The World Weekly

» see theworldweekly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The World Weekly Media Limited was incorporated in London on 2 August 2012. The magazine was announced that November and began publishing in January 2013, and it began the way London magazines of that era began: 75,000 free copies pressed into hands at members' clubs and the big transport interchanges. Roy Greenslade gave it two paragraphs in the Guardian on 17 January 2013 under the headline "New magazine launches in London."

The pitch was better than the launch suggests. Rory O'Grady, the founding managing director, described it as a publication with no specific political ideology, taking what he called a multidimensional approach to news. In practice that meant translating and republishing work from international providers while building a network of stringers, and it meant explicitly trying to get out from under the Western frame. Salman Shaheen, who became editor-in-chief in 2014, put it as cutting through the Western bias of the big news organizations and getting around entrenched political positions.

The business model was freemium with a print distribution on top, and the plan was to repeat the London launch in Hong Kong and New York on the way to a presence in 45 cities. That did not happen. What survived was the website and a rotating cast of editors, serving a readership that The Good Web Guide described in 2014 as being handed a slick aggregator with original analysis attached.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the backers ~

The money was City money with a Westminster edge. Roland Rudd and Lord Mervyn Davies were among the backers named in the launch coverage, alongside Lord Jonathan Marland, which is an unusual set of names to find behind a magazine whose stated purpose was to decenter the Anglo-American view of the news. It bought the thing five and a half years, which is longer than most of its 2013 cohort managed.

~ march 2015 ~

In March 2015 the site went down under what everyone involved believed was a denial-of-service attack, following its critical coverage of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Left Foot Forward ran it as a London magazine shut down by hackers after criticizing the Turkish president. Shaheen's response was that the magazine would not be silenced or intimidated, and the site came back.

This is the part I was close to, from the other end. I have been online in Turkey since 1998 and on TTNet for most of that, and the 2014 to 2015 window is when the state's relationship with the internet stopped being abstract. Twitter went dark nationally in March 2014 and YouTube with it; both were blocked again in April 2015. For a while the workaround was common knowledge, and 8.8.8.8 turned up written on walls in Istanbul because changing your DNS server was the whole trick. A London magazine getting flooded off its host for a paragraph about Erdogan is the same story viewed from outside the border, with one difference that matters: the magazine could say what had happened to it, in English, and then go back to publishing.

~ the paperwork ~

Shaheen left in 2017. Manuel Langendorf took over as editor-in-chief and was still in the chair when the magazine stopped publishing in June 2018, after five and a half years. Companies House records The World Weekly Media Limited as dissolved on 15 October 2019, sixteen months later, which is the ordinary lag between a publication ending and its company being struck off.

theworldweekly.com answers today. It serves a Vietnamese football streaming site, which is a reused domain rather than any kind of survival, and it means the archive of an explicitly international magazine is now only reachable through the Wayback Machine.

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