Novelist Claire Messud has signed a deal to write two books with W. W. Norton & Company. The Burning Girl will be published next fall, while the second book has not yet been announced. As part of the deal, Norton will republish When the World was Steady, Messud’s first novel.
Deborah Needleman is stepping down from her position as editor in chief at T Magazine. A new editor in chief has not yet been named. As to Needleman’s future plans, in a memo to staff Dean Baquet wrote, “I’ll let her tell you what she will do next, but it mainly consists of taking a break and enjoying more of the world that T so vibrantly covers.”
The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg and the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan both ask Mark Zuckerberg to fix Facebook’s fake news problem. John Herrman points out that dealing with fake news won’t restore readers’ trust in the work of reporters. “A number of narrow measures could stop a fake story about the pope, for example,” Herrman writes. “But where would that leave the rest of the media? Answered and rebutted, and barely better positioned against everything else that remained.”
Donald Trump held an off-the-record meeting yesterday with executives and anchors from major television networks. Although journalists expected Trump to finally answer questions about access to the president-elect, according to the New York Post, Trump used the meeting to yell at members of the press, calling them “a room full of liars.” One source told the Post “it was like a f—ing firing squad.”
Christina Xu writes about experiencing the 2016 election through Chinese-language news, offering a vision of “the post-truth future” that is already engulfing the US media. Through apps like Weibo and WeChat, fake news is able to spread unchecked to Chinese citizens worldwide, and a blanket distrust of state media leads to a distrust of fact checking as well. “In a system where no source is deemed fully trustworthy,” Xu writes, “research and citations are diminished to just another set of opinions.”
Internet trolls are moving from politically-motivated one-star reviews of books to politically-motivated one-star reviews of publishing apps. Quartz, USA Today, and CNN are among the companies whose apps are receiving low ratings due to accusations of liberal bias. One reviewer described CNN’s app as being full of “absurdly left-leaning rhetoric. . . . I’m all for the first amendment but also representing the facts.”