Naomi Klein is joining The Intercept as a senior correspondent, focusing on the “shocks of the Trump era.” In her announcement, editor in chief Betsy Reed explained, “No one is better than Naomi Klein at exposing the hidden agendas of disaster capitalists and their agents in government.”
Associated Press photographer Burhan Ozbilici’s coverage of the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey has been awarded the 2017 World Press Photo of the Year, as well as the top prize for the spot news category. But Stuart Franklin, the chair of the World Press Photo award jury, wrote in The Guardian that the award should have gone to another photo. Franklin praised Ozbilici’s “bravery and skill,” saying that it absolutely deserved the prize for news photography, but that its Photo of the Year win was questionable. “It’s a photograph of a murder, the killer and the slain, both seen in the same picture, and morally as problematic to publish as a terrorist beheading,” he writes.
In a newsroom-wide meeting Monday, Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker defended his paper’s coverage of Trump, saying that critics who allege the paper has been soft on the new administration are “fake news.” Baker also “suggested staffers unhappy with the Journal’s coverage should go elsewhere.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper is writing a novel with Little, Brown. The Hellfire Club will be published in 2018.
Mary Gaitskill talks to LitHub about her new essay collection, Somebody With a Little Hammer. Gaitskill says that some of her essays, like one about the 2008 presidential election, are hard to read in 2016. “It seems like all the things we thought were the worst thing possible are now so much worse,” she said. “Sarah Palin looks like a more harmless kind of cartoon character in comparison to what’s happening now.”
At Vanity Fair, Tina Nguyen profiles White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. As the communications director for the Republican National Committee, Spicer enjoyed a friendly relationship with the press, but has now adopted the Trump administration’s adversarial attitude toward media, a position most journalists believe is unsustainable. One reporter remembered a time when Spicer broke up a fistfight between a reporter from Fox News and another from the Huffington Post. “He’s usually the ‘c’mon guys, let’s just have a drink’ dude, not the asshole trying to pick a fight,” the anonymous source said. “It’s harder to be that guy when you’re working for a bunch of brawlers.”
