Better Homes and Gardens publisher Meredith Corporation has bought Time Inc. with a “passive financial investment” from the Koch brothers. Politico talks to skeptics of the brothers’ claims that they won’t be involved in the company or use their newly-acquired publications to spread their conservative agenda. “They could influence coverage without lifting a finger, basically,” said Koch biographer Daniel Schulman. “If the staff of these publications are aware that the Kochs are significant financial backers of Time Inc, they may not go out of their way to be critical of the brothers or the company.”
Keith Olbermann is “retiring from political commentary in all media venues,” including his GQ webseries, “The Resistance.” “I am proud of it, and I repudiate none of it. It has been my privilege to do it,” Olbermann said in the show’s final episode, which aired yesterday. “But frankly, I have not enjoyed one minute of it. As I’m certain it has also been for you, for me, it has been unadulterated pain, revulsion and horror.”
Margaret Sullivan explains why an upcoming Supreme Court case on warrantless access to cellphone location data could negatively impact journalists.
The Rumpus has announced the nominees for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks to SF Gate about the influence of hip-hop on his writing style. Coates says that although artists like Mobb Deep inspired him to write poetry, hip-hop influences his journalistic writing as well. “One of the things people don’t give hip-hop enough credit is—I’m talking about the great ones—the amount of weight they put on each line, how much energy is actually put into each line and how that has a cumulative effect,” he said. “For me, the way I do that is—even though the lines are written a certain way—they’re facts. If I say something poetic about Trump, it’s going to be facts after that.”
The New York Times took to its Reader Center to explain its recent profile of white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer Tony Hovater, which many critics felt normalized Hovater’s racist views. At Splinter, however, Anna Merlan and Brendan O’Connor still have some questions. Among other things, Merlan and O’Connor note that the paper did not require Hovater and his wife to use their legal names. “It’s unusual for any newspaper, let alone the Times, not to say when their subject isn’t using their real name,” they note. “A paper that insists on noting Snoop Dogg’s legal name can probably do the same for a Nazi, no?”