Far Eastern Economic Review - History

History

The Far Eastern Economic Review was started in 1946 by Eric Halpern, a Jewish immigrant from Vienna, who initially settled in Shanghai and ran Finance and Commerce, a biweekly business magazine. Later on, when China was in the midst of the Chinese Civil War, he decamped to Hong Kong and founded the weekly publication, FEER, focusing on finance, commerce and industry.

After Halpern's retirement in 1958, Dick Wilson became chief editor and publisher. He operated an office in a colonial building along the waterfront where the Mandarin Hotel now stands. During Wilson’s tenure, coverage of the magazine extended from China and Hong Kong into other regions around the world, from Japan to Australia to India and to the Philippines.

In 1964, Wilson was succeeded as editor by Derek Davies, a Welsh journalist, who had served in the British Foreign Office. Between 1964 and 1989, the flamboyant Davies built FEER from a small weekly into one of Asia's most authoritative magazines, with a circulation of nearly 90,000. At its peak, FEER had an editorial team of nearly 100 news staff in 15 bureaus across Asia - the largest news team of any regional weekly.

After serving 25 years as senior editor, Davies was succeeded by Philip Bowring. In 1992, Bowring was forced to resign due to differences with Dow Jones' Vice President Karen Elliott House over the magazine's editorial direction.

In November 2001, Dow-Jones merged the editorial operations of the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal in an attempt to cut costs. In 2004, the magazine ceased to exist as a weekly and was changed to a monthly publication with Hugo Restall as its editor. In September 2009, Dow-Jones, now a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp, announced that the magazine will be shut down permanently.