paper trail

Miriam Toews on men narrating women's stories; Bryan Goldberg's plans for a media empire

Miriam Toews. Photo: Carol Loewen

Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram wonders if Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Washington Post op-ed calling for regulations on Facebook, as well as a nascent plan to pay publishers for content it posts on the platform, are “a genuine attempt to help media, or another part of a long-running PR campaign by a company desperately afraid of getting caught on the wrong side of antitrust legislation?”

Adweek reports that Bustle founder Bryan Goldberg, who recently bought Gawker, The Outline, and Mic, has plans to continue expanding his media empire.

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Christine Fischer Guy |https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-women-will-write-their-own-stories-a-q-and-a-with-miriam-toews-on-women-talking/#!|talks to| Miriam Toews about religion, forgiveness, and why she chose to have a male narrator in her new book, Women Talking. “In my mind, it was important that it was a male narrator, because I was thinking, it’s time for the men to listen and to record and to stay quiet,” she explained. “It’s time they learn and understand what the women’s lives are, and how they need to change. In the end, the women will write their own stories.”

“When deciding to share a story of abuse, harassment, or anything on the broad spectrum of transgression, a person is making a journalistic judgment,” writes Nausicaa Renner on #MeToo, first-person essays, and women who choose to come forward with stories of abuse and harassment. “She decides that the newsworthiness of what she has to say—in other words, the importance of speaking out, the potential impact of the story, and the information she would give the public—outweigh whatever harm it might do to her life in the short term.”

“The editor’s job is to make people think? The people did think; they thought it was a careless and dishonest piece about an important subject,” writes Hmm Daily editor Tom Scocca on former New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma’s recent defense in the Financial Times of his decision to publish Jian Ghomeshi’s essay. “They thought it replicated, and the decision to publish it likewise replicated, the complacency and contempt and reflexive masculine defensiveness that the movement was seeking to name and bring to account.”

Tonight at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan, Geoff Dyer presents his latest book, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy.