Poets & Writers has created a COVID-19 Relief Fund to offer emergency assistance to writers affected by the pandemic. The first round of funding will provide eighty writers with grants of up to $1,000.
Condé Nast is cutting salaries of all employees making over $100,000 and will reduce hours for other staff, the New York Times reports.
At Literary Hub, Jenny Odell and Wendy Liu discuss technology, our current political moment, and the similarities between their respective recent books, How to Do Nothing and Abolish Silicon Valley. “We have to hope that there is a future beyond the horizon of our present emergency—that there’s a world to look forward to, and one worth fighting for. What else do we have?” said Liu. “This crisis has been deepening the cruelties endemic to our economic system, and while I mostly feel powerless and worried, I also feel galvanized. Seeing the way the powerful have responded to this crisis (stock-dumping! corporate bailouts! laying off workers whose health insurance is tied to their job!) has, for me, wholeheartedly affirmed the importance of radical politics.”
“If you are well and at home and have enough to eat and can concentrate on a book, do you read toward or away from your fear?” asks Siri Hustvedt at Literary Hub.
Recode’s Peter Kafka examines the early media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to find what went wrong. “The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete,” he explains. “Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isn’t yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that they’ll tune us out?” NiemanLab points out that COVID-19 articles from earlier this year are dangerously out of date and that news organizations need to find new ways besides linking to old work to add context to breaking news articles. “The media’s widespread framing of the relationship between protecting lives and protecting the economy as a ‘debate’ or a ‘trade-off’ is dangerous—or at least one-sided,” writes Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop. “There is, in reality, no choice to be made between public health and a healthy economy—because public health is an essential prerequisite of a healthy economy.”