The Guardian has an article explaining the chaos at Newsweek magazine, where management tried to shut down a story by its reporters about the publication’s ties to a Christian college. The magazine’s offices were raided by the DA on January 18th, and since then, the staff has been trying to dig into the reasons for the raid. In the process, there have been editors and reporters fired and charges by staff that executives tried to subject the reporting to an unethical review process. At Columbia Journalism Review, Joel Simon weighs in on why the dismissal of editors is so troubling: “These firings appear to be legal, and certainly don’t violate the First Amendment. But from a press freedom perspective they are disturbing because they challenge a norm at the heart of American journalism, which is that the business side stays out of the newsroom and does not dictate coverage.”
Newsweek ran into more trouble yesterday, as they were forced to retract a story, “How An Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken,” after they were unable to verify their source’s key claims.
Finalists for the LA Times book prize include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joyce Carol Oates, Ron Chernow, and Jesmyn Ward.
Tonight at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, Sigrid Nunez will discuss her new novel, The Friend, with Peter Cameron. In our Feb/Mar issue, Vivian Gornick said of the book: “I don’t know whether or not The Friend is a good novel or even, strictly speaking, if it’s a novel at all—so odd is its construction—but after I’d turned the last page of the book I found myself sorry to be leaving the company of a feeling intelligence that had delighted me and even, on occasion, given joy.”