On Thursday, Jarrod Warren Ramos open fired in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis Maryland, killing five people. Soon after, the publication’s official account tweeted, “Yes, we’re putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” In today’s edition, the opinion page is left almost entirely blank, and the Gazette has published remembrances of the five victims: Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Wendi Winters, and Rebecca Smith.
A biography of Anthony Bourdain will be published in fall 2019. Bourdain: The Oral Biography will be edited by Laurie Woolever, who collaborated often with the chef.
Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan reflects on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surprise win in the New York Democratic Primary, and the media’s failure to adequately cover the candidate. On Tuesday, the Times ran the headline “Who Is Ocasio-Cortez?,” while sites like the Intercept and web networks such as The Young Turks had been reporting on her for months. The Young Turks’s Cenk Uygur told the Post, “The traditional media pay attention to one metric—money—but there should be other considerations: number of volunteers, social-media engagement, small-dollar donations . . . She was through the roof on all of those metrics.”
At Gizmodo media, a round of buyouts has allowed the company to avoid layoffs. Forty-four employees reportedly took the severance package as Univision, which acquired Gizmodo Media Group in 2016, mandated budget cuts.
The science-fiction author Harlan Ellison has died at the age of eighty-four.
At the New York Times, veteran obituary writer Margalit Fox is retiring after twenty-four years at the paper. For Times Insider, Fox reflects on her career and takes a crack at penning her own epitaph: “At times she wrote obits with tears in her eyes, but far more often she wrote them from joy. It was the joy that sprang from the extraordinary privilege of tracing the arc—in sweet-smelling newsprint, damp with ink—of lives well lived.”
