SCOTT SIMON
Weekend Edition - Saturday (NPR)
11-13-2004
Analysis: Demise of the Far Eastern Economic Review
Host: SCOTT SIMON
Time: 1:00-2:00 PM
SCOTT SIMON, host:
One of the world's most respected and distinctive newsmagazines shut down this past week. The Far Eastern Economic Review was established in 1946 by a group of European journalists in the British colony of Hong Kong. Since that time, a group of journalists, who became known as both scholarly and somewhat swashbuckling, covered the birth of Singapore, the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese, and in the 1990s, one of its reporters tracked down and interviewed Cambodia's mass murderer Pol Pot, who was then in hiding. NPR's Anthony Kuhn filed stories for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He most recently served as the magazine's Beijing correspondent until this past July. He joins us from London. Anthony, thanks for being with us.
ANTHONY KUHN reporting:
A pleasure to be here.
SIMON: The Dow Jones Company, which has owned Far Eastern Economic Review since 1987, says it has to lay off its entire staff of correspondents. Tell us about this group of people as you knew them.
KUHN: They were very often specialists. They were often expats who had gone native in multiple Asian countries. For example, there's Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who specialized in Burma, and he and his wife, an ethnic Shan woman from Burma, walked the China-Burma border, taking pictures and writing along the way. There was Nayan Chanda, who later edited the paper, who made a name for himself filing from Saigon in the last days of the war. There was Nate Thayer, who covered Cambodia, spent many years in the jungle, and finally got a key interview with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. And their writing was often very quirky, but it was appreciated by readers.
SIMON: John McBeth, a New Zealander by birth, who reported from East Timor even after his leg was amputated...
KUHN: Yes, he was just one of the Review's journalists who were known for getting in the face of leaders around the region. Many of them were jailed for writing stories that autocratic governments in Asia didn't like.
SIMON: When you were at the Far Eastern Economic Review, who did you think you were writing for?
KUHN: The readers were mostly academics and business and political leaders around the region, and just people who were interested in Asian events. It was a regional audience, as opposed to the local and global audiences that are more common now.
SIMON: And what changed in publishing or in Asia that brought Dow Jones to this decision that they have to shut down the magazine and then re-launch it as a monthly opinion journal?
KUHN: Well, Dow Jones said that the magazine had been losing money for the past six years. There was a time during the 1980s when it was quite profitable. What Dow Jones said was that the advertisers had all migrated to either global or regional media. There was also the problem that they have the daily Asian Wall Street Journal, which had a substantial overlap with the Far Eastern Economic Review's readership. So basically they couldn't support it any longer.
SIMON: Anthony, thanks very much.
KUHN: Nice to speak to you, Scott.
SIMON: NPR's Anthony Kuhn speaking with us from London about the demise of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
And it's 22 minutes before the hour.