The Breakfast Meeting: Restoring the Zakaria Brand, and Profiting in Textbooks

By NOAM COHEN

The multimedia career of Fareed Zakaria - CNN host, Time magazine and Washington Post columnist, public speaker - took a hit this month when he was found to have lifted entire passages from a New Yorker article for his Time magazine column. After a brief suspension, he will return to those outlets. But he tells Christine Haughney that he has been chastened by the experience: “Other things will have to go away. There's got to be some stripping down.” To media critics, Mr. Zakaria is an example of how the personal brand now trumps the institutional brand, even of important outlets like Time and CNN. Still, even a widely successful personal brand can be overextended.

• David Carr looks at the case of Jonah Lehrer, the former New Yorker writer found to have made up quotes in a book. While it can be treacherous to explain such behavior - and certainly, there have long been spectacular cases of journalists who have made up ent ire articles - one change in journalism has perhaps made this behavior (as well as plagiarism) more common, Mr. Carr writes:

The now ancient routes to credibility at small magazines and newspapers - toiling in menial jobs while learning the business - have been wiped out, replaced by an algorithm of social media heat and blog traction. Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment, when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would soon not be part of it.

The spectacle around the Julian Assange case continued over the weekend, as Mr. Assange took to the window of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Sunday to address his followers who filled the surrounding streets, Ravi Somaiya writes. The standoff continues between Ecuador, which has granted Mr. Assange asylum, and the British government, which in tends to extradite him to Sweden to face questioning on accusations of rape, sexual molesting and unlawful coercion - allegations he has denied.

Media companies see a rare growth area in education, as textbooks become digital and incorporate video, Brooks Barnes and Amy Chozick write. For example, Techbook - which will produce materials used by 500,000 students this fall - is backed by the cable TV company Discovery, but not by a traditional education publisher. Similarly, News Corporation is investing $100 million in its fledgling education division, Amplify. It can appear to media executives that education is naturally moving into the areas that their companies do best, and the market is estimated to be as large as $7 billion a year. Of course, traditional publishers are also quickly adapting.

Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival this week, where she will have a chance to “to set out an alternative template for the family and in turn the future of one of the largest media empires on earth,” Dan Sabbagh writes in The Guardian. The festival was the site for a much-commented-upon talk in 2009 by another Murdoch scion, James, who attacked the BBC and offered his own media criticism, noting that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”

Movie theater chains are experimenting with producing their own movies, an effort to expand the number of movies they can show. Open Road Films, a joint venture between Regal and AMC, is mimicking the old studio system, Michael Cieply writes, by “filling screens with films that have modest budgets, recognizable stars and drawing power, and can be promoted by the aggressive use of relatively cheap marketing techniques.” Its latest film, “Hit & Run,” a romantic comedy starring Bradley Cooper, opens this week.

The director Tony Scott leapt to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles Harbor on Sunday night, according to the authorities, The Associated Press reported. The death of Mr. Scott, who was 68 and the director of “Top Gun” among other Hollywood blockbusters, is being investigated as a suicide.