The staff at the Denver Post have released a statement heavily criticizing the paper’s ownership, Digital First Media and the hedge fund Alden Capital. The letter was released soon after the editorial page editor, Chuck Plunkett, resigned because an op-ed critical of the owners was blocked by DFM’s chief operating officer. The open letter concludes with a call for the ownership group to make big changes: “It has become vividly clear that they must either invest in the newspaper or sell it to someone who cares about Colorado, and they must do it immediately.” The Daily Beast has more background on the story in “The Denver Post Newsroom is in Full-On Rebellion against Its Hedge Fund Master,” while Neiman Labs takes a deep-dive into how Alden Capital is making money in the news business by slashing staff and budgets.
Ian McEwan helped his son Greg with a paper on McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love. According to McEwan, “I didn’t read his essay but it turned out his teacher disagreed fundamentally with what he said. I think he ended up with a C+.”
In the New York Times, David Leonhardt calls for Barnes & Noble to be saved as Amazon threatens to make the bookselling giant irrelevant.
At New York magazine, Eric Levits considers the recent trend of mainstream media outlets hiring conservative columnists: “It’s one thing to employ a conservative writer because he or she is interesting . . . it’s another to employ a substandard columnist because he or she is conservative. And liberal publications, in their quest for balance, have often done the latter.”
Wired magazine talks to the authors of the most-cited source on Wikipedia, a 2007 academic paper on world climate that has been referenced more than 2.8 million times.
Tonight at the Brooklyn Historical Society, David Grann talks about his book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.