The New York Times books section and the paper’s Sunday Book Review will no longer be separate entities. On the Recode Media podcast, Assistant Masthead Editor Clifford Levy said, “We have to be willing to try new things, and if they fail, that’s fine.” The two teams will be merged under the guidance of Book Review editor Pamela Paul, who told Publishers Weekly that the move will reduce redundant reviews: “‘There will no longer be any instances of two freelancers reviewing the same books.” In today’s business section, the Times’s internal email system assists Daniel Victor as he advises readers on what to do about being added to an unwanted email chain.
Finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize have been announced. The short list includes Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Emma Cline’s The Girls, and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You.
The verbal attacks by Roger Ailes’s lawyers on journalist Gabriel Sherman have taken on a more menacing tone “in our Age of Hogan,” writes James Warren. “Have no doubt that the courtroom victory of Hulk Hogan, which marked the financial ruin of Gawker Media, is part of the calculus in essentially warning Sherman and his employer that Team Ailes means business.”
HuffPost Mexico launched yesterday, becoming the site’s sixteenth international edition. Global Editorial Director Howard Fineman noted the Trump campaign in his lengthy introduction to the Mexican edition earlier this summer: “Our two countries are increasingly intertwined, whatever Trump may wish to unravel.”
After the FAA recently relaxed rules about who could legally pilot drones, any journalist with the ability to pass a multiple-choice test can take to the skies in search of stories. To avoid “a glut of inexperienced operators,” a University of Nebraska journalism professor and a BuzzFeed fellow have created an open-source manual for drone reportage.
New Order and Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris has signed a deal to write a memoir with Little, Brown imprint Constable. “Part memoir, part visual scrapbook, part aural history,” the book will be published in 2018.
At The Awl, Patrick Hoffman reviews James Patterson’s MasterClass on writing. “I started zoning out a little. My eyes drifted over toward my cat. Mr. Patterson pulled me right back in by saying, ‘Once you have the outline, start writing dude, you’re ready.’ It was that dude that woke me.”
Jonathan Safran Foer spoke with The Bookseller about his new novel, Here I Am. “My feeling of the book is it is . . . about things like how dishes are washed, what kind of moisturiser one applies, why a certain kind of mattress is purchased instead of another, what it’s like to take a baby’s temperature.” Foer’s book was included in The Guardian’s round-up of this fall’s “best American writing,” along with Nicholson Baker’s Substitute, Nell Zink’s Nicotine, Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson, and Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History.