Politico reports that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger fired executive editor Jill Abramson last week after concluding that she had give him misleading information about her decision to hire a new co-managing editor. According to sources, Abramson led Sulzberger to believe that she had consulted with other editors about the candidate she wanted to hire. Many have called the dismissal graceless (and some, such as Salon’s Daniel D’Addario, have said that she was fired for seeking a salary equal to that of her male predecessor, Bill Keller). It certainly has shaken up the newsroom—one staffer leaked (to Buzzfeed) a 96-page internal “innovation” report, which the Neiman Journalism Lab says is “one of the key documents of this media age.” Buzzfeed goes far, headlining one post about the leaked document “The End of the Print New York Times.”
At Slate, two editors, Dan Kois and Laura Helmuth, debate their very different editorial methods. Says Kois: “I want writers to walk away bruised but invigorated and wanting more. Like they just ran Tough Mudder or something.”
If you read the new anthologies MFA vs. NYC and Should I Go to Grad School? and you still want to get an advanced degree in writing, Publisher’s Weekly has published its first MFA survey, with quotes from writers, teachers, and agents.
Chipotle plans to start running short original works fiction on its drink cups, by authors including Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The Daily Dot has an exclusive excerpt of George Saunders’s new fast-food fiction.
For and against Karl Ove Knausgaard: In the Nation, William Deresiewicz asks why My Struggle has gotten so much attention; in the LRB, Ben Lerner answers that it has something to do with the quality of Knausgaard's attention. Obviously, "Knausgaard couldn’t remember his past in the degree of detail the books provide. . . . But the cumulative effect of his descriptions is to suggest the possibility of total recall, a past citable in all its moments: each cornflake, each snowflake."
