Political reporter Olivia Nuzzi will become New York magazine’s first Washington correspondent. Nuzzi, who most recently covered Trump’s presidential campaign for the Daily Beast, talked to the Columbia Journalism Review about her new job covering “the psychodrama of the Beltway,” which she says makes her “equal parts excited and terrified.”
Arundhati Roy talks about her upcoming book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in twenty years. Roy says that she has spent the last ten years working on the book, and that the characters she has spent a decade with “have conspired to confound accepted categories and notions—including my own—of identity and gender, nationhood and patriotism, faith, family, motherhood, death—and love itself.” Roy’s book will be published by Knopf in June.
Robert O’Neill, the Navy SEAL “who fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden,” has announced plans for a memoir. The Operator will be published by Scribner in April.
Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerry Baker has asked staff to avoid referring to the countries singled out by the Trump administration’s immigration ban as “majority Muslim countries,” a phrase he calls “very loaded.” Writers and editors have pushed back against Baker’s request, with one anonymous employee telling Politico that Baker’s decision “to go out of his way to whitewash this is unconscionable.”
Poynter calls on newsroom leaders to clearly define rules for their reporters on what level of political participation is acceptable in the Trump era, when neutral observation can seem like compliance with the more questionable policies and positions of the administration. “Consider a Muslim journalist whose family may be impacted by the ban—can she join the airport demonstrations?” asks Katie Hawkins-Gaar. “Is it political to say that climate change exists? And what about the Trump voter who wants to correct the misconception that all journalists are liberal?” Former Marketplace reporter Lewis Wallace writes about being fired from his job after he wrote a personal blog post questioning the value of neutrality as a transgender journalist. “I believe journalism itself is under attack,” Wallace writes, “and in order to defend it, we need to know what we stand for and perhaps even consider activism as journalists on behalf of fairness, inclusivity, and free speech.”
On Inauguration Day, Jacobin magazine, Verso Books, and Haymarket Books jointly hosted “The Anti-Inauguration,” an event in Washington DC featuring Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Anand Gopal, and Owen Jones. A video of the gathering is available to watch on YouTube, and the speeches have been collected in a free e-book, The Anti-Inauguration: Building Resistance in the Trump Era.