BANGKOK — Antigovernment protesters who have camped out on the streets of Bangkok for the past three weeks raised the stakes in their mass demonstrations on Saturday, converging on the heart of Bangkok’s shopping district and vowing to remain until new elections are called.
Tens of thousands of protesters, including many families with small children, took over a main intersection, blocking roads leading to upscale shopping malls and five-star hotels and demanding that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand take action soon.
“We will remain here until the government declares that Parliament is dissolved,” said Veera Musikapong, one of the leaders of the protesters, who are known as the Red Shirts.
The Thai Foreign Ministry said the government would follow a “multistep approach, from light to heavier measures,” in what appeared to be a turning point in its handling of the crisis, the latest chapter of four years of political turmoil.
On Tuesday the Thai cabinet extended the use of a law that allows the military to clear out protesters and make arrests. Mr. Abhisit said Saturday that protesters had exceeded the limits of their constitutional right to demonstrate and that the government would negotiate or use legal means to oust them.
Mr. Abhisit has offered to call new elections within nine months — about a year before his term ends — but protest leaders, who claim the government is illegitimate, rejected the concession. The Red Shirts, who have wide support in the populous north and northeast, would probably win elections if they were held now, analysts believe.
Protesters, many of whom support Thaksin Shinawatra, who was removed as prime minister in a 2006 military coup, say they are angry at what they perceive as the undue influence of the country’s bureaucracy, military and elite.
Despite the threats to remove them, protesters appeared to be in a jovial mood late Saturday. As they listened to speeches, many camped out on the sidewalk in front of display windows advertising luxury brands like Dior, Ferragamo and Tag Heuer.
Tourists who pushed through the throngs of red-shirted protesters said they were polite and helpful.
“I don’t feel threatened,” said Elizabeth York, a visitor from London whose 1-year-old was in a stroller. “They make way for the babies,” she said.
Others were less forgiving of the demonstrators. An 18-year-old Thai, the scion of a wealthy family, drove his Porsche into protesters’ motorcycles and was besieged by the crowd before the riot police intervened, The Associated Press reported.
A woman who said she had to walk several miles to work because of the demonstration gave this assessment of the protesters: “They are very poor and very stupid.”
MARJA, Afghanistan — Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support.
The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marja, where the Taliban seem to know everything — and most of the time it is impossible to even tell who they are — they have already found ways to thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some who take the Marines’ money, or pocketing it themselves.
Just a few weeks since the start of the operation here, the Taliban have “reseized control and the momentum in a lot of ways” in northern Marja, Maj. James Coffman, civil affairs leader for the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, said in an interview in late March. “We have to change tactics to get the locals back on our side.”
Col. Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan National Police commander here, says his informants have told him that at least 30 Taliban have come to one Marine outpost here to take money from the Marines as compensation for property damage or family members killed during the operation in February.
“You shake hands with them, but you don’t know they are Taliban,” Colonel Sakhi said. “They have the same clothes, and the same style. And they are using the money against the Marines. They are buying I.E.D.’s and buying ammunition, everything.”
One tribal elder from northern Marja, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being killed, said in an interview on Saturday that the killing and intimidation continued to worsen. “Every day we are hearing that they kill people, and we are finding their dead bodies,” he said. “The Taliban are everywhere.”
The local problem points to the larger challenges ahead as American forces expand operations in the predominantly Pashtun south, where the Taliban draw most of their support and the government is deeply unpopular.
In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin to the only political organization in a one-party town, with an influence that touches everyone. Even the Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.
“We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”
“We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We have to deal with these people.”
The Marines hoped the work programs would be a quick way to put to work hundreds of “military-aged males,” as they call them. In some places, that has worked. But the programs have run into jeopardy in other parts of Marja, an area of about 80 square miles that is a patchwork of lush farmland and small bazaars and villages.
In northern Marja, the biggest blow came when the local man hired to supervise the work programs was beaten by the Taliban and refused to help the Marines any more. The programs are “completely dead in the water” there, Major Coffman said.
In addition to work programs, the Marines are using compensation payments to build support for the newly appointed district governor of Marja, Hajji Abdul Zahir, telling people that to receive money they must get his approval. That effort has proved equally vulnerable.
In late March, an Afghan man was beaten by the Taliban hours after he had gone to the Marine outpost that houses Mr. Zahir’s office to collect his compensation. The Taliban took the money and stole a similar amount as punishment, said Colonel Sakhi, the police commander.
“My greatest fear right now is not knowing if I have put money into the pockets of the Taliban,” Major Coffman said.
Despite those reservations, the Marine strategy depends on sowing this community with buckets of cash. The money is a bridge to a day when, in theory, the new Marja district government will have more credibility than the Taliban.
That would be a difficult goal even if the Americans did not intend to rid the region of its lucrative poppy crop. While the United States has abandoned the policy of widespread eradication of the crop, efforts to discourage planting it will still cost farmers and power brokers huge sums.
“There are lots of people with lots of money invested here, and they are not just going to give that up,“ General Nicholson said. “Now is the heavy lifting. We have to convince a very skeptical population that we are here to help them.”
A steady flow of Taliban attacks have added to the challenge. After the February offensive, the Marines used cash payments to prod more than 20 store owners at one bazaar in northern Marja to open their doors, a key to stabilizing the area and reassuring residents.
By late March, all but five shops had closed, Major Coffman said. A prominent anti-Taliban senior elder was also gunned down in northern Marja, prompting most of the 200 people in his district to flee.
“They have completely paralyzed all the folks here,” Major Coffman said.
In another sign of how little the Marines control outside their own outposts, one week ago masked gunmen killed a 22-year-old man, Hazrat Gul, in broad daylight as he and four other Afghans built a small bridge about a third of a mile from a military base in central Marja.
Mr. Gul’s boss, an Afghan who contracted with the Marines to build the bridge, says he has been warned four times by the Taliban to stop working for the Americans.
And even as the NATO-backed Mr. Zahir struggles to gain credibility as Marja’s leader, the Taliban are working to fortify their own local administration.
According to Colonel Sakhi, the Taliban’s governor for Marja returned to the area on Monday for the first time since the February assault and held a meeting with local elders, many of whom Mr. Zahir is trying to win over. The Taliban governor warned them not to take money from the Marines or cooperate with the Afghan government, Colonel Sakhi said.
In central Marja, where the work projects have had more success, about 2,000 Afghan men are employed by programs financed by the First Battalion, Sixth Marines, said the unit’s civil affairs leader, Maj. David Fennell.
At one of the battalion’s outposts, shipments of cash arrive regularly. The last was 10 million afghanis, or $210,000, stuffed into a rucksack. The battalion doles out $150,000 a week, Major Fennell said.
On one afternoon in late March, 40 Afghans could be seen clearing away several acres of rubble remaining from a bazaar leveled during a NATO bomb strike two years ago. The $190,000 contract is expected to take a month to complete.
But intimidation is still rife — even inside the walls of the Marines’ outpost. One woman who came to the base crouched behind a Humvee and begged for help, saying that her husband had been killed during the February operation.
First Lt. Aran Walsh offered her $1,700 worth of Afghan currency. He asked her why she hid herself.
“If they see me, they’ll inform the Taliban,” she said.
Moises Saman contributed reporting from Marja, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The signs of a new season surround us: Flowers are blooming, trees are budding, and another Facebook privacy fracas is brewing.
The last event kicked off a week ago, when the popular social network posted a note on its blog about "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites.
The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there?
As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. . . . This is not empowering."
(Before I go further, a few disclaimers: Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors; Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is on leave to run for political office, is a friend of mine from college; and many Post staffers, myself included, use public Facebook pages to connect with readers.)
The upside isn't quite as clear.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt and product director Bret Taylor said the Palo Alto, Calif., company wanted to expand its utility. In this experiment, Facebook would build on its Facebook Connect system (in which people can sign into sites such as The Post's with their Facebook accounts) to help other companies greet Facebook users with a taste of its social network.
For example, Taylor suggested that if a Facebook friend posted a link to a song on his wall and you clicked over to the record label's site, the label could tell you which Facebook pals liked the song.
This test would come with limits. You'd have to be logged into Facebook in the same browser to get any such personalized welcome elsewhere, less than 10 sites would be invited into the program at first, and each of them would have to let you easily opt out (after which each would have to delete any data Facebook had shared about you). Facebook would also provide a universal opt-out for the entire program.
To its credit, Facebook hasn't tried to spring this change on people. Beyond that blog post, it has invited users to comment on proposed changes to its privacy policy and "statement of rights and responsibilities" -- then provided a marked-up version of each showing text that has been removed and added, a step few other sites bother to take.
The reaction to that prior disclosure could indicate how worked up people really are about the changes. The relevant part of the new privacy policy, "Information You Share With Third Parties," had drawn only 211 comments early Thursday.
More important, consider what's happened since Facebook made far more user data public by default in December. According to Schnitt, 33.9 percent of Facebook users had changed their privacy settings one way or another, even though the site required all of them to confirm, decline or edit its suggested options. Since then, 50 million more people have joined Facebook.
You can't chalk all of that up to audience obliviousness.
Perhaps Facebook users have decided that with so many people on the site, their own data get lost in the collective noise -- sort of the way living in a big city affords some enforced anonymity.
Some might have learned to think like publicists on Facebook. They dial back how much information they post, they only write status updates that beg for publicity (think of all the political manifestoes you've seen), or they create second accounts for their work identities (an action Facebook's user agreement prohibits).
Or maybe Facebook's executives are correct in assuming that people don't want as much privacy online, as founder Mark Zuckerbergsaid in January. (He did not say that privacy was dead, nor does he seem to think that; his own Facebook profile informs strangers that "Mark only shares some of his profile information with everyone.")
But even if all of those theories are true, changing the rules to share people's information without advance permission crosses a line. If the benefits of this openness are as obvious as Facebook suggests, this new option should sell itself to the same people who let Google's computers read their Gmail, then publicize their pastimes on Foursquare. And if this experiment is as limited as Facebook suggests, the company won't forgo much revenue if it eases off on its launch.
In the meantime, I'll stay on the site -- as a journalist, it's implausible not to. But it would help to see some sign that this company will go to the mat to defend its users' rights, even if that means jeopardizing its profits. It's not too late for Facebook to pick a fight with China, is it?
By William Booth Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, April 4, 2010; A01
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate.
The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 killings in the city in the past year.
Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.
"Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization," said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso division. "They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it."
The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, "Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars."
The mayor of Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars for the assassins' use. The mayor received a death threat recently in a note left beside a pig's head in the city.
Arabit said investigators have no evidence to suggest the Barrio Azteca gang includes former military personnel or police. It is, however, working for the Juarez cartel, which includes La Linea, an enforcement element composed in part of former Juarez police officers, according to Mexican officials.
"There has to be some form of training going on," said an anti-gang detective with the El Paso sheriff's department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. "I don't know who, and I don't know where. But how else would you explain how they operate?"
On March 13, Lesley Enriquez Redelfs, 35, who worked for the U.S. Consulate in Juarez, and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, 34, a deputy in the El Paso sheriff's department and a detention officer at the county jail, were returning home to El Paso from a children's party sponsored by the U.S. consul in Juarez. As their white sport-utility vehicle neared the international bridge that sunny Saturday afternoon, they were attacked by gunmen in at least two chase cars. When police arrived, they found the couple dead in their vehicle and their infant daughter wailing in her car seat. The intersection was littered with casings from AK-47 assault rifles and 9mm guns.
Ten minutes before the Redelfs were killed, Jorge Alberto Ceniceros Salcido, 37, a supervisor at a Juarez assembly plant whose wife, Hilda Antillon Jimenez, also works for the U.S. Consulate, was attacked and slain in similar style. He had just left the same party and was also driving a white SUV, with his children in the car.
According to intelligence gathered in Juarez and El Paso, U.S. investigators were quick to suspect the Barrio Azteca gang in connection with what President Obama has called the "brutal murders." What was unclear, they said, was the motive. U.S. diplomats and agents have declined to describe the killings as a targeted confrontation with the U.S. government, which had been pushing to place U.S. drug intelligence officers in a Juarez police headquarters to more quickly pass along leads.
Five days after the consulate killings, the DEA unleashed in El Paso a multiagency "gang sweep" called Operation Knockdown to gather intelligence from Barrio Azteca members. Over four days, officers questioned 363 people, including about 200 gang members or their associates, and made 26 felony arrests.
Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that the Barrio Azteca gang had given "a green light" to the retaliatory killing of U.S. law enforcement officers.
Authorities were especially interested in Eduardo Ravelo, a captain of the Barrio Azteca enterprise allegedly responsible for operations in Juarez. In October, the FBI had placed Ravelo and his mug shot on its 10-most-wanted list, though they warned that Ravelo may have had plastic surgery and altered his fingerprints. Ravelo is still at large.
DEA agents say that 27 Barrio Azteca members were detained as they tried to cross from El Paso to Juarez during Operation Knockdown, evidence of gang members' fluid movement between the two countries.
This week, authorities announced that Mexican soldiers, using information from the FBI and other sources, had arrested Ricardo Valles de la Rosa, an Azteca sergeant, in Juarez.
Valles's confession was obtained at a military base where he was allegedly beaten, according to his attorney, a public defender. He has not been charged in the consulate killings, though he is charged with killing rival gang members, including members of an enterprise known as the Artistic Assassins, or "Double A's," who operate as contract killers for the Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa is vying for control of billion dollar drug-trafficking routes through the Juarez-El Paso corridor.
In his statements, Valles said he was told through a chain of letters and phone calls from Barrio Azteca leaders in the El Paso county jail and their associates that gang leaders wanted Redelfs, the El Paso sheriff's deputy, killed because of his treatment of Azteca members in jail and his alleged threats against them.
Valles said he tracked down Redelfs at the children's party and then handed off the hit to others. He said the killing of the factory supervisor was a mistake because he was driving a white SUV similar to Redelfs's.
El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said in a statement that Valles was a career criminal and denied that Redelfs had mistreated inmates. Wiles stressed that the motives remain unknown.
Fred Burton, a former State Department special agent and now a security adviser for the Texas government, said he is suspicious of attempts to underplay the killings. "These were targeted hits done by sophisticated operators," he said. "But it is not politically expedient for either side to say that criminal organizations were behind this. That is a nightmare scenario for them."
Mexican officials say that Valles, 45, was born in Juarez but grew up in El Paso, where he lived for 30 years. Nicknamed "Chino," he was a member of the Los Fatherless street gang in El Paso. In 1995, he was convicted of distributing drugs and spent 12 years in eight U.S. federal prisons, where he met an Azteca gang leader. After his release, he was deported to Mexico and began working with the Aztecas in Juarez.
The theory that the carnage in Juarez is being stoked by rival gangs of contract killers -- the Barrio Aztecas and the Artistic Assassins -- each working for rival drug cartels makes sense to many observers.
The gangs are a binational phenomenon whose members exploit the mistrust between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, said Howard Campbell, a professor at the University of Texas in El Paso and an expert on the drug trade.
"They use the border to their advantage," Campbell said.
The rulers had sued for defamation 16 years ago, saying a Herald Tribune Op-Ed column had implied that they got their jobs through nepotism. The paper wound up paying $678,000 and promising not to do it again. But in February, it named Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister now, in an Op-Ed article about Asian political dynasties.
After the Lees objected, the paper said its language “may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended.” The Herald Tribune, wholly owned by The New York Times Company, apologized for “any distress or embarrassment” suffered by the Lees. The statement was published in the paper and on the Web site it shares with The Times.
Some readers were astonished that a news organization with a long history of standing up for First Amendment values would appear to bow obsequiously to an authoritarian regime that makes no secret of its determination to cow critics, including Western news organizations, through aggressive libel actions. Singapore’s leaders use a local court system in which, according to Stuart Karle, a former general counsel of The Wall Street Journal, they have never lost a libel suit.
The notion that it could be defamatory to call a political family a dynasty seems ludicrous in the United States, where The Times has routinely applied the label to the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. But Singapore is a different story.
Lee Kuan Yew once testified, according to The Times, that he designed the draconian press laws to make sure that “journalists will not appear to be all-wise, all-powerful, omnipotent figures.” Four years ago, The Times quoted his son as saying, “If you don’t have the law of defamation, you would be like America, where people say terrible things about the president and it can’t be proved.”
Steven Brostoff of Arlington, Va., wondered whether The Times had other agreements like the one with the Lees, and asked, “What conclusions should we draw about how news coverage from these countries is slanted?” Zeb Raft of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, asked if The Times was admitting that certain world leaders “deserve to be treated with deference. This is the implication of the apology.”
George Freeman, a Times Company lawyer, said the 1994 agreement was the only one he knew about and that it applied only to The Herald Tribune. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said, “Nobody in this company has ever told me what our reporters can write — or not write — about Singapore.” He said the Times newsroom has no agreements with any government about what can be reported. “We don’t work that way.”
Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said, “If we have something that needs to be said on the editorial or Op-Ed pages, on any subject, we will say it, clearly and honestly.”
That is what the late William Safire did on the Op-Ed page in 2002, when he criticizedBloomberg News for “kowtowing to the Lee family” by apologizing for an article about the elevation of the younger Lee’s wife to run a state-owned investment company. Bloomberg, he said, had “just demeaned itself and undermined the cause of a free online press.”
Safire wrote that he took “loud exception” in 1994 when The Herald Tribune, then owned jointly by the Times Company and The Washington Post Company, “cravenly caved” over an article by Philip Bowring — the same Hong Kong-based columnist who sparked last month’s dust-up. “I doubt such a sellout of principle will happen again.”
Richard Simmons was the president of The Herald Tribune in 1994 and authorized the agreement that was broken last month — an “undertaking” by the company’s lawyers to prevent a repetition of the language that offended the Lees. “We had, in my view, no choice,” he said. “What the American media absolutely refuse to recognize is Singapore operates on a different set of legal rules than does the United States.” He said Western news organizations can accept the legal system there or leave.
For The Herald Tribune and all the other news organizations that have paid damages to Singapore’s rulers (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg) or had their circulation limited there (Time, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Economist), the choice has been to stay.
Singapore is tiny, with a population of around five million, but it has outsized economic power as a financial hub, making it an important source of news. For The Herald Tribune, the economic stakes are large: more than 10 percent of its Asian circulation is in Singapore. It prints papers there that are distributed throughout the region. It sells advertising to companies throughout Asia that want to reach readers in Singapore.
“If you want to be a global paper, it has lots of banks, lots of commerce, a highly educated, English-speaking population,” said Karle. “It’s hard to turn your back on that.”
Faced with this predicament when the Lees objected to the article last month, The Herald Tribune apologized and paid up — $114,000 — before it was even sued. Karle said the paper could have spent a million dollars for a worse result in court: forced to pay higher damages and make a more humiliating apology.
But settling the way it did has its own price. Roby Alampay, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, told Agence France-Presse, “This continuing line of major media organizations too quick to offer contrition and money is a sad sight and a persisting insult on legitimate journalism, fair commentary, free speech and the rights that Singaporeans deserve.”
Safire toldThe American Journalism Review in 1995 that the world’s free press should unite and pull out of Singapore in the face of any new libel action. I think that is what should happen too, but it never has.
That leaves the Times Company with its own choice if another challenge arises. “Singapore is an important market for The International Herald Tribune,” the company told me in a statement. “There are more than 12,000 I.H.T. readers who shouldn’t be deprived of the right to read the paper in print or online. In addition, getting kicked out of Singapore would also make it more difficult for others in the region to get the I.H.T. since we print in Singapore for distribution there and in the neighboring areas.”
Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.
Some magazine fans may feel like their favorite publications are dissolving into fragments of their former selves: fractured content distributed throughout the web, social media, digital editions and the surviving print versions.
But something unique to magazines does still hold at the center, and a new report on the future of magazines suggests that the future for both print and digital magazines will be strong.
Within the report are 30 short profiles of creative methods of making magazines fresh and new in an increasingly competitive media environment. The entire report can be purchased online in printed format for 100 euros or as a PDF for 75 euros.
For example, one chapter describes the integration of small video screens into the September 2009 print edition of Entertainment Weekly that played previews of CBS shows, engaging more of the reader's senses in a "hybrid" medium. Another chapter details how magazines have developed online games that entice readers to engage with their brands in new ways. National Geographic's game "Herod's Lost Tomb" alone has been downloaded 15 million times.
FIPP, a London-based industry organization whose 800-plus members represent over 6,000 magazine titles, co-sponsored the report with Innovation, whose international group of researchers gathered creative approaches to magazine content, advertising and sales being tested around the world. The report mimics a similar yearly publication on new ideas in the newspaper business that Innovation has been creating for the last 11 years.
Finding Magazines' Future
The co-editors of the report, Juan Señor and John Wilpers of Innovation Media Consulting, both come from traditional media backgrounds. Señor, a partner at Innovation, has worked for Wall Street Journal TV, CNBC Europe and the International Herald Tribune Television, and was nominated for an Emmy for his work as a reporter at PBS' NewsHour. Wilpers, who is a consultant for Innovation, worked for a variety of U.S. newspapers and most recently has consulted with newsrooms including The Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times on the integration of blogging into their content.
Juan Señor
Though the innovations contained in the report come from around the world, Señor notes that many "came from more innovative markets in Europe, London and New York -- not accidentally, but coincidentally, because a lot of titles are in trouble" in those places.
Señor and Wilpers together formed their researchers' collected ideas into a cohesive and provocative report on the remarkable variety of ways magazine publishers are experimenting with content, advertising and sales, both in digital and print forms.
"We asked publishers, what are you doing that other magazine publishers should know about? Really it was just doing the kind of research that a good reporter would do," says Wilpers, who had a group of 25 freelance researchers working with him on the project. The focus of the report, according to Wilpers, was "initially supposed to be digital innovations, but print still drives so much of our revenue that we wanted to include that."
Whether for digital or print, each innovation described in the report is individually fascinating. Perhaps more compelling, however, is the realization that taken together, these innovations will result in nothing less than the transformation of the magazine industry -- and of the concept of the magazine itself.
Magazine Experimentation
Both Señor and Wilpers were impressed by magazine professionals' willingness to experiment with new storytelling styles, platforms, formats and revenue streams.
"In the newspaper industry, for so long, we saw paralyzing fear," says Wilpers. "And so people, out of fear, did nothing. They hoped that things would get better by going away."
The magazine industry, though, has embraced digital formats and played with creative opportunities, without forgetting its print roots. "Digital is fun, it's exciting, it's sexy, and it's one of the many answers to publishing going forward. But print's going to be around for a while. We just need to figure out how to make it work," Wilpers says.
That isn't a clear-cut process. Today's magazine transformation will never be complete, and shouldn't be, says Señor.
"To be successful, you should be in a constant state of beta," explains Señor. "If you're not, it's very difficult to move things forward."
Aggregation and Curation
Magazines have experimented with both social media and user-generated content. Yet although magazines should engage with social media, Señor says, social media are "the platform, not the message."
"Very few people out there are producing quality stuff," he says. "For spot reporting, [social media are] fantastic, but still somebody has to quiet the noise and tell me what's happening. There's nothing like the role of a journalist to do the editing and selection for you."
Señor and Wilpers believe this editing and selecting process will increasingly be the role of magazines in the future.
John Wilpers
"You'll see magazines like The Nation curating the best political content, even if they didn't write it," says Wilpers. He notes that a magazine's reputation for quality carries over to other content editors choose for readers, and that as magazine staffs shrink, editors can selectively draw upon a wide variety of skilled outside authors and curate the best of their work for the magazine's audience.
"There's such a blog fog out there, so many people producing rubbish," Señor says. "Just tell me what I should be listening to. Tell it to me with the independence and credibility of journalists. That's the importance of an editor as a curator."
The Magazine as 'Content Proposition'
As magazines differentiate their content for multiple platforms, include a variety of content from their staff and other external sources, and use creative new approaches to their content, there is still a center that holds to define magazines.
Señor argues that today's magazines each have their own "content propositions" that define their subjects and styles.
"The magazine doesn't become a paper product, but a brand of journalism," he says. "The magazine can still have a digital destination. It has a design. It has a masthead. It's a brand proposition as opposed to a platform proposition, but it's still doing a specific kind of storytelling."
Each magazine expresses its content proposition in its own unique way, across multiple media and even through different business models.
"Every publication will have a quiver of opportunities, and no two quivers will be the same," says Wilpers. "Everyone's going to have lots and lots of different tools."
Saving Paper
Paper can still be one of those tools. However, paper editions of magazines may no longer be a mass medium. Instead, they could become a special experience distinctive from what digital magazines provide.
Señor compares paper and digital editions to the levels of clothing in the fashion world. Today's digital magazine editions, he says, are like the expensive, rare, high-end haute couture offered by fashion designers to generate public interest in their brands. Print editions are like the cheap, widespread, lower-status prêt-à-porter clothing they offer for a mass market. However, this analogy, Señor says, is about to be reversed.
"[Print] circulation is definitely going to go down, but if you make the magazine a quality product on paper, a premium product, you can charge much more. I see easily charging $10 for the paper version," he says. "In time, the prêt-à-porter will become digital, and paper will become haute couture. But you have to make the paper experience have tremendous quality, not something you offer in other platforms."
As magazines innovate, then, it's not about leaving paper behind. It's about experimenting with the best ways to gather a defined, branded set of content and to distribute it in the most fitting platform. Though all these simultaneous innovations may feel to observers like fragmentation and weakness, it may be the case that some essential quality of magazines will help them survive and even flourish through their transformation.
Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Mass Communication and Journalism Department at California State University, Fresno. Her research focuses on magazines and media communities. She also blogs at sivekmedia.com, and is the magazine correspondent for MediaShift.
In early March, observers watched as around 20 long-time Christian orphanage workers were expelled from the country they called home. The incident, and others which followed it, have brought to light the debate surrounding Christianity in the Kingdom.
While the official Moroccan line is that 98.7-99 per cent of the population is Muslim (the remainder being approximately 1% Christian and 0.2% Jewish), that statistic includes ethnic Europeans residing in Morocco. Proselytizing is illegal, as is conversion away from Islam. Still, foreign Christians are allowed to practice freely, and a number of churches, mostly from the era of French colonization, remain. In contrast, the country's tiny Jewish population is almost entirely native, and is also allowed free practice of their faith.
Despite guarantees of freedom, it would appear that the government is taking a stronger approach of late to proselytism, both real and perceived. The Moroccan Dispatchesshares a recent incident in which an Egyptian Catholic priest was expelled from the country:
Evangelicals have operated for years in Morocco, with their main purpose being the conversion of Muslims. Catholics have operated for longer, but purposefully have not engaged in proselytizing. So it came as a surprise that a Catholic priest was also detained and then exported during last week's crackdown.
The blogger shares a message he received from the church in Casablanca:
On Sunday the 7th of March, five minutes before mass began; the police in the city of Larache entered our friary and arrested one of our confrères, Rami Zaki, a young Egyptian friar still in initial formation who was spending a year with us. He was ordered to go with the police, had no possibility to collect anything, and was given no explanation for his arrest…
…When Rami was put on the plane, his passport was taken from him and given to the pilot who later surrendered it with Rami to the police in Cairo. He was detained by the police in Cairo for another seven hours for interrogation before he was permitted to telephone his community of friars. From Sunday, the morning of his arrest, to Tuesday afternoon, when he was released – a total of more than 50 hours – Rami was deprived by the police in Morocco and Egypt of any of his human rights.
In another post, the blogger demonstrates that the public has joined in the crackdowns, citing a recent incident in which a cross was removed from its site of many years:
Where a cross once hung in Meknés
This is the place where a cross used to hang in Meknes' medina. The Catholics who teach Moroccans languages and career skills in this building do not engage in proselytism but have caught up in the anti-Christian sentiment following the recent expulsions of Christians. Last week, the cross was knocked down and beaten into pieces.
On a positive note, Moroccans who have benefited from their services have volunteered to reconstruct the cross.
In a more recent post, the same blogger assesses a TelQuel article on the situation, and says of it:
In the main article, it points out that most Moroccans convert to Christianity more as a result of Arabic media and not from foreign missionaries. This jives with my experience: a number of Moroccans I know have had long conversations with Christian missionaries about religion and none have converted. Some defended Islam while smoking hashish just to piss off the Christians, it that gives you an idea of how many Moroccans understand their Islamic identity. This observation about foreign missionaries, of course, undermines the rationale behind the recent expulsions of many foreigners.
Other media critical of the government have been shut down recently. And the same could happen to Tel Quel. But as long as they are still around, there will be at least some debate and critical thinking about current events.
Turkey’s governing party moved this week to further reduce the power of the country’s staunchly secular old guard, submitting a series of amendments to Turkey’s military coup-era 1982 constitution, but passage is far from assured.
A number of the 26 amendments, if passed, would strike at a center of power for the old elite, the judiciary, by opening up its appointment process and expanding its membership.
For generations, Turkey’s judiciary has been controlled by a small class of hard-line secularists with a nationalist ideology, and the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has long urged that it be changed. The amendments require 367 votes out of 550 to become law, more than the governing party has. At the same time, the secular opposition party is having trouble gathering the 110 votes needed to kill the package in the Constitutional Court.
Some liberals criticized the measures for falling short of what is needed for deeper democracy in Turkey, while opponents of the party, Justice and Development, say the amendments are an effort by its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to consolidate his power. But supporters say the changes would start to bring Turkey in line with European countries.
“When you actually look at what the amendments propose, you see that all changes are copied from examples that function quite well in E.U. member states,” said Joost Lagendijk, senior adviser at the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University and a former European Parliament member.
The current constitution, which enshrines Turkey’s secular mandate, has been amended several times since it was put in place, and most Turkish intellectuals argue that it should be scrapped entirely.
But Mr. Erdogan’s past efforts to change it have met with ferocious criticism. His party commissioned a new draft in 2008, which was written largely by a group of intellectuals, but was forced to scrap it after the secular opposition party filed suit against Justice and Development, which is Islamic-inspired, and a high court threatened to ban the party.
The government argues that the changes as necessary to break away from a troubled past of military coups and strong control of the state by a small coterie of unelected officials in the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Critics of the newly proposed amendments fear that the key changes — the way appointments are made to the constitutional court, the main watchdog of secularism in Turkey, and to the Senior Council of Judges and Prosecutors, responsible for judicial appointments and monitoring court officials — would damage Turkey’s founding principles. They do not trust Mr. Erdogan, whose party arose from a class of Muslim entrepreneurs that upper class secular Turks long looked down upon.
“The secular democratic state in Turkey is in danger,” said Sabih Kanadoglu, the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, another powerful court.
Other changes include trying military officers in civilian courts and making it harder to ban political parties.
If Mr. Erdogan fails to pass the changes in Parliament, he has said he would bring them to a nationwide referendum, though some have criticized that approach as too black-and-white for the complexity of the amendments.
The disagreement follows a long-running divide in Turkish society between the broad sector of society that supports Justice and Development and secular Turks, who believe Mr. Erdogan is dismantling the old system to establish a new one that empowers him.
At the same time, liberals who were hoping for bolder change expressed disappointment. One of the principle authors of the 2008 draft, Ergun Ozbudun, a professor of law at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, noted that the amendments offered no concessions to ethnic or religious groups, for example, whose rights in Turkey have been routinely abused.
“The desire deep in their hearts was probably to go more courageously,” he said by telephone, “but they are maybe afraid of the opposition and constitutional court.”
Nor do the amendments lower the steep 10 percent threshold that political parties must meet to claim seats in Parliament, which keeps out smaller political parties, including those that represent ethnic groups such as Kurds, out of Parliament one of the liberals’ central demands.
Ibrahim Kaboglu, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul’s Marmara University, said the changes would expand the president’s powers, for example by allowing him to choose more members of the constitutional court, and he said he worried that the court, a bastion of secular resistance, would soon be packed with Mr. Erdogan’s allies.
“They seem to be in a rush to fill both institutions with judges and members who are closer to their political line to secure their future,” he said, referring to the Constitutional Court and the Senior Council.
For those used to seeing the faces of slaves in Civil War-era tintypes -- staring at the camera in posed, formal judgment -- it is a shock to see the face of slavery in a shy, adolescent boy.
Majok Majok Dhal, 14 or 15 years old (many former slaves have no idea of their exact age), dimly remembers his capture in the village of Mareng at about age 5. "I ran a little and was taken. I was carried on horseback." He recalls seeing other captives shot and killed after refusing to march north with the raiders into Sudan proper. His master, Atheib, was "not a good person." He forced the boy to tend goats and live with them in a stable. Majok was beaten regularly with a bamboo stick, "if I was not quick and fast." He recalls once being feverish and unable to work. The master "stabbed my leg with a knife. He said, 'I will cut your throat.' " Majok shows me his poorly healed wound. He was forced to address Atheib as "father."
Relating his experience, Majok shows no anger -- until asked about the master's children. "When they beat me up, I couldn't raise my head. If I tried to fight back, the father would kill me." He recounts their taunting. "They would say to me, 'Why don't you go to your own home and eat?' " Majok's voice rises: "If he brought me all the way to take care of goats and cattle, why did he not employ his own children?"
I talk to Majok through an interpreter, under a large tamarind tree, in a setting as bleak as his story. The scenery tests every possible shade of brown: reddish brown, yellowish brown, greenish brown. It is a landscape of thatched, conical huts; circling scavenger birds; rutted mud roads; and wandering goats. A haze of fine red dust blurs the horizon.
Nearby, about 125 recently released slaves are being interviewed by Christian Solidarity International, an organization that has helped redeem and resettle tens of thousands of captives during the past 15 years. Though no more slaves are being taken by northern militias -- the raids generally stopped with the American-sponsored peace treaty in 2005 -- an estimated tens of thousands more are still held within a hundred miles of South Sudan's northern border.
The background of each man, woman and child at the makeshift camp is recorded, reflecting a determination by CSI that none of these people, and none of the crimes they have experienced, be forgotten. A woman is missing teeth from being tied and thrown to the ground. Others reluctantly admit that their genitals were mutilated. One woman tells me she is often awakened by her nightmares.
Slavery is only the most extreme legacy of Sudan's two decades of civil war. With patience, nearly every personal encounter reveals a story of struggle. A pastor tells me how his congregation met for 15 years under a tree so they could quickly move to avoid bombing raids. Cattle herds -- the main source of stored wealth in South Sudan -- were decimated. An estimated 40 percent of people in this region depend on food aid of some sort. There is almost no public health infrastructure. A Sudanese doctor tells me that about every two weeks he diagnoses a new case of leprosy -- a condition almost unknown in the West. Women in rural areas play fertility roulette -- a local aid official estimates that one in six will die from complications during childbirth.
Just months from South Sudan's likely vote for independence, its humanitarian challenges seem overwhelming. International relief organizations provide many services, but the greater need is the building of local capacity -- agricultural development, trained government administrators, a credible national teaching hospital. Direct international aid in the form of cash can encourage local corruption. But technical assistance to build specific capabilities might be the only way to avoid the destructive failure of a new nation. Still, as one U.S. State Department official recently vented to me, "We are doing about 10 percent of what we need to do."
Without leaving the planet, it would be difficult to experience greater cultural distance than meeting a Sudanese goatherd released from slavery. But my main impression of Majok was his profound resemblance to my sons of similar age. It is a hopeful thing about humanity. In a timid smile, in a turn of the head, we see similarity, we see family. We should also see responsibility.
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