Amid rumors of a coming settlement between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media, employees are urging their prospective new owners to abide by their previously negotiated union contract. “We look forward to building a constructive relationship of mutual respect with the new owners,” read a statement released by Gawker staff. “This can only happen under the terms of our union contract.”
Former co-founder of The Verge Josh Topolsky continues his attempts to explain just who the readers of his new project, The Outline, will be. “They live in urban areas. They’re really tech-savvy. They fund Kickstarter projects. They eat farm-to-table food. They care about politics, they’re engaged.” Topolsky plans to focus his new project on “power, culture and the future.”
The BBC will again be graced by the presence of disgruntled former employee George Orwell, who called his work there a waste of his “own time and the public money.” The broadcasting company had originally rejected a statue of the writer, a gift from late Labour MP Ben Whitaker, because Orwell was still “too provocative a figure.” Four years later, The Guardian reports that “he will be warmly welcomed back.”
“Wi-Fi- and coffee-free” bookstores are “among London’s hottest hangouts.” The Times is on it: “The internet-free bookshop campaigns for the days of haughty glances over the tops of reading glasses, gentle tutting at noise, and hours spent simply considering the words on the page.”
The New York Public Library’s new app, SimplyE, offers 300,000 books in one digital location, available to anyone with a NYPL library card. But electronic reading won’t get rid of the hold list: Limited numbers of book licenses mean that some books, like Emma Cline’s The Girls, already have hundreds of people waiting to download.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and David Szalay’s All That Man Is, both recently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, have made the Gordon Burn Prize shortlist for 2016.
Penguin Random House offices in downtown Manhattan will be relocated to the Broadway headquarters, saving the company $20 million each year. The move is scheduled for 2019 and “will not cause our organizational structure to change in any way.”
A report on diversity in science fiction writing found that “38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers,” which equals just under 2 percent. Jean Ho writes about shifting the burden of solving the diversity problem from authors to the publishing industry, drawing attention to the role of marketing and publicity departments. “For writers of color, the lack of diversity . . . can feel like a death knell.”
In honor of Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson’s birthday yesterday, Emma Lawson penned a tribute to Jansson’s best known creation, the Moomin family. “Round, white trolls with big snouts and small arms,” the mouthless creatures first appeared in a 1943 illustration and now have a museum and theme park dedicated to them.