The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced at an online ceremony last night. They are Clint Smith, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Melissa Febos, Anthony Veasna So, Diane Seuss, Rebecca Donner, and Jeremy Atherton Lin. As previously announced, novelist Percival Everett has been given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Merve Emre has accepted the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Cave Canem Foundation has recieved the Toni Morrison Achievement Award.
In a review of Deborah Cohen’s group biography Last Call at the Hotel Imperial for the New Yorker, Krithika Varagur writes about the birth of American foreign correspondents in the interwar era. It was common then for reporters to learn about the countries and conflicts they were covering as they went along. Varagur emphasizes that the model, as practiced by journalists like John Gunther, is outdated: “We’re no longer in the American century, after all, but, rather, the nascent multipolar one, and infinitely many colorful anecdotes and reported details won’t substitute for hard thinking about what goals various peoples, nations, and societies can and should aspire to in such a world.”
An op-ed in the New York Times, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” is causing strong reactions on Twitter. The op-ed reports on a poll that shows Americans feeling skittish about speaking their minds “without fear of being shamed or shunned.” The editorial board, for its part, is taking this very seriously, writing that it will identify potential threats to free speech and “offer solutions”: “We are under no illusions that this is easy.”
In Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Harris discusses the lessons learned from writing the weekly newsletter Journalism Crisis Project, which began in the spring of 2020 to catalog the disruptions to the media industry during the pandemic. A key finding was the importance of local news, which varies widely from place to place: “The local information crisis is tricky, because it’s vast, varied, and hard to measure. Continued attention to the problem must center people’s needs (a notoriously difficult thing to quantify).” You can sign up for the newsletter here.
At NiemanLab, Shraddha Chakradhar interviews Amethyst J. Davis, the founder of the Harvey World Herald, a local outlet she launched six months ago to serve a Chicago suburb and former news desert. “I always say that for every news desert in America, there’s an opportunity to build an institution that works for the public. That institution does not exist here in Harvey,” Davis said. “But if the institution isn’t there, you can build it and build it the right way out of the gate.”