider this Journalism 101 hint from the Slate website:

How do you measure a crowd?
Basic arithmetic. Estimates depend on three variables: the area of the available space, the proportion of the space that's occupied, and the crowd's density. While the first measurement is objective, and the second fairly easily determined with aerial photography, the third is a little trickier. It's customary to assume that in a very crowded place (like a commuter train during peak hours) people occupy 2.5 square feet, whereas in a looser gathering each person takes up more like 5 square feet.

For better accuracy, you also ought to consider how long the event lasted, because not every protestor stays for the duration. And a separate estimate for the security presence is helpful.
For example, at a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem in 2006, police outnumbered marchers almost two to one.

Moonbats and wingnuts exchanged vitriol and snark over the disparate numbers last weekend. Most amusing was blogger Nate Silver's assessment (picked up by the Columbia Journalism Review:

There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration — it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.”
The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it [in her update to her 9/12 tea party post]. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

Well that last statement is also hyberbole, one assumes. To reach that figure, the male apparatus under discussion would measure 1.7 inches!