Beyonce is working on a 600-page book about the making of Lemonade. How to Make Lemonade “shows the inspiration and themes behind some of the film’s most provocative and cryptic moments,” and includes a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. The limited-edition version of the book includes two LPs, and is available on Beyonce’s website for $300.
Adweek lists the online publishers who have chosen to “pivot to video” in the last few months. “Check in later to see what, exactly, they have headed toward.”
Publisher’s Weekly visits the offices of the New York Times’s book review, which was recently combined into one department and is going through a redesign. Although restructuring is often a precursor to downsizing, “this is one of those cases in which centralizing and consolidating is not reduction,” editor Pamela Paul said. “It’s expansion. Obviously, we need the staff to be able to carry that out.”
The Outline reports on the closure of media start-up Fresco News. In one effort to boost morale, the company invited investor Ashton Kutcher to speak. After a pep talk about the site’s mission of empowering “citizen journalists,” Kutcher broke the news that the staff would not be paid on time. Founder John Meyer had given Kutcher some Fresco-branded merchandise, which the actor then offered to the staff. “Kutcher looked at me and said, ‘I don’t need this,’” one employee remembered. “‘If you want it, you can sell this on eBay and pay your rent.’”
In anticipation of the president’s announcement that he plans to send more US troops to Afghanistan, Axios has collected six years-worth of tweets in which Trump called for the US to leave the country.
John Herrman looks at the recent purge of right-wing media and social network users in response to Charlottesville, and explains why these groups proliferated for so long on the internet. “Despite their participatory rhetoric, social platforms are closer to authoritarian spaces than democratic ones,” Herrman writes. “It makes some sense that people with authoritarian tendencies would have an intuitive understanding of how they work and how to take advantage of them.”
Bloomberg takes a close look at Steve Bannon’s descent. Joshua Green writes that while Bannon’s “attack dog” style was an asset during the campaign, his “aggressive instincts and sharp elbows didn’t translate to the White House.” American Prospect editor Bob Kuttner tells Poynter that he can only take partial credit for Bannon’s firing. “My conversation may have been the last straw but he was in the process of doing himself in,” Kuttner said. “I’m honored that he chose me for his final self-immolation.”