Last week was all about Quentin Tarantino at the New York Post—with the number of articles about the Pulp Fiction director skyrocketing literally infinitely over the last year. After the staggering increase, New Yorkers of a certain age can’t help but be reminded of the last time it seemed like the maverick director appeared in the tabloid this regularly.
The mainstream media is but one slice of the paid writing world. The deeper you go, the murkier it gets.
In a recent issue of T Magazine, a glossy New York Times supplement that serves mostly as a catalog of luxe advertisements, billionaire heiress Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen helped out her billionaire husband, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. This is why we should banish the rich from all media.
After patriotism and religion, “attacking the media” is the most popular refuge of the scoundrel.
Even in ideal conditions, it is not easy making a living as a freelance writer. It is much harder when the places you write for don’t pay you promptly. That’s where we come in.
Vice President Joe Biden announced in a speech in the White House’s Rose Garden today that he is not running for president. This is a real bummer for the American public, which deserves, if nothing else, more election entertainment. It’s an even bigger bummer for all the pundits and political journalists who confidently reported—with sources and everything—that Biden was going to run.
According to reports, a “former CIA agent” who frequently talked national security on Fox News was actually just an extremely talented con man with a penchant for scamming Fox News producers and government contractors alike.
Roxane Gay, accomplished Twitter user and author, has not received her iPhone yet. Rather than settle this in private, she chose to publicly chastise Apple before her 89,000 followers about her missing phone. She also threatened to use the New York Times to settle the score. But it was just a joke!
Imagine this: a burst of tweets show a bus explosion on the interstate, sending up a tremendous mushroom cloud, visible from miles away. How many people are hurt? Or dead? What caused the explosion? No one knows, because all the reporters decided to give the victims and bystanders space, and respected everyone’s need to process the trauma before answering questions about it.
It’s nice to have a job in an economy where not everyone does, and in a field—journalism—where the economic prospects are uncertain. Many publishers are looking with concern at a world where Facebook and Apple are using their power to steer readers to proprietary platforms, as innovations in ad blocking threaten the whole existing business model, which was already sort of provisional. Then again, Re/Code reported this morning that Axel Springer, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt, is going to buy the website Business Insider in a deal that “values Business Insider at $442 million.”
The American intelligentsia is excited about a new book with a shocking and previously unheard thesis: black people do not like crime in their neighborhoods. Does this revolutionary idea change everything we thought we knew?
Nobody in journalism really knows exactly what’s ethical or unethical, but a standard that we could perhaps come to some sort of consensus on is if a reporter is moved to the point of tears by a person, she shouldn’t write about that person in her capacity as an impartial news reporter.
