For the Record

Herald Names Richardson Executive Editor:

Past Pulitzer juror and Atlanta Journal-Constitution Senior Managing Editor Monica R. Richardson will succeed Pulitzer Prize Board Co-Chair Aminda Marqués González as executive editor of the Miami Herald, the newspaper announced Monday. Richardson "will be the first Black executive editor in the Herald’s 117-year history," according to reporter David Smiley. "I'm pleased to be working in a newsroom where journalism is the core mission of everything. That’s what drives me in my career. It’s the passion," she said. "I wouldn't be coming to Miami if I didn’t see that passion for journalism." Richardson also will "oversee el Nuevo Herald and the Bradenton Herald, and operate as McClatchy's Florida regional editor." Marqués began her new role as vice president and executive editor of Simon & Schuster's adult trade publishing imprint on November 30.

Betsy Wade (1929-2020):

Longtime New York Times copy editor and travel columnist Betsy Wade died Thursday at her home in Manhattan from complications of colon cancer. She was 91. The first woman to edit news at The Times, Wade played an integral role in preparing the newspaper's Public Service Prize-winning series on the Pentagon Papers for publication in 1971 before becoming the first female chief of the foreign copy desk a year later. She also initiated a class action lawsuit that ameilorated gender inequities at the publication and served as president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, the largest bargaining unit in the national journalism union. Wade is survived by her husband, past Pulitzer juror and former Columbia Journalism School professor James Boylan, who founded the Columbia Journalism Review in 1961.

Matthews Elected National Press Club President:

Members of the National Press Club have elected Associated Press U.S. Video Assignment Manager Lisa Nicole Matthews to serve as its 114th president, the Washington-based professional organization announced Saturday. Matthews is the third person of color to hold the position. The group also has elected the first all-female leadership team in its history, including Vice President Jen Judson (Defense News), Membership Secretary Emily Wilkins (Bloomberg Government), Secretary Gillian Rich (Investor's Business Daily) and Treasurer Eileen O’Reilly (Axios). "I believe the Press Club must continue the robust work of elevating diverse voices and recruiting a more diverse membership," said Matthews.

Barnes & Noble Embraces Decentralization:

Barnes & Noble is "abandoning the strategy that made it a bookselling behemoth two decades ago — uniformity designed to create economies of scale and simplify the shopping experience" in favor of "empowering store managers to curate their shelves based on local tastes" as the book retailer struggles in its seventh year of declining revenue, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. In recent months, CEO James Daunt "severed decadeslong relationships with publishers who paid to have their books placed in stores" by dismissing New York-based book buyers. "At the end of the day, I expect to give the booksellers complete freedom in all the things that I think should matter," he said. "Freedom to put the books wherever they like, display them however they like, arrange them however they like."

Dylan Sells Entire Songwriting Catalog:

2008 Special Citation recipient Bob Dylan "has sold his entire publishing catalog — more than 600 copyrights spanning 60 years — to Universal Music Publishing Group" in a deal "likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars," Anne Steele of The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. In the last five years, songwriter catalogs "have been commanding sale prices that amount to 10 to 18 times their annual royalties, compared with eight to 13 times in earlier years" due to the increasing prevalence of streaming revenue. "By bringing to UMG the vast and brilliant Dylan songwriting catalog, in an instant, we have forever transformed the legacy of this company," said Universal CEO Lucian Grainge in an internal email.

Wired's Thompson Joins Atlantic:

Wired Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson has been appointed chief executive of The Atlantic, Emerson Collective President Laurene Powell Jobs and minority owner David G. Bradley announced Thursday in a joint email to staff obtained by Marc Tracy of The New York Times. "Nick is singular; we've seen no one like him," Powell Jobs and Bradley wrote. “​As to leading and supporting ​Atlantic ​strategy, Nick brings a surround-sound coverage of relevant experience. Having been an editor, he is committed to the undergirding tenets of our work — superior editorial standards and complete editorial independence." Thompson, who previously served as the top digital editor of The New Yorker from 2012 to 2017, met with past Pulitzer juror and Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a socially distanced setting at his Brooklyn home this week. "[I] have enormous confidence that he will guide this company to a new era of subscription and reader growth, technological creativity and business success," Goldberg said. Thompson will join the magazine in February.

Dicker on Zeus Performance:

Washington Post Vice President for Commercial Technology Jarrod Dicker spoke to William Turvill of PressGazette about the newspaper's Zeus Performance "media monetization platform," which includes the Zeus Insights contextual data advertising system and has attracted more than 100 clients since 2019. The buy-side platform Zeus Prime (offering access to platforms like YouTube and Apple News) will be added to the suite in the first quarter of 2021. "We're actually building a new ecosystem with all these different publishers," said Dicker, who believes that the platform could compete with "Facebook, Google and others" in the future. "We've, on the open web, built an environment that brands and advertisers are used to buying on – like through Facebook, through Amazon or through a lot of these other platforms – that guarantees premium inventory in highly viewable environments. With shared contextual targeting across all participating publishers. [...] And that is insanely unique."

Alison Lurie (1926-2020):

1985 Fiction winner Alison Lurie died Thursday at a hospice center in Ithaca, N.Y. She was 94. A graduate of Radcliffe College of Harvard University, Lurie published four novels before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1970, where she taught alongside her first husband, the critic and memoirist Jonathan Peele Bishop. Much of her oeuvre chronicled the sociocultural valences and interpersonal vicissitudes of faculty life at the fictional Corinth University, eliciting laudatory comparisons to Henry James and such British contemporaries as Kingsley Amis. An early scholar of children's literature (which she chronicled in The New York Review of Books), Lurie also was a close friend of 1977 Poetry winner James Merrill, a relationship that inspired the memoir "Familiar Spirits" (2001). Later in life, she divided her time between Ithaca, London and Key West with her second husband, the writer Edward Hower, who survives her.

Intercept Announces Principles for Freelance Contributors:

Following a dialogue facilitated by the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union, The Intercept has "embarked on a monthslong process of figuring out what principles we could articulate that would help ensure that the needs and interests of freelancers continue to be met" by the digital news organization. In addition to offering press credentials "when appropriate and necessary," the agreement provides for credit lines with "links to either the freelancer’s website or social media page" and the "importance of indemnification language."

Amazon in Talks to Buy Wondery:

Amazon "is in exclusive talks to purchase podcast startup Wondery, according to people familiar with the matter, as the tech giant pushes further into the growing audio sector," Benjamin Mullin and Anne Steele of The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The talks value the company at $300 million amid projected revenue of $40 million this year, "with about 75% of that coming from advertising and the rest from licensing to TV, to subscription services like Audible and Stitcher Premium and to Wondery’s own premium subscription service, which launched this summer." Following several acquisitions, Wondery "is the last large, independent podcaster on the market — and could present the final opportunity for a major tech or media giant to buy its way into the exploding field."