In September, New York Times executiveeditor Dean Baquet spoke on an “Inside the Times” podcast about the publication’s duty to call out candidate Trump’s untrue statements. This was certainly the case with the Times’s coverage of his first full day in office, when the paper published at least three articles about the president’s false claims regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration and the origin of his feud with the CIA: “White House Pushes ‘Alternative Facts.’ Here are the Real Ones;” “With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift;” and “Trump’s Inauguration

The intrepid investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who enjoyed a long tenure at the Village Voice in the newsweekly's heyday, died yesterday. Barrett's books included Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 and Trump: The Deals and the Downfalls. The latter book, which was originally published in 1992, had a resurgence this year, selling for hundreds of dollars on Amazon until it was rereleased as an e-book with a new introduction by the author. Barrett remained an expert critic of Trump, who once had the reporter physically removed from a party, until the end. Barrett

The finalists for the PEN America Literary Awards were announced yesterday. Nominees include Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Arthur Lubow’s Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.

Textbook publisher Pearson announced plans yesterday to sell its 47 percent stake in Penguin Random House, which it owns in partnership with Bertelsmann. The move has staff and authors concerned about consolidation. One anonymous author told The Guardian that although the company seems to be doing fine financially, “you always worry that any added

The New York Times released their “2020 Report” yesterday, which outlines the publication’s strategies and goals. The authors of the report focused on increasing subscribers and embracing digital journalism. “Too often, digital progress has been accomplished through workarounds; now we must tear apart the barriers,” the introduction states. “We must differentiate between mission and tradition: what we do because it’s essential to our values and what we do because we’ve always done it.” In a memo to staff, executive editor Dean Baquet and managing editor Joseph Kahn clarified which of the report’s

At Politico, Jack Shafer writes that Trump’s presidency could unintentionally Make Journalism Great Again. Shafer takes examples from Trump’s press conferences, Reince Priebus’s plan to evict journalists from the White House, and Sean Spicer’s control over news briefings to suggest that journalists will have plenty of chances to hone their skills over the next four years. “Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting,” Shafer writes, “the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows

Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich has left Russian PEN. She is joining thirty other writers in protesting PEN’s decision to expel journalist Sergey Parkhomenko after he criticized the group for not supporting a jailed Ukranian filmmaker. In her letter, Alexievich writes that the group’s decision to disavow Parkhomenko is an echo of the Stalinist era. “Putin will go, whereas this shameful page from the history of PEN will stay,” Alexievich writes. “We now live through times when we cannot win over evil, we are powerless before the ‘red man’. But he cannot stop time. I believe in

Ani DiFranco has announced plans for her first book, to be published by Viking. The singer will write a memoir about her early years in New York and her political activism. A release date and title have yet to be set.

BuzzFeed sold more than $25,000 worth of t-shirts, garbage cans, and bumper stickers on Wednesday after Donald Trump called the website as a “failing pile of garbage.” All proceeds from the sale are being donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The BBC is creating its own fact-checking team to fight the spread of fake news. The Reality Check team will investigate stories

After publishing a dossier of unverified intelligence findings on president-elect Donald Trump, BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith defended the decision in a memo to staff. “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” Smith wrote. “In this case, the document was in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media.” Other news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, have stated that they did have the report, but chose not to publish it after they were unable to confirm many of the claims.

Marlon James has announced plans for a series of fantasy books. James told Entertainment Weekly that the idea for the book came from an argument about the film version of The Hobbit. “I remember saying, ‘You know, if an Asian or a black hobbit came out of the Shire, nobody would have cared. We would have just moved on,’” James said. “And my friend said, ‘Well, Lord of the Rings is all this British and Celtic mythology.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know… Lord of the Rings isn’t real.’ . . . I think the argument ended with me saying, ‘You know what? Keep your d— Hobbit.’” The Dark Star Trilogy will

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.

In her acceptance speech last night for the Cecile B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep criticized president-elect Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrants, people with disabilities, and the press. Streep asked her cohorts to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists: “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage."

Facebook has hired former NBC and CNN newscaster Campbell Brown as the company’s head of news partnerships. Brown was most recently the cofounder of The 74, an education-news website funded by

Today, Donald Trump will meet with a group of Conde Nast editorial leaders, including Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter. Carter has been publicly poking fun at the real-estate mogul since at least 1988, when he called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” in SPY magazine, and Trump has retaliated on Twitter, calling Carter, among other things, a “dummy.” Neither Trump’s spokespeople or Conde Nast have commented on the purpose of the meeting.

Novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk talks about what she’s reading and how being a memoirist is like being a mother: “A parent can create a complex and instructive