At the Washington Post, Karen Heller speculates about who will write the inevitable 2016 election books. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of 2008’s Game Change and 2012’s Double Down, are expected to write a follow-up about this year’s contest, and there will be many more accounts of one of the most bizarre and consequential elections in US history. As Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs books notes: “There’s going to be a cascade. An awful lot of people want to weigh in.” Next week, Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution will be published, along with Megyn Kelly’s Settle For More (Kelly has already taken to Twitter to dispute an early New York Times review of the book). Beyond that, books from Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as from Trump insiders such as Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, are likely to be published in the coming year.
Candace Smith reflects on covering Trump’s campaign as a black journalist. “Conversations with over 100 Trump supporters, all white, revealed a darker truth,” Smith writes. “They may like me as a person, but were concerned more holistically what black and brown people were doing to this country and worried about a changing nation that no longer looked like them.”
Hamilton Nolan writes that the only thing that will fix the media is diversity, and not just of race and gender. “The Times’s approach to diversity is to hire a black person who went to Columbia Journalism School and a woman who went to Princeton and someone who grew up in rural West Virginia who went to Harvard. This is not what diversity means.”
Journalists worry that the traditional modes of press access to the president will be severely limited by Donald Trump. Spokesperson Hope Hicks released a statement saying the team “fully expect to operate a traditional pool,” but did not include any details of their plan. The press pool has already been barred from traveling with the president-elect and his staff has yet to respond to inquiries from the AP and elsewhere.
The New York Daily News is offering buyouts to journalists, and will follow with layoffs if needed, as the paper looks to cut $6 millon from the budget.
The 2016 Goldsmiths prize was awarded to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, a 223-page novel comprised of a single sentence.
At The Intercept, Sam Biddle pleads with Facebook to stop misinformation from being so easily circulated on the site: “A less-toxic Facebook is doable. A less-toxic Facebook is crucial. A less-toxic Facebook is the absolute least you should demand from the people it’s made rich, because, with no great exaggeration, the ability to deliberately confuse tens of millions of American voters in exchange for banner ad revenues is a crisis.”
