Meeting #2: The Final Countdown
Hello hello!
Thanks for signing up for this reading experiment. It’s great to have you here.
What we’re reading📚
For our August book club, we’ve chosen The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace.
It’s not too late to start reading—or listening! Wallace has also produced a podcast miniseries, The View From Somewhere: A Podcast About Journalism With Purpose, which covers a lot of the same territory.
When we’re meeting🤳🏽
We’re going to be meeting at 4 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 23.
To reduce the risk of Zoom bombing, I will be sending the meeting login privately to each subscriber. If you don’t see it in your inbox by EOD, let me know!
Author Lewis Raven Wallace will be joining us. To submit your questions for him, fill out this Google Form.
Extracurricular reads🤓
If you’re seeking more info about the authors, the book, or its contents, look no further. . .
You can still read Wallace’s original “Objectivity is dead and I’m ok with it” post on Medium
In 2019, he also wrote for Neiman Lab about “How Trans Journalists are Challenging—and Changing—Journalism”
In an otherwise glowing review, Bookforum questioned where The View From Somewhere leaves us, arguing that “Wallace is too quick to treat ‘perspective’ as something self-explanatory”—a common critique of anti-objectivity arguments, including Wesley Lowery’s
PopMatters also wrote an insightful review of the book, with an emphasis on a journalist’s role in challenging orthodoxy, wherever we find it
News You Can Use🗞
The Atlantic wrote an excellent story about the Hong Kong-based, Jack Ma-owned South China Morning Post, a “newsroom at the edge of autocracy”
Deadspin alumni launched their own worker-owned media company, Defector Media, and you could say it’s going OK so far
Sign of the times: Conde Nast may break its lease on One World Trade
Bloomberg announced its second “subscription bundle” with The Atlantic (it’s also partnered with The Information)
Trump’s TikTok drama may be a “distraction”, according to Wired, but Facebook is capitalizing on it anyway, as it launches Instagram Reels
I’ve been waiting for an article like this: “How protestors across the country are keeping people informed”—and what they think about the traditional media
In the CJR, Scroll and Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile wrote about how local news outlets can compete with the NYT—and why they must
Get in touch✍🏽
Questions, comments, concerns, reading recommendations—I’ll take it all! You can reach me at elliepses@gmail.com or on Twitter @elliepses (DMs are open).
And, as always, the full History of Journalism reading List is available here.