BuzzFeed is starting a fellowship for young writers. The site’s new literary editor, poet Saeed Jones, is also planning what he calls a whole “literary movement” that involves a magazine, readings, and a salon series. Jones says, “I think it’s fair to say there were a few skeptics initially about the idea of book culture and BuzzFeed culture coming together, but it totally works. I’m excited to push us even further and publish new fiction, poems and lyric essays by writers we adore.”
At Publishers Weekly, some reactions to this week’s Business Insider story about the breakdown in negotiations between HarperCollins and Amazon. Since Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider, PW says it’s possible that the Insider’s story is a negotiating tactic—the source is left unnamed in the report. Publishers Weekly also notes that HarperCollins is equipped to handle the kind of delays in stocking and shipping that Hachette suffered last year when they ran afoul of Amazon.
George R. R. Martin has posted an excerpt from the next book in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, as his fans not-so-patiently wait for the new season of Game of Thrones to start.
In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh visited My Lai, the site of an American massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 that Hersh exposed in a series of landmark articles the next year (he reported the piece from the States). At the Columbia Journalism Review, Hersh talks about the article and discusses what he makes of the current media landscape, praising younger media companies like Gawker and BuzzFeed: “The mainstream press is driving itself out of business and it’s probably going to be okay, because some of the younger stuff, once they get their feet on the ground and get a little more money, a little more success, a little more security, and a little more confidence, they’ll fill the gap.”
The New York Times is planning to make NYT Now, it’s streamlined mobile app, free. The app picks highlights from the Times, as well as articles from around the web, and presents them in an image-heavy feed with prominent social-media sharing buttons. The free version would be ad supported and provide fewer articles from the Times proper. The app is meant to draw in younger readers—who, the Times hope, may subscribe to the full digital package one day—and broaden the Times’s advertising base.