New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich talks to The Rumpus about critical authority, Twitter mobs, and snobbery. “My growth as a writer was unlearning that snobbishness and trying to cultivate more of a rawness in my relationship with the people who were reading me, if I was lucky enough to have anyone reading me,” she said of the evolution of music criticism. “I think it made me as a writer feel less alone, it made me feel like I was in conversation with a lot of other people in a way that I found really comforting and nice. But it was a shift in the way that I thought music criticism was supposed to be, which was ‘I’m gonna tell you what’s good because I’m smarter than you.’
Former Gizmodo Media reporter Brendan O’Connor is working on “a book about immigration, capitalism, and the far right” with Haymarket Books.
Carol Rosenberg, known for her work covering the prisoners and war court at Guantanamo Bay, is joining the New York Times as a national security reporter.
At Wired, Zeynep Tufekci explores possible systems for verifying the authenticity of online articles, photos, and videos. “It’s harder than just showing the people an image of a print newspaper (if you can find one), because digital bits can easily be altered,” she writes. “As we shift from an era when realistic fakes were expensive and hard to create to one where they’re cheap and easy, we will inevitably adjust our norms.”
The Daily Beast reports that CNN is defending its decision to hire Sarah Isgur Flores, the former spokesperson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as a political editor at the company’s Washington bureau. CNN’s own Brian Stelter writes that “employees are concerned” about the news and are “questioning whether her sudden leap from the Trump administration to the CNN newsroom is an ethical breach.” “CNN seems to be doubling down on a ratings-first, fair-in-name-only approach to politics,” writes Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post. “At a time when so many talented and experienced journalists are out of work because of layoffs in a teetering industry, this makes even less sense.”
