Rupert Murdoch apparently wants Fox News to stop sucking up to Donald Trump, but can’t get his CEO Roger Ailes in line. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire suggests everyone go for the one approach to Trump they haven’t yet tried: take him seriously.

The New York Times doesn’t like Nick Denton’s accusation that it moves journalists off certain beats to appease advertisers with less “toothy” coverage. Denton made the comments in a long scandal-postmortem editorial meeting early this week, in which he explained to his staff that the “Gawker tax”—essentially, the ad revenue they

Those who wonder what a post-Gawker internet might look like were treated to a preview on Monday when both it and Jezebel went dark during editorial wranglings over that disputed post. One Gawker writer, musing on his editorial experiences elsewhere and on the ethics of outing or not outing, hopes it won’t come to that, concluding: “I would rather work at a place that’s bold enough to fuck up than one that is too afraid to ever risk it.” And editors elsewhere use the occasion to discuss their worst mistakes—here’s Jimmy Jellinek of Playboy on what happened after he published a nude spread of

Whatever else one says about Gawker, they reallyknowhowtomakethemselvesthestory. (But should you only have time for one of those links, make it the one in which resigning executive editor Tommy Craggs calls this latest incident “Nick’s Reichstag fire.”)

If you missed Jonathan Franzen’s sometime protégée Nell Zink reviewing the new Jonathan Franzen (and as we’ve said before, what could be better than a review by someone who really knows you?), it looks as if you’re still out of luck. (A real shame, because one possible answer to the previous question is “a review preceded by the words: ‘On

On Friday afternoon, Gawker management removed its controversial item outing a Conde Nast CFO. Outcry against the post seemed to be almost unanimous. Glenn Greenwald called it “reprehensible beyond belief” and Lena Dunham deemed it “cruel and unnecessary.” According to Gawker CEO Nick Denton, "It was an editorial call, a close call around which there were more internal disagreements than usual. And it is a decision I regret." But editor Max Read continues to defend the piece: “given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on

Kathryn Schulz may wish that Condé Nast hadn’t been so savvy about securing its cut of journalists’ film deals, because her latest New Yorker piece has the makings of a blockbuster disaster movie. Schulz describes in nightmarish detail what will happen when, quite possibly in the next few decades, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the (woefully underprepared) Pacific Northwest. People can’t stop talking about the piece this week. Vox provided numbers and graphics and timelines, while Seattle’s The Stranger picked out for its readers the five scariest bits (on that front, this paragraph seems

Whether just because he made such a fuss about being left off the last time, or because that fuss drew the attention of readers who then went out and bought his book, Ted Cruz has now made it on to the New York Times bestseller list. But Team Cruz wants more—a campaign spokesperson insists that the Times’s initial decision to keep A Time for Truth off the list (they’d essentially suggested that Cruz was bulk-buying it himself to rig sales) was “partisan” and “raises troubling questions that should concern any author. . . . The New York Times has a responsibility to authors and readers to have

Last night at a McNally Jackson event, a woman explained to the critic James Wood that the character of Atticus Finch had always read as false and creepy to her, and that his emergence as a racist in Go Set a Watchman just shows Harper Lee only ever rewrote him in heroic, sentimental mode for commercial reasons: She’s apparently not the only one for whom a racist Atticus hasn’t come as much of a shock. Meanwhile, someone has gone so far as to give the novel the track-changes treatment, and show you where the text overlaps with To Kill a Mockingbird word for word. And for anyone now thoroughly

Worms turn? This week the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, and a few others have teamed up against the twenty-year-old bullies Amazon, telling on them to the Justice Department.

Poor Harper Lee continues to be milked for all she’s worth: With spectacular timing, it now transpires that yet another novel may have turned up, perhaps one “bridging” the gap between To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman.

Less suspect, perhaps, is the discovery by an antiquarian book dealer of Charles Dickens’s annotations on a collection of the periodical he edited, All the Year Round,

An early review (and excerpt) of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which will be published tomorrow, has shocked Lee’s fans by revealing that the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, crusading lawyer Atticus Finch, is a racist in the new novel. Go Set a Watchman, which some are calling a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the story of a grown-up Scout Finch (now known as Jean Louise) returning to Alabama to visit Atticus in the 1950s. We learn that Atticus has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, and he has some unkind things to say about desegregation, the NAACP, and “negroes” in general. There have

Since Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman comes out next week (and you can read the first chapter, or indeed have Reese Witherspoon read it to you, here), a reporter for Bloomberg Business headed to Monroeville to try to untangle the whole strange story of its provenance.

Apparently some people are only just discovering the Awl. At the Verge, there's an admiring profile of the site, and especially of its redheaded media/tech savants Matt Buchanan and John Herrman (formerly of Gizmodo and then Buzzfeed, they seem to come as a package deal). The Awl is presented as understanding the new realities of

Ben Marcus discusses the new anthology of American stories he has edited: “There is an awful set of questions around the short story and its accepted irrelevance (against the novel) and its commercial inferiority. I just fucking hate it all. I hate that it’s even a conversation.”

At Politico, Dylan Byers has a report on whether, if we all stopped paying attention to Donald Trump, he would go away.

Under the leadership of their editorial director Amy O’Leary, a recent New York Times escapee, Upworthy has been moving away from clickbait headlines and toward more original stories. That means

For authors, few things ever seem to go in this direction. As of next year, the Man Booker International Prize is merging with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize to create one annual award for a translated work of literary fiction. When the Man Booker International was awarded every two years for a whole body of work, you had to be Lydia Davis or László Krasznahorkai to get your hands on the £60,000 (c. $90,000), but now you could get it for a single book—though, of course, you’d have to split it with your translator.

Somebody really went deep in fact-checking Donald Trump’s claim to have