Name Maer Roshan | Role Editor | |
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Maer Roshan is an American writer, editor and entrepreneur who has launched several magazines and websites, including Radar Magazine and the entertainment website Radaronline.com. In 1992, Roshan founded and edited the gay weekly QW, which covered gay politics and the AIDS epidemic. More recently Roshan started TheFix.com, a daily website about addiction, recovery and the drug war. His most recent work is a I-pad publication called Punch!
Contents
He has also served as the longtime deputy editor of New York, editorial director of Talk and features editor of Interview. He has written for The New York Times, the Miami Herald, New York, The New Republic, The Advocate, Details and Harper’s Bazaar. He has authored a book on the New York club scene and a biography of Courtney Love.
Early life
Born in Teheran, Iran on August 13, 1967, Roshan moved to New York in 1979, at the age of twelve, shortly after the Islamic Revolution, when his American-run school was bombed. He attended Ohr Torah High School in Forest Hills, Queens and graduated from New York University with degrees in politics and journalism. He began his media career in 1989 as a police and military reporter at the Key West Citizen and later worked as a stringer for The Miami Herald. He launched his first magazine, the gay weekly QW in 1991, during the height of the AIDS crisis, recruiting writers and editors including Andrew Solomon and David Rakoff. The magazine's coverage of politics and culture earned it a general excellence award from the Alternative Press Association. Soon after, Time Inc. hired him to create a national gay glossy, Tribe.
Career
In 1994, Roshan was hired as Deputy Editor of New York. During his seven year tenure he was responsible for some of the most popular issues of the magazine. Roshan was the first reporter to interview Donatella Versace after the 2000 murder of her brother, Gianni Versace, and he also secured the first post-impeachment interview with Monica Lewinsky.
In 2001, Tina Brown hired Roshan as the editorial director for Talk magazine. Roshan was credited by Adweek with "quickly turning around the struggling publication." Six months into his tenure, he redesigned the title, increased ad pages by 20% and nearly doubled the magazine's circulation, while slashing the magazine's budget by 50%. Brown called him "the only real natural male magazine editor of his generation."
But the magazine's upwards trajectory was interrupted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which effected the advertising market. In January 2002 Talk officially suspended publication. Roshan gathered aides from New York and Talk and started Radar in his living room.
Roshan spent six months writing the business plan for the magazine and another eight months shopping it around to prospective investors. Roshan secured two million dollars from prominent investors including Harvey Weinstein and the attorney Benjamin Brafman, enough to publish two issues of the magazine. Started by a young editor during the depths of a recession and run by a skeleton staff, Radar's launch generated widespread media coverage. The New York Times deemed it "the launch of the decade." BlackTable, an online magazine, published a feature that reviewed Radar's dozens of reviewers.
The magazine's two critically acclaimed test issues sold out across most of North America. But after the seed money was gone, Radar disappeared from the newsstands while Roshan searched for more long-term funding. Fourteen months later he raised an estimated ten million dollars from billionaires Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein, and secured further backing from Integrity Multimedia, a company funded by billionaire Ron Burkle. Under Roshan's leadership, Radar became one of the first print publications to include online media. Roshan hired a staff devoted exclusively to producing web content. After attracting 1.5 million unique visitors in the month of its debut, Radaronline.com, was cited byThe Wall Street Journal as a new model for print magazines struggling to adapt to a new media environment.
In May 2008, Radar was nominated for a General Excellence award by the American Society of Magazine Editors. A few months later, Radaronline was purchased by American Media, the owner of the National Enquirer and Star for an undisclosed sum. The site currently attracts an estimated ten million unique visitors a month.
In April 2011 Roshan started TheFix.com, a daily website about the drug war, addiction, and recovery that was inspired by his own experience with addiction. The site is the most trafficked addiction and recovery portal in the world, featuring columns by Susan Cheever, Duff McDonald and the first-ever independent reviews of treatment centers across the nation.
More recently, according to The New York Observer, Roshan teamed up with Dany Levy (founder of Dailycandy.com) and David Bennahum (founder of AmericanIndependent.com) to launch Punch! an interactive general interest iPad magazine that debuted in April, 2012. Its technology has since been absorbed by a new company named Kinja, an educational children's site founded by former Nickolodeon CEO Geraldine Laybourn.
Since 2012, Roshan has been living in Los Angeles, California, where he started a new company called Awesome Projects Inc. which consults on editorial and internet matters for a diverse range of high-profile media companies, including Yahoo!, AOL, Paramount and Disney. He recently teamed up with Cary Woods, producer of Scream, Citizen Ruth and Kids, to start a new production company named Cary Woods Productions. Roshan will serve as Head of Development for the company, which will specialize in dramatic network television shows, online series and documentaries. The company's first projectis a documentary directed by Thenmozhi Soundarajamon about the escalating rape epidemic among the untouchable caste of India.