Foreign Policy

Owned by Graham Holdings (formerly the Washington Post Company). Graham Holdings’ revenue for the third quarter of 2015 was $641.4 million, of which $68.9 million came from advertising. Its other business segments, of which Foreign Policy ‒ and Slate magazine ‒ is a part, reported $70.1 million in revenue for the quarter. Graham Holdings is both privately held and publicly traded: Its Class A stocks are held by the Graham family, which allows them to select 70 percent of the company’s board of directors, while its Class B shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Foreign Policy’s funding comes from subscriptions, advertising and events. Recent FP Event underwriters have included Hewlett Packard, Visa, Lockheed Martin, Verizon, HSBC, Energy API, Chevron and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. Lockheed Martin has also been a recent defense advertiser, along with Northrop Grumman and Boeing, its direct competitors. Other advertisers have included Shell, USEC, LexisNexis, the CIA and a slew of colleges, universities and non-governmental organizations.

Foreign Policy was launched at the close of the Vietnam War in 1970, by a Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, and his friend, Warren Demian Manshel. The magazine was intended to be a mouthpiece for alternative views about US policy abroad by its founders. Foreign Policy maintained its quarterly format until the year 2000, when it became, as it refers to itself, "the glossy magazine it is today while retaining its independent viewpoint." It now focuses on global affairs, current events, domestic and international policy. Foreign Policy is available both online and in print with six issues annually. The magazine’s website features over 20 originally-reported articles plus more than a dozen blogs and columns daily. It is reached by, on average, 2.4 million readers monthly, according to the magazine’s figures.

As the CEO and Editor of the FP Group (a subsidiary of Graham Holdings), Rothkopf oversees all the magazine’s operations, including editorial, publishing and events. He is also the president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory company. The editor is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former owner of Foreign Policy (from 2000 to 2008). Rothkopf served in the Clinton administration as deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade and as acting undersecretary of commerce.

Managing editor for news at Foreign Policy since 2014, Dreazen previously worked at the Atlantic Media Group (The Atlantic, National Journal) and was a writer-in-residence at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a defense policy think-tank.

Before taking a post at National Journal in 2010, Dreazen had reported for the Wall Street Journal for 11 years, much of that time as a military correspondent. He was embedded with US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending nearly four years in both countries. Dreazen also reported from almost 20 other countries, including Pakistan, Russia, China, Israel, Japan, and Turkey.

Thanks to his connections in the military, Dreazen got to know US Army General Mark Graham, who lost two sons in 2004 — one in combat in Iraq, the other from suicide due to depression. The story of Graham and his family coping with these deaths formed the backbone of Dreazen’s 2014 book about military suicides — "The invisible front: Love and loss in an era of endless war" — published by Crown, a division of Random House.

In November 2011, Dreazen married Anne Rosenzweig, a strategist working for the Secretary of Defense at the time. She is now a defense and foreign policy fellow for Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire).

The senior editor for economics and a Foreign Policy columnist, Altman is also an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He created FP’s Baseline Profitability Index, a tool for assessing the attractiveness of investing in markets around the world. Altman previously wrote for the Economist, the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times, where he sat on the editorial board ‒ as one of its youngest members in history. He also served as an economic advisor to the British government, and has triple citizenship with the US, Canada and United Kingdom.

Schake contributes to FP’s Shadow Government blog, and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Republican-leaning public policy think tank at Stanford University. She served in President George W. Bush’s administration at both the State Department and the National Security Council as a national security adviser on defense issues. She worked at the Pentagon from 1990 to 1996. During the 2008 presidential election, Schake was a senior policy adviser for policy development and outreach for foreign and defense policy for the McCain-Palin campaign. Her sister, Kristina, was First Lady Michelle Obama’s communications director from 2010 until 2013, when she left the White House to become the chief communications officer at L’Oreal USA. "They simply gathered different information about world," their mother, Cecelia, a college instructor, told the Daily Beast about their opposing political viewpoints. "We are all over the map and that makes for interesting Thanksgiving dinners."

An editor at FP concerned with the overly male audience of the magazine asked Sarah Kendzior, who had written on motherhood’s financial toll and is a Central Asia scholar, for advice on attracting female readers. She told the publication it didn’t have enough women as contributors, and suggested she write a piece on the subject, according to the Nation. Instead, Foreign Policy published an article on a panel discussion the magazine had hosted that asked, in part, "Where are all the women?" (The nine-member panel only contained one woman.)

Al Jazeera later published Kenzior’s article. She expounded on her thesis ‒ that structural economic barriers exclude women and people of color from the field because it requires significant economic resources to enter ‒ in a personal blog post.

"[Foreign Policy] thought I would make a good contributor since I understood the struggles women face in the field," she wrote. When she was told that they would not pay her for her contribution, she told them that "without compensation, I could not afford the childcare needed to write an article on the plight of working mothers. They said that I would get great exposure. Unfortunately, the babysitter watching my kids would not accept ‘exposure’ as a viable currency. I suggested that childcare might be a good topic to address in the special issue. They agreed. We parted ways."

FP had previously dedicated an issue to women ‒ The Sex Issue ‒ in 2012. It created a controversy due to its "provocative focus on Muslim women" in the issue’s featured article, written by Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American columnist who said she had suffered brutal sexual and physical assault in Egypt’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring.

"FP deliberately designed its treatment of the sexual dimension of foreign policy to be provocative, both visually and substantively; the result was one huge soundbite," Hilal Elver wrote in an Al Jazeera op-ed about the April 2012 publication. She complained that the magazine contained a free poster version of the cover art ‒ "a striking picture of a woman, at once threatening and seductive: her face covered, exposing only her eyes, her black hair, with her entire body painted black" ‒ that was "perhaps unwittingly reminiscent of the notorious ‘playmate of the month’ foldouts from Playboy magazine." Elver also noted that the theme of "sex and foreign policy" (not the more neutral "gender and foreign policy") ignored women on globally ‒ and in the United States and other Western countries specifically ‒ by focusing solely on women in the Muslim world.