Slate editor in chief Julia Turner explains the decision to close the DoubleX vertical just as the #MeToo movement took off. “Ever since I’ve taken over as editor, it’s felt very strange for me to be the first female editor in chief of Slate, and one of the few female editors in chief of general interest magazines, and have women’s pages still. Like reproductive rights—that goes in the women’s section. News about campus sexual assault policy—that goes in the women’s section,” she said. “Those stories are part of why we want to do this. Those stories are news. . . . Putting all that stuff under a purple logo didn’t feel modern or right anymore in terms of the centrality of those questions to the news.”
At the Paris Review, Naima Coster talks about Brooklyn, gentrification, and family life in her new book, Halsey Street. “As I wrote this book, I was interested in the impulse that people have to hide whatever they think might cost them the love and esteem of others,” she said. “In life, real intimacy happens when we’re ready to share the mess of our inner lives with one another, and I think that’s also one of the ways that intimacy happens in fiction.”
Naomi Fry has been hired by the New Yorker as a staff write and copy editor for the website. Fry is a freelance writer and copy chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
ESPN is considering selling FiveThirtyEight.
Matthew Hays explores how HuffPost’s recently-ended “practice of taking lots of written work for free” changed the online publishing world. “After The Huffington Post’s unpaid-content model became famous in media circles, I began to hear a familiar conversation. As media outlets began to pay less or ask for less words to cut costs, the bartering would ultimately end in an editor saying, ‘Well, at least we pay something. Look at The Huffington Post—they pay nothing,’” Hays recalls. “I wish I could monetize the number of times I heard these words from a commissioning editor. To put a spin on an old cliche, if I could I’d be very rich—maybe as rich as Arianna Huffington.”
