Bobby Ghosh has been named the editor of Time International, Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Martha Nelson and Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel told staffers in an announcement Friday morning. “[T]his appointment has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he saved me from getting tear-gassed in Tahrir Square last year,” the memo reads.
Jim Frederick is vacating the position “to move on to other challenges,” the memo says. He will become a contributing editor. Full text follows.
March 15, 2013
To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Martha Nelson & Rick Stengel
Re: Staff Announcement
On the recommendation of Rick Stengel, I am pleased to announce that Bobby Ghosh is the new editor of TIME International. I’ll hand it off to Rick to fill in the details:
It gives me great pleasure to announce that Bobby Ghosh is our new international editor. Bobby, quite simply, is a magnificent journalist who has done the highest level of work that one can aspire to in our profession. During his five years as our Baghdad bureau chief throughout the worst of the Iraq war, Bobby wrote two of our most unforgettable cover stories: Life in Hell, and Sunnis vs. Shi’ites. He was not only fearless in his work in Iraq but he was the guardian of all who worked for us in Baghdad. The breadth of his interests and the depth of his expertise is reflected in a sampling of his recent international covers, from soccer star Leo Messi to Bollywood icon Aamir Khan to a profile of Egyptian president Mohamad Morsi. Bobby came to TIME in 1998 after ten years as a journalist in India and two on the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. He became a senior editor at TIME Asia, where he wrote a weekly TIME.com column called Subcontinental Drift. Bobby then moved to London to become a senior editor at TIME Europe and in 2007, he became the first non-American World editor in TIME’s history. Every day, Bobby extends TIME’s reach on all platforms from his tweets @Ghoshworld (“food, football and foreign affairs…not necessarily in that order”) to his frequent television appearances. His TED Talk on the End of Jihad has more than 350,000 views. He is entrepreneurial by nature and has many ideas on how to grow the TIME brand. And, finally, this appointment has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he saved me from getting tear-gassed in Tahrir Square last year. Congratulations to Bobby on his new role. He will be great.
For a while now, I’ve known that Jim Frederick has wanted to write a third book and launch some media and tech start up ideas. He has been a superb editor of our international editions and a great ambassador for TIME, which I know he will continue to be. After 16 years at Time Inc., Jim has decided to move on to other challenges. Jim started at Money and, after earning an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, joined TIME in 2002 as a roving business writer based in Hong Kong. He became our Tokyo bureau chief for four years and then moved to London as a senior editor. As the editor of TIME.com here in New York, he demonstrated great leadership and digital savvy, dramatically increasing TIME.com’s metabolism as well as its traffic, and extended the brand by launching several new apps on a variety of platforms. Running international was a chance for Jim to become even more of an authority on foreign affairs, which he also demonstrated with his terrific Iraq book, Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death. He has excelled at everything he has done for TIME and I view this as an evolution in Jim’s relations with us, not an ending. He will become a contributing editor, and I hope we will soon see his byline in the magazine and online.
Please join me and Rick in congratulating Bobby and Jim.
M.N. R.S.
