A Newsweek story about the magazine’s ties to a Christian university was published last night with a lengthy note from the editors. The letter charges the publication’s leadership with trying to suppress the article. The opening paragraph states that two editors and a reporter were fired “for doing their jobs,” that two more reporters were threatened with termination by management, and that the article was subject to a review process that “involved egregious breaches of confidentiality and journalism ethics.” One Newsweek employee told the Daily Beast “I have never experienced a newsroom with such astonishingly poor leadership. . . . It’s an absolute shit show and no one has any idea what’s going on.”
Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos is dropping his suit against Simon & Schuster for cancelling publication of his memoir, Dangerous.
Tonight at the Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic, Cheston Knapp discusses his new collection of essays Up Up, Down Down with Joshua Ferris.
The Chicago Reader is looking for a new editor after firing Mark Konkol, who worked on one issue. Konkol’s debut featured a political cartoon on the cover that included a black lawn jockey holding up Illinois candidate for governor, J. B. Pritzker. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Adeshina Emmanuel details working with Konkol on a story for the issue (the cover was, in part, meant to illustrate his article) and the editor’s insistence on using racist language in the piece’s headline. Emmanuel also discusses the cover, quoting the response he first posted on Facebook: “Sure, I’ll be getting a check, and I gained some followers, but was it worth the humiliation of having my work under that cover? Does that cover really serve my people? I believe my voice as a black millennial man was exploited, used to lend credibility to what ultimately is another example of the type of sneak racism my articles called out. I feel used. It hurts.”