A new Gallup poll shows that the rate of reading in America has held steady for the past fifteen years, with half of young adults reading between one and ten books per year. The data “suggests that book reading is a classic tradition that has remained a constant in a faster-paced world, especially in comparison to the slump of other printed media.”
The New York Times announced yesterday that Ian Fisher will take over as Jerusalem bureau chief. Fisher was most recently the Rome bureau chief, and will be replacing Peter Baker, who has been tapped to lead the Trump administration coverage team.
After praising Breitbart News’s coverage in an interview with the site last weekend, Politico co-founder Mike Allen tried to clarify his statements yesterday at the Washington Post. Allen told Erik Wemple that the interview—in which Allen said he admired “so much about what’s been built at Breitbart” and marvelled at “what an amazing road the country” is on—was “in no way an endorsement of anything that they do” and that any backlash was simply “Twitter twisting.” When Wemple asked how fellow journalists should heed Allen’s advice to enjoy this “once-in-a-century moment in journalism and in our country’s history,” particularly the Jewish reporters who have, as Wemple writes, “received anti-Semitic threats and abuse for doing their jobs,” Allen defended his comment. “I think that this is a great time to be a journalist,” Allen said, “and I’m surprised you would question that.”
After a US intelligence report accused Russian news network RT of “undermining US viewers’ trust in US democratic procedures,” editor in chief Margarita Simonyan talked to The Guardian about the findings. Simonyan said that the critiques of RT were based solely on their critical coverage of Clinton: “What a resounding endorsement of journalism and freedom of speech.”
The Onion has signed a deal with Lionsgate to develop three films through 2018. Details about the films are not yet available. In a statement, Vice President of Onion Studios Kyle Ryan said, “With the help of Serious Business and Lionsgate, we’ll make room on our award shelf for some Oscars. To the basement you go, Pulitzers.”
At The Guardian, Danuta Kean compares the choices of book thieves in the UK and Canada, and concludes that “they have a better class of book thief in Toronto.” In Canada, Haruki Murakami tops the list of most-stolen books, while mass-market series like “Harry Potter” are the favorite target for UK thieves. “Am I alone in feeling a bit embarrassed that our thieves can’t raise the bar a bit?” Kean asks. “Must they make us look so dumb compared with our Canadian cousins?”