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The Love Life of a Travel Writer
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Jen Leo at Written Road asks travel writers how their jobs affect their relationships. Which is a good question, really. So how does the spouse feel when you're jetting off to some resort every other week?

I've been on my own doing my own thing for so long, that it never occurred to me that travel could put a strain on a relationship. Now that I have a serious boyfriend, it's an issue. So, as I meet more and more married travel writers, I want to ask them, how do you do it? How do you deal with the leaving, with the return? Yesterday I happened to talk to two people from different perspectives. One married woman said that it is a strain on their relationship, but that she's not necessarily ready to give up her thriving career. Then I talked to a man, who is divorced, who can't imagine how being a travel writer works when you're in a relationship.

Huffington acknowledged on her Web site Saturday that she was "blinded" to the issue of assembling a blog in which the source of the material wasn't clear, as was the case with Clooney.

"I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post, but was pieced together from previous interviews," she wrote. "I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier."

On Monday, Huffington said she considered the misunderstanding a "major lesson learned" and would put future snippets from interviews or conversations into her own blog. She also maintained that while she sent Clooney a sample blog "to show how it's done and encourage him to join the blogosphere, I will curb my enthusiasm and not do this in the future." Clooney's publicist, Stan Rosenfield, wasn't entirely satisfied. "She didn't apologize to George, did she?" he said Tuesday. "An apology to the readers was appropriate. But to my knowledge, she has not apologized to George." Clooney's comments in the Web posting faulted Democrats for muting their views before the start of the Iraq war.

On her 17-year-old daughter, Maria:

I just gave her a necklace that says on it: "Fearlessness." That's probably the biggest thing that Maria's taught me. She's not afraid to say no. She's not afraid to take chances. Conformity is not in her DNA. . . . She's sort of the girl I was, with all of the societal expectations of my time surgically removed. And I realize when I look at her that what I've been trying to do for the last 35 years is remove those societal expectations. She and her friends have grown up in a completely different world. They never think that there are jobs that women can't hold, because they've seen women hold virtually every job. That's why they're all so obsessed with the presidency. Because it's the only job during their lifetime -- except for the papacy, which I don't think most of them want -- that hasn't been held by a woman.

Ganji was jailed in 2001 for writing articles in which he linked senior officials to the murder of dissidents. Correspondents say he is a hero to Iran's reformists for standing up to hardliners, and many world leaders have called for his release. He has spent much of his jail term in solitary confinement and went on hunger strike for several months last year.

When brought to court to stand trial, Ganji complained he had been beaten but he says he was then threatened for revealing it. The BBC's Frances Harrison in Tehran says many Iranians thought Ganji, 46, would never be freed from jail, even though his sentence was due to end. The release comes days before the United Nations Security Council is due to discuss Iran's stand-off with Western nations over the country's nuclear programme.

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The family says he is not in good health. He has low blood pressure and they say he now weighs only 49 kg, after having first been on a hunger strike and then later, they allege, denied regular food by the jail authorities. But one family member told AFP news agency he was "doing well and in good spirits" after his release. Ganji is not expected to give any interviews now because his wife says that might give the authorities an excuse to arrest him again.

Skelton's book tells the tale of a young boy who, while running his hand along the shelves of some ancient books in Oxford's Bodleian Library, pricks his finger on a haunted medieval book. The discovery unlocks a 500-year-old mystery that threatens humanity.

But Skelton, 35, says his book is a more challenging read than what Harry Potter fans are used to. And he says his villains are ordinary human beings who have been tempted and corrupted by ambition.

"It does seem strange, but the characters used to visit me. They were in a sense, my only companions," he said.

His friend told him he should send a manuscript to an agent and he did. It caught the eye of one agent, who sent it along to publishers.

"I gathered up the manuscript, took it home, read it on the weekend and felt that feeling that as an editor you just long for, which is huge excitement, hairs standing up on the back of my neck," said Rebecca McNally, fiction publisher at Puffin.

NetDoctor launched in February 2000 and now draws about 2 million visitors a month seeking information about topics such as weight loss, diabetes, smoking and health care insurance.

The site is profitable, Edwards said, adding that NatMag plans to drive more traffic to NetDoctor by promoting it in its magazines and to boost advertising sales.

The deal comes the same day media conglomerate NBC Universal, owned by General Electric, announced plans to buy dot-com-boom survivor iVillage Inc., which owns a network of Web sites targeted at women, for $600 million.

New York-based Hearst, which owns newspapers, TV stations and cable networks, has about a 25 percent stake in iVillage, which also hosts Web sites for a number of the publisher's U.S. magazines.

Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the United States, has agreed to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, the two companies announced today.

The combined company plans to sell 12 Knight-Ridder papers, including both its papers in Philadelphia - The Inquirer and the Daily News - along with The San Jose Mercury News in California, Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

"I regret that we'll be selling them and that the employees have to go through another period of uncertainty," he said. "But we had to be clear-eyed about this and apply our longstanding acquisition criteria," the pillar of which is to go into high-growth markets.

Pruitt said the company would keep 20 other Knight-Ridder papers, including The Miami Herald, The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram and The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. He said the expanded company would have 32 daily papers with a combined daily circulation of 3.2 million.