Times New Roman

Lace Newspapers

The art of Myrian Dion.

Songs about Newspapers

The list, care of the New Yorker.

The New York Review of Books Turns 50

New York Magazine sits down with its founding editor, Robert Silvers.

From the piece...

You didn’t have any notion this would become an institution in this way?
No. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought it was very possible that I would come back, and it was very kind of Jack to say my job would be held open. I asked Barbara Epstein that morning if she would join me as co-editor. She said yes. We met the next night with Lizzie in the darkened Harper’s offices. We looked through the books that had come in for review, and we thought of various people who might write on them. 

The first issue appeared dated February 1, 1963. It has been called the best first issue of a magazine ever published. Looking at these names glittering on the cover, it’s astonishing how many, from W. H. Auden to Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy to Norman Mailer to William Styron, John Berryman to Robert Lowell to Robert Penn Warren, and on and on, are still recognizable.
I remember Jason called his friend Wystan Auden. Lizzie called Fred Dupee—Lizzie and Barbara both. Lizzie called Mary McCarthy, and so did I. Barbara called Gore Vidal. I called Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Mailer. In the next two days I talked with Jonathan Miller, who wrote on Updike, and then with Philip Rahv, and Dwight MacDonald, who wrote on Arthur Schlesinger.

What did you say?
I said, we’re starting a new book review, and would they write on the book I was sending? They had three weeks. There was no question of payment. No one asked about it. Sometimes they said, “I’d rather do another book.” They all just assumed a new book review was needed.

What's Next for the New York Times Book Review?

They have a new editor so what's coming?

From a piece on the Daily Beast...

Are you worried about the future of books?

No, because fundamentally people love stories and they want information, and a book, to my mind, is still one of the best ways to tell stories and deliver information and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think that’s part of human nature.

As a longtime fan of the Book Review, the one criticism I would offer is there are times, reading from Berlin or California, when it has seemed to me a little too focused on the tastes of people in Manhattan. To what extent are you looking to address a New York readership and to what extent are you looking to a national readership?

We’re a national newspaper now and that’s even more so with the Book Review, because we are the last freestanding book review section in the country, so I definitely consider our audience not only to be national but global. Just as we read The Guardian here at the Review, we have a readership in other countries. There are so many books that are conceived on a global way in the same way that’s happened in the film industry. We have an international audience. There are a lot of people who are interested in books in English who live all over the world, and we want to address them as well.

Happy 50th Birthday, New York Review of Books

Salon celebrates.

From the story...

It is, of course, a singularity, the unique product of a very particular moment in American literary culture and of a small group of skilled, visionary and very wired editors. The tale has often been told of how the publisher Jason Epstein, his wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, convened in an apartment on West 67thStreet in the midst of an extended newspaper strike in New York, then in its second vexing week. The absence of the New York Times and its book review constituted a grievous problem for publishers, who felt they had nowhere to advertise their books or get them effectively reviewed; the very existence of the book review constituted a grievous problem for those four people, who viewed it with disdain. In his memoir “Book Business,” Epstein says, “Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash.” Hardwick had recently written a brutal takedown in Harper’s, decrying “the lack of literary tone itself” and dismissing it as “a provincial journal.” So they seized the day: Lowell borrowed $4,000 to float the enterprise, and the brilliant young Harper’s editor Robert Silvers was hired on for what very well could have been a one-off job, if the new review could not have been made financially self-sustaining. The whole thing had the air of an Andy Hardy let’s-put-on-a-show exercise, except the cast of this movie all went to Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Chicago and came equipped with killer rolodexes and deadly serious intent. As the “To the Reader” note on page two puts it, “The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review, but the demand for one.”

Mission accomplished.

Outcry as New Orleans' Daily Paper Cuts Back

Best/Worst Typo Mistakes in 2012

Enjoy!

Foxes Hidden in the Fine Print

The art of Jade Phillips.

How a Crossword is Made

Why New Orleans Should Have a Daily Newspaper

New Orleans just might be the largest city in the nation without a daily newspaper.

The Atlantic laments that fact.

From an article...

From outside of New Orleans, this entire story seems most perplexing for the fact that seemingly everyone in the city wants a daily newspaper except for the people who have the power to print one – and those people, the Newhouses, have steadfastly refused to sell to new owners who share the community’s wishes. This odd misalignment of interests speaks to a larger question: To whom does a newspaper really belong? Especially when it is the only newspaper in town.

Does the Times-Picayune belong to the Newhouses, the latest in a line of 175 years' worth of stewards, who may do with it whatever they want today? Or does it belong, in some larger sense, to the city itself?

No one can force the Newhouses to blow money the family doesn’t want to on a dying newspaper model. But if other deep pockets in the city are eager to do that – and so many in New Orleans want them to – then that option should be on the table.

New Orleans should have a daily newspaper not because daily newspapers are a great business model (they’re pretty clearly not), nor because daily newspapers play some special role in civic life.

Fleet Street: The Surprising Origins of the Modern Newspaper

Matthew Green discusses Britain's first newspapers.

From the piece in the Telegraph...

The birth of the modern newspaper can be traced to a house that once stood on the eastern bank of the fetid River Fleet in London. From 1702, overlooking the sewage, dead dogs, and suicide victims that clogged up the waterway, England’s first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, thumped, clanged and squelched out the news to the city's eager citizens.

It was just one product of a media revolution at the dawn of the 18th century. For reasons that will become clear, England’s strict pre-publication censorship laws melted away in 1695 and within months a prolific newspaper press had burst into life. By the mid-1730s, 31 papers - six dailies, 12 tri-weeklies and 13 weeklies - were being hawked on the streets of London, with an average combined weekly circulation of 100,000. Contemporaries assumed that each issue was read or heard by 20 people in taverns, coffeehouses, barber shops and elsewhere, suggesting that by the mid-1740s, some 42 per cent of London’s 650,000-strong population consumed news daily.

The press boom triggered a new addiction, something the journalist Joseph Addison defined in 1712 as a ‘news frenzy‘.

The Hemingway Papers

Ernest Hemingway once wrote columns for the Toronto Star. You can find those columns, here.

The Bathrobe Era

What does the death of print newspapers mean for writers?

From a piece in the Millions...

But as troubling as the death of print journalism may be for our collective civic and political lives, it may have an even more lasting impact on our literary culture. For more than a century, newspaper jobs provided vital early paychecks, and even more vital training grounds, for generations of American writers as different as Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Maynard, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tony Earley. Just as importantly, reporting jobs taught nonfiction writers from Rachel Carson to Michael Pollan how to ferret out hidden information and present it to readers in a compelling narrative.

Now, though, the infrastructure that helped finance all those literary apprenticeships is fast slipping away. The vacuum left behind by dying print publications has been largely filled by blogs, a few of them, like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, connected to huge corporations, many others written by bathrobe-clad auteurs like yours truly. This is great for readers who need only fire up their laptop – or increasingly, their tablet or smartphone – and have instant access to nearly all the information produced in the known world, for free.

But the system’s very efficiency is also its Achilles’ heel. When I worked in newspapers, a good part of my paycheck came from sales of classified ads. That’s all gone now, thanks to Craigslist and eBay. We also were a delivery system for circulars from grocery stores and real estate firms advertising their best deals. Buh-bye. Display ads still exist online, but advertisers are increasingly directing their ad dollars to Google and Facebook, which do a much better job of matching ads to their users’ needs. Add to this the longer-term trend of locally owned grocery stores, restaurants, and clothing shops being replaced by national chains, which draw more business from nationwide TV ad campaigns, and the economic model that supported independent reporting for more than a hundred years has vanished.

Inside the Graphics Department at the New York Times

The New York Times from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Where the Major Papers Stand on Book Reviewing

It's not all bad!

From a piece on Publisher's Weekly...

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

The paper overhauled its coverage in 2009, and now book-related content opens broadsheets in Sunday’s Arts section. The book coverage includes six to seven stand-alone reviews, as well as a column from book editor Karen R. Long. There’s a “new in paperback” section, which also focuses on one title, and a themed capsule roundup.

The San Francisco Chronicle

A pullout Books section runs every Sunday featuring six to nine reviews of roughly 750 words each, along with one or two 250-word capsule reviews. In addition to the reviews, there’s a bestseller list; a 10-title recommendation list from local booksellers; a sample of notable first sentences in new releases; and a 100-word item from a famous local person about his/her favorite book.

Woven Newspaper Portraits

The beautiful artwork of Gugger Petter.

It's Sunday - Do You Have Your Penguin Ready to Get the Newspaper For You?

On the Dismantling of a Once Great Paper

The Los Angeles Review of Books takes a look at the fall of the Los Angeles Times.

From the piece...

Around the time of O’Shea’s appointment, a Merrill Lynch banker placed a phone call to Sam Zell to discuss the distressed media property. The Tribune Company’s revenues were declining. Investment bankers circled the company like sharks, smelling fee-laden packages of loans that could be converted into securities and peddled to big institutional investors or hedge funds. Like everyone else in finance in 2007, they kept their sights on their fees and thought little about any ramifications that might follow.

Zell was known for constructing complicated deals, especially ones in which he personally had very little at stake. For the Tribune deal, Zell put a paltry $315 million of his own money into a purchase offer of $8.2 billion. To raise the other $7.9 billion, he proposed making Tribune an S corporation owned by a nonprofit ESOP (Employee Share Ownership Plan), which would be exempt from federal income taxes. The ESOP could then borrow the rest of the money needed to buy the stock owned by the Chandlers, the McCormick Trust, employees, and other shareholders in order to complete the sale and take the company private. If the deal went through, Tribune managers would be rewarded with large “success bonuses.” The investment bankers and advisors, for six months of work, would take in about $160 million.

The deal would saddle the company with $12-13 billion in debt. In other words, everyone stood to gain except the newspaper, the company, and their employees, all of whom were risking a great deal and, in the case of the employees, without their consent. The deal from hell went through. Exactly 12 months later the company would file for the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. Over 4,200 people lost their jobs in the three years that followed.

Occupy Walll Street

They now have a library.

They now have a newspaper, too.