Marc Ambinder.

Marc Ambinder needed a break. He’d been productive, having written a book about the Joint Special Operations Command and broken new ground in his reporting on the death of Osama bin Laden, as well as covering the Obama era for The Atlantic. Not to mention serving as National Journal’s White House correspondent. That was his last gig before moving out of D.C. His last byline on its website came in January of this year, and rather than waiting until after the election for a restorative vacation, Mr. Ambinder departed for the West Coast, with his husband, a Mattel executive, in tow.

“After 11 years living in Washington, D.C., part of me is just sick of this swamp,” Mr. Ambinder wrote in GQ. Good-bye to all that humidity!

Out in Los Angeles (dry heat), Mr. Ambinder took meetings with the goal of producing a drama or reality series based on issues of interest to him, particularly national security. He declined to go into many specifics, given the drawn-out and often random process of television production, but his Twitter bio is guardedly optimistic: “Sort-of TV producer.”

“At some point in everyone’s life, you owe yourself the chance to do what you want for a while,” he told Off the Record. He was also writing a bit for GQ and working on a book deal, but came to miss the news cycle. “It’s hard to completely step away from it. You get addicted to the arousal of it!” Mr. Ambinder noted.

Along came The Week, which this week announced its hiring of Mr. Ambinder as editor at large and blogger for The Compass, a one-man show akin to Andrew Sullivan’s vertical at The Daily Beast or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s at The Atlantic.

The blog isn’t going to be updated exhaustively, though. “A bunch of other publications had come to me after I left National Journal and asked me to join full time,” said Mr. Ambinder, “and they put together fairly attractive financial packages. The problem was, it would degrade my capacity to do the things I’m out here to do. It sounds weird for me to say this, but I’m working on developing TV shows based on long-form subjects I’ve already written. The development process is [an] endless series of meetings. There will be days when my mind and attention needs to be occupied by those.”

But even thoughtful blogging—the site’s first two days featured three posts, all somewhere between long-for-the-Internet and #longreads—can tend to plunge one into a frivolous, all-consuming news cycle. Mr. Ambinder, who cites Matt Yglesias (Slate), David Frum (The Daily Beast) and Ezra Klein (The Washington Post) as writers he admires, doesn’t seem concerned, having escaped the Beltway echo chamber. “After the 2008 election, it was hard to imagine covering anything else as exciting as that,” he said. “Covering Washington for the next four years and the toxicity of virtually everything in Washington kind of got to me. Maybe I had a fight-or-flight response on an existential level. I kind of got tired of just covering ... politics!

“I couldn’t find myself writing about what Rush Limbaugh said today ... I did not want to cover the 2012 campaign as a daily journalist. I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude.”

At The Week, though, he’ll be able to inject voice, opinion and even doubt into his columns, rather than the authority of a dispassionate correspondent. “You’re kind of telling the story but letting the reader know you’re not, and can never be, 100 percent sure of yourself and what you’re saying. It’s kind of a good trait in someone who’s writing frequently. The more you know, the more you really don’t know."

He added, “There’s a corollary there with people in Los Angeles, where, they say, nobody knows anything.”

"You're fucking with the magic!" Kamarzin told them, according to Ken Auletta.

Seven years later the illusion is over, and not just online.

Time Inc. is partnering with ad buyer Starcom MediaVest Group in an effort called the "Alliance for Magazine Accountability" to promise advertisers certain quantifiable returns (for example, a percentage of readers who will remember seeing their ad), according to Advertising Age.

"We've been preaching that magazines engage readers like no other media," said Stephanie George, exec VP at Time Inc., which publishes magazines including Time, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune. "So today, in a crowded media market, when it comes to accountability, the work from this Alliance will help prove magazines' advertising effectiveness."

Under the arrangement, if a Time Inc. title falls short of the metrics promised to the advertiser, it will run ads for free until the conditions of the sale are met.

Most magazines only guarantee paid circulation, but some like The Week, which was one of the only titles to increase ad pages in 2009, already promise reader recall scores to advertisers if they invest enough in the magazine.

The Week began a program in 2007 called "Total Transparency" to woo advertisers with market research showing how effective ads in the magazine would be compared to spots in other titles. In 2009, The Week extended the program to guarantee reader recall rates to advertisers certain advertisers.

"I think our emphasis on Total Transparency — that program — did help us drive the ad wins of 2009," said Steven Kotok, president of The Week to the Observer.

The Week, despite inauspicious beginnings ("Is [owner] Felix Dennis Mad?" demanded The Wall Street Journal), is proving a winner. It's financially solid, and readers actually read it: They spend an average of 67 seconds on each page. By contrast, deadbeat Economist readers put in 30.

Forbes writes of the magazine's success:

The Week's overall revenue climbed from $20 million in 2004 to $48 million in 2008. It broke even this year and expects to be profitable next year. It's also become a cultural reference point; it has been brandished on-screen by Meet The Press' David Gregory and spotted in the hands of Drew Barrymore.

When a blog "avoid[s] the costly process of reporting and writing its own stories," it's shameful; when a magazine does, it's a miracle.

But we didn’t expect that it would take long for Maer Roshan, Radar’s editor, to get up to a new trick. However many times he’d fallen before, he’d also proven, with dogged determination, that year after year he’ll return. Sure enough, in the weeks after Radar shut down, he tried, furiously, to get the last issue printed. It never hit the presses.

But then things got quiet. We heard that Mr. Roshan had gotten a gig as editor at large with the Daily Beast. There was a byline in February about red carpet snafus, then radio silence. No one knew quite where Mr. Roshan was, other than that he might be in Los Angeles.

In May, he resurfaced! A Keith Kelly item in the Post told us that Mr. Roshan had landed at The Week, where Daily Beast editor Tina Brown’s hubby, Harry Evans, is an editor at large. The item reported that Mr. Roshan was going to be the online editor of theweek.com.

But then, we didn’t see him on the masthead.  

So we decided to check in with Mr. Roshan. We found him late Monday afternoon on his cell from Los Angeles.

“It’s kind of great here! It’s sunny!” he said.

Mr. Roshan said he was never the online editor.

“It was an acting editor job,” he said. “It was to give [The Week] a little direction. It was never supposed to be a long-term thing. It was a consultancy job.”

So what does one do out in L.A.?

“You do things like go to the beach and work out,” he said.

Isn’t that the sort of stuff of which L.A. dreams are made!

More seriously, Mr. Roshan said he’s working on some TV projects

“I’m working on a project which has me here for four or five months,” he said.

Naturally, he wouldn’t give us a tell-all, nor even a hint of what it is he’s working on, but he told us he originally moved out to L.A. with TV in mind. And, he said, the TV gig is looking good. “Things have firmed up since I’ve been out here,” he said.

Does that mean he’s giving up on the city for good?

“I still have my apartment in New York, and I still love New York,” he said. “I’m not giving that up.”

jkoblin@observer.com

“Let’s get the murder thing out of the way,” he said in his refined British accent, alluding to his outrageous, and subsequently retracted claim in The Times of London on April 2 that he had killed a man 25 years ago.

“What they didn’t notice was the date that this front page London Times article came out. It was the same day The Guardian made a front page that had pictures of penguins flying from Antarctica to South America. It was also the same day another newspaper in Britain had a wonderful front page story that President Sarkozy of France was undergoing daily stretching on a rack so that he could become as tall as his new wife." (Those stories actually ran the previous day, and it was The Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph that carried the penguins story, but point taken.)

“I have a lot of books to sell, do you understand?” he said. Mr. Dennis recently published Island of Dreams, his fourth collection of poetry. “Anybody who thinks that story is real needs a sense of humor check.”

And in fact that's just what Mr. Dennis delivered to the J-school's ongoing Thursday evening magazine lecture series, which are sometimes tedious affairs, with speakers who muse wistfully on their long hard journeys to the tops of prestigious publications, and then offer seemingly canned advice to the journalism students seeking reassurance that their pricey degrees will eventually pay off. Mr. Dennis slayed the audience—which included a bevy of suit-clad Dennis Publishing employees, among them William Falk, the Pulitzer-winning editor-in-chief of the company’s weekly news aggregate, The Week—with his witty and theatrical speech that drew frequent bursts of laughter.

In one exchange, a student cited a passage from Mr. Dennis’ 2006 bestseller, How To Get Rich, in which he writes about how money vastly improved his sex life.

“Is there any hope for those of us who aspire only to be poor journalists?” the student, a fellow Brit, asked.

“Yeah, because you’re young, and so you’re hung like a horse,” Mr. Dennis replied, to the crowd's roaring amusement. “For those of us who are old, fat and bald with glasses, wealth is the only way.”

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was when Mr. Dennis took a swipe at Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who at the J-school in February, lamented the fact that the young journos in the audience preferred The Economist to his own publication.

“I hear there is a certain person, whose name I will not repeat, that was here recently bleating on about how upset he was that not one of the 100 aught students in attendance read his magazine,” Mr. Dennis said. “Here’s my plea. Until you are earning a decent salary, can I please ask you NOT TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK!?”

And then he started offering the bribe:

“However, should you wish to receive a free year’s trial subscription, just give me your name and address after this lecture and I’ll take care of it ... I look forward to seeing every one of your names in print real soon, at the top of the masthead.”