About Asiaweek

Asiaweek

Asiaweek was a Hong Kong-based English-language news magazine that reported Asia from an Asian perspective. It was founded in 1975 by Michael O'Neill, a New Zealander, and T. J. S. George, an Indian, who had worked together at the Far Eastern Economic Review, and it was published weekly by Asiaweek Limited, later a subsidiary of Time Inc. It ceased publication with its issue of 7 December 2001, at a circulation of about 120,000 copies, blaming a downturn in the advertising market. In its twenty-six years it was, with the Review, one of the defining English-language weeklies of a region then consciously inventing a pan-Asian identity, and its founding mission statement became one of the best-known declarations in Asian journalism: to report accurately and fairly the affairs of Asia in all spheres of human activity, to see the world from an Asian perspective, and to be Asia's voice in the world.

Asiaweek was a closed magazine, written about here in the past tense throughout. No successor revived the English edition, although it had formerly been associated with Yazhou Zhoukan, an international Chinese-language newsweekly launched by Asiaweek Limited in 1987, which continued on its own path after Time Warner acquired the English edition.

Founding in Hong Kong in 1975

Asiaweek was founded in 1975 and was based in Hong Kong. Its founders, Michael O'Neill and T. J. S. George, had worked together at the Far Eastern Economic Review but had grown disenchanted with what they considered its ponderous style and perceived British stance. Their answer was a new weekly, written from Asia rather than about Asia from outside. As George wrote in an editorial statement in Asiaweek's first issue in December 1975: realities had changed, and values with them; it was a new Asia, and this was a new magazine to report it.

The timing shaped the idea. Alejandro Reyes, a long-time Asiaweek correspondent and contributing editor who later wrote the magazine's epitaph, pointed out that in 1975 no one was talking about globalisation and few spoke of regional integration or an Asian consciousness. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was only eight years old and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum had not yet been born. A pan-Asian English-language weekly was therefore not following a ready-made audience. It was attempting to create one, on the assumption that a reader in Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila or Jakarta had reason to care about the politics, business and culture of the others, and to read about them through Asian rather than Western eyes. Its later slogan expressed the same promise in shorter form: Asia through Asian eyes.

Editors and editorial character

Asiaweek had four editors during its twenty-six years: its co-founders T. J. S. George and Michael O'Neill, who conceived the magazine; Ann Morrison, who succeeded O'Neill in 1994 and came to Hong Kong from Fortune in New York; and Dorinda Elliott, formerly Newsweek's Asia editor in Hong Kong, who took over in October 2000. O'Neill, who paced the corridor of the magazine's Hong Kong headquarters in Reyes's recollection, was founding editor of Asiaweek and was also founding editor-in-chief of Yazhou Zhoukan when Asiaweek Limited launched it in 1987, with Thomas Hon Wing Polin as its founding managing editor.

Those who worked for the magazine described its heyday style as fresh and fearless. George remained nostalgic in later writing about that style and wary of American involvement in Asian affairs. Reyes insisted, against critics who said the title had been Americanised, that the magazine retained its strongly Asian voice independently of whatever its bosses in New York might have wanted. Others disagreed. M. G. G. Pillai, one of Asiaweek's casualties at the closure, said the magazine lost focus and became increasingly Americanised after Time took over. That argument, between an Asian voice preserved and an Asian voice diluted, ran through the magazine's last decade and through almost everything written about its death.

Ownership: Reader's Digest, then Time

Asiaweek's ownership passed from regional beginnings into American corporate hands. Reader's Digest held the major stake in the magazine's early corporate life. In 1985, Time Inc., as it was then known, acquired 84 per cent of Asiaweek, buying out Reader's Digest's 80 per cent stake and 4 per cent local interests. The remaining 16 per cent was owned by Michael O'Neill. The purchase placed a locally born Hong Kong title inside the world's largest magazine publisher, even though Asiaweek appeared to be in direct competition with Time's own Asian edition for readers and advertising.

In 1994 Time ousted O'Neill and installed Ann Morrison as editor. For George, who had left Asiaweek before its final troubles, that removal was the true death of the title. He said his only regret was the way the magazine was devalued by the very people who took it upon themselves to nurture it, that the concept itself was killed in 1994 when O'Neill was removed by the new management, and that its closure in 2001 was a mere burial. Corporate defenders of the later decisions answered in economic terms, but the symbolism was hard to escape for the magazine's founders: the editor who had personified the Asian-perspective idea was removed by owners in New York, seven years before the owners closed the magazine itself.

What Asiaweek published

At its core Asiaweek was a weekly news magazine focusing on Asia, covering politics, business and society across the Asia-Pacific region for English-reading Asians and for outsiders who wanted the region's own account of itself. It published news, analysis, interviews and cultural reporting, and it was sold across a region whose diversity was both its subject and its commercial difficulty. Reyes, who began his professional career as a journalist with Asiaweek and worked for it from 1988 to 2001 in Hong Kong and Singapore, embodied the staffing model: correspondents posted around Asia, writing for a single regional edition.

Two ventures beyond weekly news showed the breadth of its ambitions. The first was the annual Asiaweek Short Story Competition, which ran from 1981 to 1988 and invited fiction from across Asia. Its prizewinning stories were eventually published in book form in 1991 as Prizewinning Asian Fiction, edited and introduced by Leon Comber and published by Times Editions in Singapore and Hong Kong University Press. In his foreword, Asiaweek managing editor Salmon Wayne Morrison presented the anthology as a contribution to an understanding of the Asia-Pacific region, and the competition remained one of the publication's most cited contributions to Asian letters. The second was its ranking journalism, notably its listing of Asia's best universities, which offered what Times Higher Education described as the first listing of Asia's fifty best universities, with the University of Tokyo at number one, followed by Kyoto University, the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The ranking provoked argument among governments and universities, which was precisely evidence that a Hong Kong magazine's judgement had acquired regional authority.

Competition and the economics of a pan-Asian weekly

For much of its life Asiaweek's position was protected by scarcity. The New York Times columnist Thomas Crampton wrote that Asiaweek and the Far Eastern Economic Review were the only weekly magazines with a strong Asia focus through the 1980s. That changed in the 1990s, when global and local media companies expanded into regional editions. In addition to several small regionally financed magazines, The Economist, Fortune, BusinessWeek and Forbes all began aggressive expansions into Asia, and those global titles could rely on skeletal staffs and economies of scale that a standalone regional weekly could not match.

Reyes reached a similar conclusion from inside. He attributed the magazine's demise to the failure of a pan-Asian marketing strategy impeded by limited resources and intense competition, even while he remained hopeful that a niche market for media with an Asian perspective would revive despite globalisation. The structural problem was that pan-Asian identity, however powerful editorially, was hard to sell to advertisers country by country. A magazine read across a dozen markets had to persuade advertisers who often bought media market by market, while global competitors could bundle Asia into worldwide buys and local competitors could offer a single national audience more cheaply.

The final years and relaunch

The last editorial change came in October 2000, when Dorinda Elliott, formerly Newsweek's Asia editor in Hong Kong, took over as editor. A relaunch followed in May 2001, in which Asiaweek repositioned as a business title, at a circulation of about 120,000, entering a market that already had the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian editions of many global publications. Reyes recalled that the magazine's real success with the public had come in the mid-to-late 1990s, borne out by a rise in circulation and advertising revenue, and that Asiaweek had been in profit from 1994 to 1996, though it never made more than about 1.2 million dollars in one year. Those figures underlined the fragility beneath the famous name: even in its best recent years, the magazine's profit cushion had been thin.

Then the advertising market fell away. The downturn after the technology crash was made much worse by the financial fallout from the attacks of 11 September 2001. Time announced the closure on 29 November 2001, and the final issue was dated 7 December 2001. Reyes wrote that the weekly news magazine was by then selling 130,000 copies, which he described as the highest circulation for an English-language magazine produced in Asia, while Time's own announcement and subsequent reporting put circulation at 120,000 copies when it closed. Either way, the title did not die for lack of readers. It died because the advertising that paid for regional journalism had collapsed faster than its costs could be cut.

Closure and the official explanation

Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of Time Inc., attributed the closure to a downturn in the advertising market. According to Time, the reason was an advertising slump, and its executives insisted their decisions were based on economic, not editorial, considerations. Reporting in Asian Economic News on 3 December 2001 was headlined simply that Time shuts down Asiaweek magazine. The magazine's own online notice stated the essential fact in one sentence: Asiaweek ceased publication with its 7 December 2001 issue, but its online archives were still available.

Not everyone accepted the economic explanation as the whole story. Philip Bowring, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, later drew a parallel between Time and Asiaweek and Dow Jones and the Review: Time had bought locally born Asiaweek even though it appeared to compete directly with its own title, and in due course closed Asiaweek rather than its ailing Time Asia. George put the founders' verdict most bluntly in 2009, writing that Time Inc. killed Asiaweek and Dow Jones killed the Review, leaving the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine flying the American flag over Asia unchallenged by lesser flags. Whether the closure was commercial necessity or corporate preference for a global brand over a regional one depended, then as now, on where the observer stood.

Afterlife and legacy

Asiaweek had been an early digital presence, a title remembered for putting nearly the whole magazine online in 1995, when very few titles did. That made its post-closure treatment of its archive especially painful for its writers. Reyes wrote that he had initially applauded the modern, business-oriented techniques of AOL Time Warner, but was unhappy to find that Time deleted all Asiaweek articles from its online archives, including his own, calling the decisions tragic and the work of New York-centric media bureaucrats. The printed magazine had lasted twenty-six years. Its digital record proved easier to erase.

Its legacy survived in people and in an idea. Reyes went on to academic and policy work in Hong Kong and Canada, carrying the magazine's Asian-perspective argument into AsiaGlobal and university settings. The Chinese-language Yazhou Zhoukan, founded under the same Hong Kong company in 1987, continued as a separate international Chinese newsweekly. And the founding proposition, that Asia needed at least one major English-language weekly that saw the world from an Asian perspective and served as Asia's voice in the world, was repeatedly cited after 2001 whenever a regional title closed or a global title expanded. Asiaweek did not prove that such a magazine could survive the advertising economics of a fragmented region. It proved, for twenty-six years, that such a magazine could be made, read and argued about across the whole of Asia, and that remains the achievement for which it is remembered.