Adweek.com's Top 10 Press Stories of 2011

Here are the 10 most-read press stories published on Adweek.com in 2011: 'Psychology Today' Asks Why Black Women Aren't Pretty Controversial piece draws fire, is deleted By Gabriel Beltrone Mental health bimonthly Psychology Today came under fire Monday after it published a blog post by Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa titled "Why Are African-American Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" Read full story. Magazines Pull Back on Tablet Bells and Whistles Why it's back to basics for some publishers By Lucia Moses When the iPad launched, magazines rushed to shovel expensive rich-media features into their tablet editions. But now that they have to create editions for the new Kindle Fire and Nook Color and their ilk, some are downplaying the need for often-expensive enhancements. Read full story. Former 'Newsweek' Editor Meacham Joins 'Time,' Officially Signs on as contributing editor to onetime rival By Lucia Moses In April, Adweek reported that ex-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham switched teams and wrote his first cover story for Time magazine. Now, Meacham and Time have made their relationship official: He's joined the magazine as a contributing editor. Read full story. How David Bradley and Justin Smith Saved 'The Atlantic' A sinking magazine comes back from the brink (or why all print media stories don't have to end badly) By Lucia Moses Four years ago, David Bradley, the chairman and sole owner of the Atlantic Media Company, came up to New York from Washington, D.C., to have dinner at The Carlyle with Justin Smith, who was then president and publisher of The Week. Bradley was desperate. For eight years, he'd been trying to staunch the flow of red ink at what was then called the The Atlantic Monthly, only to see the losses increase (one year, to more than $10 million). He admired Smith's work at The Week, a news digest that publisher Felix Dennis had imported from the U.K. in 2001, and wanted to hire him to, hopefully, turn around the magazine. Read full story. Is Controversy Selling for Tina Brown? Newsstand numbers for attention-grabbing covers revealed By Lucia Moses Tina Brown has courted controversy with some of her recent Newsweek cover choices. Now, newly available sales numbers are showing that those covers did not necessarily translate into the kind of spike that she might have been hoping for. Read full story. The Best Media Writer at the NYT But can Virginia Heffernan keep her voice? By Dylan Byers New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, by some chattering class estimates the best media writer at the paper, has a brain many brainy men have fallen in love with—sometimes to their peril. One of those men is socialite and investment banker Euan Rellie. Read full story. The National Magazine Award and Guantánamo: A Tall Tale Gets the Prize Scott Horton's Harper's story about detainees' deaths doesn't hold up By Alex Koppelman Harper's Magazine and Scott Horton were not supposed to win the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. Of the five finalists in the category, there were three real contenders, and most people working in the ever-shrinking category of serious magazine journalism were sure the award would go to Rolling Stone for the article by Michael Hastings that led to the downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or The New Yorker for Jane Mayer's profile of the billionaire Koch brothers. Read full story. The Trouble With Back-Ends CMS woes: Why publishers can't publish on the Web By Erin Griffith No publication has a better story about back-end chaos than BusinessWeek. Before it was acquired by Bloomberg LP, the publication sank a shocking $20 million into the back-end development of Business Exchange, a professional social networking site being built atop a proprietary content management system. Employees blamed BusinessWeek's bloated tech investment for the company's financial demise and eventual fire sale to Bloomberg, which paid a paltry sum—reported as between $2 million and $5 million—for it in 2009. Read full story. Can Politico Win Again? Blogger Ben Smith helped the site dominate the 2008 election cycle—but Twitter's encroaching on its turf By Dylan Byers Ben Smith has a problem. If there is such a thing as the prototypical political news blogger, then he's it. Smith didn't quite invent the form, but over the six years he's been blogging—first for The New York Observer, then the New York Daily News, and now for Politico—he's helped make it what it is today. He is, in the words of Kevin Sheekey, the head of government relations and communications for Bloomberg L.P., "the father of political blog journalism." Read full story. A Year of Tina Brown and Newsweek Still Needs a Savior NewsBeast still hasn't turned around its losses and has a long way to go before it gets into the black By Lucia Moses When the merger between Newsweek and The Daily Beast was announced almost a year ago, it seemed like it might, at least, have the makings of a good story: charming nonagenarian audio tycoon teams up with a media mogul and celebrity editor to save a beloved dinosaur from extinction. Those behind the mashup believed, of course, that their idea was a great one. Or at least they hoped it would be, despite the battered state of both the economy and print media. Read full story.

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Adweek.com's Top 10 Press Stories of 2011

Controversies, resurrections, CMS troubles, and lots of Tina Brown

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