Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.” [...]

And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook. [...]

But these three points are beyond dispute. [...]

First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. [...]

Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. [...]

Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. Dan Froomkin, Washington Monthly

Come altre volte, le notizie sul giornalismo le prendo dall'interessantissima newsletter del Post, Charlie.

Altre notizie della settimana:

The vital role of war, Linda Colley,The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (Profile), recensito da Miles Taylor, The Guardian

Sempre sul Guardian i finalisti del Booker Prize. 

 

 

Dictionary of Lost Words

In 1901, a concerned member of the public wrote to the men compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary to let them know that there was a word missing. In 1857 the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London had decided that Britain needed a successor to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. It had taken 40 years for the first volume – the letters A and B – to be published, and now they had only gone and left out a word.

The word was “bondmaid”, and when Australian author Pip Williams learned of its exclusion, she knew she had the makings of a novel. The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of the OED’s compilation through the fictional Esme, daughter of one of the men working on it, and her interactions with characters based on the real men and women behind the book.

A bondmaid is a young woman bound to serve until her death. Helen Sullivan, The Guardian

What does it mean to edit a cover?

A questa domanda risponde l'art editor del New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, disegnatrice francese che ora vive a York (tra l'altro è la moglie di Art Spiegelman e tra l'altro è stata l'ideatrice della copertina tutta nera dopo l'11 settembre 2001).

Even in the visual field, there are not many editors. There are art directors, but that’s slightly different. Art directors often illustrate a topic that’s given to them—the editor decides whom or what to put on the cover, and then it’s a matter of illustrating that concept or taking a photo of a politician or celebrity. With New Yorker covers, we aren’t usually illustrating a story. Our cover is a work in and of itself.

 

My job is twofold: to generate and collect ideas, and then to work with the artists to make the ideas as clear and effective as possible. Each December, I send out a calendar for the coming year with the hallmark dates: holidays, news events, the Oscars. (Everyone always wants to do the Halloween cover.) The calendar starts a dialogue with dozens of artists ...

Animal attraction et al.

When Lou, the narrator of Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear, meets a real bear, she finds that “its nose was more pointed than she expected – years of corruption by teddy bears, she supposed”. He is no cuddly toy, but she becomes surprisingly intimate with him. [...] She shits next to the bear in the mornings (that will make the bear like her, she’s told), and delights in her verdant surroundings. The bear fascinates her: “His bigness, or rather his ability to change the impression he gave of his size, excited her.” This creature is both an animal and a metonym for masculinity, intimidating and comical by turns. He spends time in the house with her, by the fire, as she works. Reading a 19th-century biography of a famous Regency dandy, while “rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt of a bear”, she feels elated. Katherine Angel, The Guardian

No More Mozart? Classical Music V. Cancel Culture

The University of Oxford is planning to change its curriculum to focus on fewer white composers and more non-European music. Manuel Brug, WorldCrunch 

 

 

 

 

Inside America’s Most Interesting Magazine

Now, Harper’s is the weirdest place to work in New York media and yet an unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out in part because of its wide range, in style and substance, amid a homogenizing media landscape. Ben Smith, New York Times

Nella foto: John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s.

 

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