The Huffington Post is aiming to increase its number of contributors from one hundred thousand to one million, using a new app, Donatello, and a self-publishing platform for writers. Arianna Huffington assures us cynics that there will be a system in place for “preserving the quality”: Would-be authors will have to be approved by editors (once) before they can start creating hard-hitting citizen journalism (for free, of course).
Buzzfeed has an intriguing report on Sidney Blumenthal, adviser, “confidant,” and controversy magnet to Hillary Clinton. It discusses his friendship with Tina Brown and his somewhat shadowy influence on the Daily Beast’s early political coverage, including two hit pieces he apparently commissioned and edited on Caroline Kennedy when she was challenging Clinton for the Senate.
How newspapers headlined the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage: “Love Supreme” (the Press of Atlantic City), “Equal Dignity” (New York Times), “We Do” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “U.S. Gay!” (Daily News). Daily News
In the Globe and Mail, Jade Colbert reviews the work of Nelly Arcan, the Quebec novelist who committed suicide in 2009. Colbert argues that Arcan, who wrote dark-themed autofiction, is one of Canada’s greatest writers: “Reading Arcan can also feel at times unbearable; she . . . presents difficult gifts: a disquieting world, presented bluntly, stripped of pretty words that normalize.”
At the ALA conference in San Francisco, Anthony Doerr won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for All the Light we Cannot See, while Bryan Stevenson won the nonfiction prize for Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.