The Intercept gives the backstory to Matt Taibbi’s recent departure from First Look (its parent company), describing his resignation as the result of “months of contentious disputes” that Taibbi had with Pierre Omidyar, Randy Ching, and John Temple (First Look’s founder, COO, and president, respectively). Taibbi had been hired to head Racket, which was conceived of as a satirical magazine, but problems arose over the “structure and management” of the site. According to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, and Jon Cook (all are listed as authors on the story), the conflict has to do with a schism between executives who “come from a highly structured Silicon Valley corporate environment” and the “fiercely independent” journalists who are skeptical of that corporate culture and “management-speak.” The even profounder problem, it seems, is the question of how much autonomy the Intercept and Racket are to have, financially and in terms of their editorial content.
When Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth leaves the company on October 1, the paper’s masthead will be 100 percent male.
Joyce Carol Oates invited a round of Twitter scorn with her comments on a recent video of a woman getting catcalled around New York. In ten hours of walking, the woman received 100 catcalls. Oates chalked it up to the neighborhoods the woman was walking in. Twitter disagreed.
The Baffler has left MIT Press, after three years with the publisher.
The New York Times has added 44,000 digital subscribers this quarter. That’s the good news. The rest isn’t: Print circulation increased only infinitesimally; print advertising dropped 5 percent; and the paper experienced a net loss of $12.5 million.