News & Notes
Jake Goes to Italy
Fate threw me together with Jake Rupert two decades ago. We were both student interns at the Ottawa Citizen and we were both assigned to the crime beat in hopes of pumping a little youthful vigor (and youthful heartlessness) into the newspaper’s struggle to keep up with the local tabloid.
Mexico II
And then there’s this :
Mexico
I think I have reached a turning point regarding the continued success of my Paris book. I wrote Time Was Soft There (Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs in the UK) a decade ago and it has generated sustained interest since then.
Paying for Journalism
In my third year journalism classes at the Institut Européen de Journalisme, we discuss the economic crisis in journalism that has resulted from the migration of advertising from traditional news media to social media and search engines. We look at less savory solutions like custom content or native advertising and less stable solutions like crowd-funding or philanthropic journalism. However, the gorilla in the classroom is the basic fact that if my students hope to get good journalism jobs one day, people need to pay good money for journalism. Continue reading →
Translation
I am not a traditional translator in the sense that it isn’t the book that is important but the overall project. A good example is my first major translation, L’Abolition by Robert Badinter. It wasn’t so much that I thought Americans absolutely needed to know this book; yes, it is a stunning narrative and an important chapter in European history, but the details are so rooted in the French culture of the 1970s that it doesn’t resonate with many non-French readers. Continue reading →
Pride
Alberto Manguel! Yes, that Alberto Manguel.
