Christian Wiman Leaving Poetry Magazine

Christian Wiman announced Monday that he would step down as editor of Poetry magazine on June 30 of this year. Mr. Wiman, who has written three books of poetry himself, served as the magazine's editor for a decade. Under his leadership, Poetry won two prestigious National Magazine Awards in 2011, including the one for general excellence. It was the first time the magazine had received the honor.

Mr. Wiman, who described himself as a devout Christian in a 2009 interview, said he was leaving to join the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

Poetry was founded in 1912 and calls itself “the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world.” In 2003, shortly after Mr. Wiman was named, the magazine received a gift of nearly $200 million from the philanthropist Ruth Lilly. Mr. Wiman used the money to enact a good deal of change at the magazine.

Circulation more than doubled, in part due to a direct mail campaig n. He also redesigned the magazine's physical look and commissioned long-form journalism from established poets. For example, in the January 2011 issue, Eliza Griswold reported from Lampedusa, an island off Italy that has taken in immigrants from Africa trying to enter Europe.

A national search will be conducted for his successor.

Al Jazeera Said to Be Acquiring Current TV

Al Jazeera is finalizing a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

If the deal is completed, Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its existing English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel based in New York, according to people with knowledge of the deal negotiations. Potentially called Al Jazeera America, roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Al Jazeera may absorb some Current TV staff members, according to the people, who insisted on anonymity becaus e they were not authorized to speak publicly. But Current's schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring.

The plan will bring Al Jazeera, which is financed by the government of Qatar, into closer competition with CNN and other news channels in the United States.

To date, the country's cable and satellite distributors have been reluctant to carry Al Jazeera English. It's currently available in just a handful of cities, including New York City and Washington, D.C. To change that, Al Jazeera has lobbied distributors, urged a letter-writing campaign by supporters and promoted its widely-praised coverage of the Arab Spring.

Acquiring Current TV, and thus its distribution deals across the country, would solve this dilemma for Al Jazeera, at least partially.

Current is hard to find on many cable lineups, and some analysts believe it's at risk of losing carriage in some homes due to low ratings, but it woul d give Al Jazeera a foothold on the country's cable and satellite service lineups. Then Al Jazeera could rebrand the channel and promote it as a new American-based news source.

Representatives for Current TV and Al Jazeera did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There was no immediate word about the sale price.

Current was conceived in 2005 after Mr. Gore and another co-founder, Joel Hyatt, bought the small cable news channel Newsworld International. Current's owners, along with Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, include several venture capital firms, and two major distributors, Comcast and DirecTV.

After several years in obscurity showing user-generated videos and documentaries, Current tacked to the left in 2011 with the hire of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. A year later, Mr. Olbermann was fired, but a liberally-minded channel made in his image remained. The channel now simulcasts liberal radio shows in the morning and features news-talk shows in the evening by Joy Behar, Eliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm, and others.

None of the shows have drawn a significant audience. On a typical night in 2012 about 42,000 people were watching the channel, according to Nielsen. Mr. Spitzer quipped to a reporter from Mediabistro last month, “Nobody's watching, but I'm having a great time.”

At the end of October, Current confirmed that it was considering selling itself. Mr. Hyatt said in a statement at the time, “Current has been approached many times by media companies interested in acquiring our company. This year alone, we have had three inquiries. As a consequence, we thought it might be useful to engage expertise to help us evaluate our strategic options.”

Since then uncertainty has plagued the staff of Current, which is based in San Francisco. Mr. Spitzer, the 8 p.m. host, remarked that someone needs to buy the channel. Ms. Granholm, the 9 p.m. host, renewed her contract for just three months. Plans for new programming at other hours have stalled. After the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., the channel replayed the gun documentary “Bowling for Columbine” dozens of times.

Andrew Sullivan Leaving Daily Beast to Start Subscription Web Site

Andrew Sullivan, the prolific writer who has built up his following for his blog “The Dish” first at the TheAtlantic.com and then at the Daily Beast, announced on Wednesday he is striking out on his own with a Web site dependent entirely on subscription revenue.

Mr. Sullivan said in an announcement posted on “The Dish” that starting on Feb. 1, he plans to charge readers $19.99 a year or whatever they might want to pay to subscribe to his site. He said that he spent the last dozen years blogging and trying to figure out how to make his venture profitable. He tried pledge drives for six years and then shifted to partnering with larger institutions like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. He said he decided to make this change now since his contract with the Daily Beast was finished at the end of 2012.

“We felt more and more that gettin g readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. He added “the only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.”

Mr. Sullivan is starting his new company, Dish Publishing LLC, with his two colleagues and executive editors, Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner. Mr. Sullivan said that he has received the support of Tina Brown, the Daily Beast's editor in chief, and Barry Diller, its owner, to keep “The Dish” on the Daily Beast Web site through Feb. 1. Then the site will shift to his old address, www.andrewsullivan.com.

He said the new venture had decided not to depend on advertising for revenue because of “how distracting and intrusive it can be, and how it often slows down the page painfully.” He add ed that advertisers also require too much effort for a small company. “We're increasingly struck how advertising is dominated online by huge entities, and how compromising and time-consuming it could be for so few of us to try and lure big corporations to support us,” he wrote.

Why It\'s Hard to Score the Fiscal Deal

I've been on vacation for the past week and have been following the fiscal negotiations with less attention than I normally would. But perhaps that distance gives me a different perspective on the deal.

Most of the observations that I was reading about the deal were highly concerned with tactical considerations: Who had moved most from their previous offers? What precedents were being established for future negotiations?

As news about the negotiations evolved on a daily (or hourly) basis, the attitude of liberals and conservatives in my Twitter feed seemed to change along with it. Liberals seemed considerably happier about the deal on Tuesday night, for example â€" after the House of Representatives nearly scuttled the deal and then passed it with mostly Democratic votes â€" than they were early Tuesday morning, after the deal had passed through the Senate with an overw helming bipartisan majority. But there had been no change to the policy terms of the deal.

I do not mean to suggest that these tactical considerations are of no importance. It could matter that the House of Representatives violated the Hastert rule - the idea that that a bill should receive a majority of votes from members of the majority party in the House â€" in passing the bill. It could matter that President Obama, at an earlier point in the negotiation, capitulated on his demand that the federal debt ceiling be raised as part of a deal, setting up another confrontation in a few months.

But I would argue that the attention paid to these tactical considerations is a bit disproportionate. They seem to make it easy to declare “winners” and “losers” at every turn in the negotiations â€" whereas evaluating the deal in terms of the actual policy impact is much trickier.

Why is this so? Because each side has a variety of plausible strategic imperatives when it comes to fiscal policy â€" and they don't necessarily yield the same policy preferences.

Take the deal from the Democratic or liberal perspective, for example. What were Democrats' major strategic goals? For some liberals, the goal might be redistribution: to adopt a series of policies that result in a net transfer of wealth from high-income earners to middle- or low-income earners.

Other Democrats (and Republicans) might view the deal from the standpoint of taxes vs. spending: what is the ratio of tax increases to spending cuts?

Finally, there is the paradigm of expansionary or contractionary fiscal policy. Since the economic recovery is still tepid, many liberals would prefer that the gov ernment continue to stimulate the economy in the near-term at the expense of increasing the debt in the long term. (This consideration may have a political component as well, since a better economy will tend to improve President Obama's popularity and perhaps increase his ability to achieve future fiscal and nonfiscal policy goals in the months and years ahead.)

Take one component of the deal: that the cuts to the payroll tax, which had been in place for the past several years were not extended and will now expire. If increasing tax revenues is the major Democratic goal, the expiration of the payroll tax cut helped to achieve that. But it also represented contractionary fiscal policy. And the impact will mostly be realized upon the middle class and the working poor, which pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes.

Most Democrats, I assume, would have preferred that the payroll tax cut had been extended: doing so would have achieved two Democratic goals (expansionary policy and redistribution), outweighing the one that it contradicted (increasing tax revenues).

But when the overall deal is considered â€" not just the payroll tax, but all the other components, like the extension of unemployment benefits, or the increase in income and capital gains taxes for high-income earners â€" it becomes much trickier to evaluate because of the different criteria that might be reasonably be applied to evaluate success or failure.

My objective here is not to advocate for any one set of metrics, or to “score” the deal that was struck on Tuesday â€" so much as to suggest that liberals and conservatives might do well to spend more time considering what their strategic objectives really are. Just as is the case durin g election campaign, an obsessive focus on the latest developments in the news cycle can cause one to lose sight of the bigger picture.