According to the New York Times, Conde Nast lost $120 million last year because of a sharp decline in print ad revenue. The company has tried to cut costs—including laying off eighty employees last year—but is still in the red. Conde Nast is said be selling the magazines Golf Digest, W, and Brides. The company’s chief executive, Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., is trying to quiet rumors that Vogue editor Anna Wintour wants to leave, saying Wintour “has agreed to work with me indefinitely in her role as editor in chief, Vogue, and artistic director of Condé Nast.”
A little-known Ernest Hemingway story, “A Room on the Garden Side,” is being published by The Strand this summer.
Sarah Jeong, the tech journalist who recently joined the New York Times editorial board, came under fire yesterday for some of her old tweets, which right-wing critics are calling “racist.” The Times released a statement in defense of Jeong, which also managed to chastise her: “Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. . . . For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. . . . She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times.” At the Verge, where Jeong has worked as a senior writer, the editorial team made a stronger defense of her, pointing out the dynamic at work: “Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda. . . . The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation.”
Yesterday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to disavow president Trump’s remarks that the press is “the enemy of the people,” a phrase with a loaded history. Meanwhile, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a former Trump administration staffer, claims in her new book that she has noticed an undeniable “mental decline” in her former boss.
Is it any wonder that sales of books about anxiety are soaring?