Type of site | Online magazine |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Owner | The Morning News LLC |
Created by | Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | 1999 |
The Morning News is a U.S.-based daily online magazine founded in 1999 by Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack. It began as an email newsletter [1] and in the fall of 2000 evolved into a news-oriented weblog with a New York focus. In October 2002, Baldwin and Womack launched The Morning News as a daily-published online magazine.
The Morning News publishes short pieces of humor, commentary, and personal essays. Other featured sections include Headlines, a twice-daily column of links to interesting, relevant, and obscure news stories and websites; Galleries, which highlights the work of contemporary artists and authors; and the Non-Expert, a satirical advice column. TMN also features a variety of themed blogs, including an interview series called TMN Talks and a book blog, Our Man in Boston, by Robert Birnbaum.
Time listed the magazine in the 2006 edition of its "50 Coolest Websites" [2] and the Utne Reader called the site "more nourishing than the newsprint diet that has previously dominated your breakfast." [3]
The Morning News content has inspired the publication of several books.
In September 2003, The Morning News published the first of 27 installments of a serial titled Gary Benchley, Rock Star, written from the perspective of "a Williamsburg wannabe-indie-rocker" named Gary Benchley.
When the collected Gary Benchley series was published by Plume in September 2005, [4] it was revealed that Gary Benchley was really TMN contributor and Harper's Magazine webmaster Paul Ford. However, many were fooled by Ford's charade, including the New York Times, which called his book "a sort of Dickens-esque flourish for the digital age." [5]
On the day of the novel's publication, The Morning News published an essay by Ford explaining the story of Gary Benchley, from inspiration to publication. [6]
Between February and August 2005, The Morning News published five essays by Anthony Doerr, who was living in Rome for a year after winning the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Doerr's essays addressed his and his wife's challenges living abroad with their infant sons; his many perspectives on Rome; and the funeral of Pope John Paul II. In June 2007, Doerr published a book, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, [7] based on the Letters From Rome series.
In 2008, The Morning News began publishing a yearly book of new content and selected online material called The Morning News Annual. [8]
While living and working in Paris, The Morning News co-founder Rosecrans Baldwin wrote a series of letters for the magazine that later inspired a travel memoir. Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2012.
In 2005, The Morning News launched the Tournament of Books, an annual literary contest structured like and coinciding with the NCAA basketball tournament. The Tournament culminates in the Rooster prize—named in honor of writer David Sedaris's brother in the short story "You Can't Kill the Rooster." The inspiration for the Tournament of Books came from the idea that while "arbitrariness is inherent in book awards," [9] the Rooster could at least be transparent.
Sixteen books published in the previous year are chosen and matched against each other, with a different judge for each match. Judges read their two assigned books and select one to advance to the next round in written decisions that are published daily on the site. Past judges include Elliot Ackerman, Monica Ali, Nicole Cliffe, Helen DeWitt, Junot Díaz, Sasha Frere-Jones, Amanda Hesser, John Hodgman, Nick Hornby, Karl Iagnemma, Tayari Jones, Sam Lipsyte, Colin Meloy, Celeste Ng, Dale Peck, David Rees, Mary Roach, Gary Shteyngart, Jeff VanderMeer, and Meg Wolitzer.
During the 2009 event, Baldwin and Womack were interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered . In the interview, Baldwin described Tournament contenders as: "books that have received a lot of hype… books that we've had recommended to us by readers, by friends, by family; books that have won awards, books that maybe got unrecognized or are coming from the independent publishing world." [10]
In 2014, the tournament celebrated its 10th edition and featured notable judges such as John Green, Roxane Gay, John Darnielle, and Roger Hodge. [11] [12]
The Tournament has two rounds, followed by semifinals, followed by a "Zombie Round" in which the two most popular books that were eliminated in earlier as determined by fan voting are re-matched against the two winners of the semifinals. In the final round, all the Tournament's judges vote for the winner. Throughout the Tournament, authors Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner provide commentary on each decision.
Past Rooster Winners in the Tournament of Books:
In 2020, a Super Rooster tournament was held, with the field comprising the winners of the first 16 years of the tournament. This tournament was won by A Mercy by Toni Morrison.
In light of the plagiarism controversy that surrounded novice author Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, in 2006 The Morning News developed a contest to find a writer who could formulate a "coherent and original piece of fiction completely made from the works of others." Contestants were prompted to plagiarize from at least five works of others and were warned that no single-word lifting was allowed — only direct plagiarism of passages and sentences.
Out of 54 entrants, Bonnie Furlong was chosen the winner of the contest for her story The Parlourmaid's Tale, or, MS in a Dustbin, [13] which, according to Gawker.com, "served Kaavya her weak ass on a plate." [14]
Starting in June 2009, The Morning News sponsored Infinite Summer, a summer-long reading expedition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The freeform read-along is guided via blog by Morning News contributing writer Matthew Baldwin; participants are urged to read about 75 pages per week and discuss their progress in online forums. The goal of the event, as Womack stated in an interview with the Associated Press, is to put the book "back in the hands of real readers: thousands of them, in fact, on the same page at the same time." [15]
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary award conferred each year for the best novel written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity that usually leads to a sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Tikkun is a quarterly interfaith Jewish left-progressive magazine and website, published in the United States, that analyzes American and Israeli culture, politics, religion, and history in the English language. The magazine has consistently published the work of Israeli and Palestinian left-wing intellectuals, but also included book and music reviews, personal essays, and poetry. In 2006 and 2011, the magazine was awarded the Independent Press Award for Best Spiritual Coverage by Utne Reader for its analysis of the inability of many progressives to understand people's yearning for faith, and the American fundamentalists' political influence on the international conflict among religious zealots. The magazine was founded in 1986 by Michael Lerner and his then-wife Nan Fink Gefen. Since 2012, its publisher is Duke University Press. Beyt Tikkun Synagogue, led by Rabbi Michael Lerner, is loosely affiliated with Tikkun magazine. It describes itself as a "hallachic community bound by Jewish law".
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Kevin Powell is an American writer, activist, and television personality. Powell is the author of 14 books, including The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood and When We Free the World published in 2020. Powell was a senior writer during the founding years of Vibe magazine from 1992 to 1996. Powell's activism has focused on ending poverty, advocating for social justice and counteracting violence against women and girls through local, national and international initiatives. He was a Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York, in 2008 and 2010.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscription is required to read some articles.
Peter Bradford Benchley was an American author, screenwriter, and environmental activist. He is known for his bestselling novel Jaws and co-wrote its movie adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. Several more of his works were also adapted for both cinema and television, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark.
Thomas Martin Spurgeon was an American writer, historian, critic, and editor in the field of comics, notable for his five-year run as editor of The Comics Journal and his blog The Comics Reporter.
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published three times each year, and content is published on its website several times each week. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is a young adult novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, written just after she graduated from high school. Its 2006 debut was highly publicized while she was enrolled at Harvard University, but the book was withdrawn after it was discovered that portions had been plagiarized from several sources, including the works of Salman Rushdie and Meg Cabot. Viswanathan immediately apologized and stated that similarities were "completely unintentional and unconscious." All shelf copies of Opal Mehta were ultimately recalled and destroyed by the publisher, and Viswanathan's contract for a second book was canceled.
Shameless is a Canadian magazine with a feminist and anti-oppressive practice perspective for girls and trans youth. It is published three times a year and also maintains a website featuring a blog, web stories and audio content. Shameless is a registered not-for-profit.
Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.
Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning writer of speculative, literary fiction and nonfiction with three books and nearly 100 short stories and essays to her credit. An attendee of Clarion Workshop, she lives in Oregon. She won the Nebula in 1999 for the short story, The Cost of Doing Business, and in 2005, she was a finalist for the Nebula, along with Eileen Gunn, for their co-written novelette, Nirvana High.
Michael Thomas Ford is an American author of primarily gay-themed literature. He is best known for his "My Queer Life" series of comedic essay collections and for his award-winning novels Last Summer, Looking for It, Full Circle, Changing Tides, and What We Remember.
Rebecca Solnit is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Infinite Summer was an online book club–style project started by writer Matthew Baldwin. Sponsored by The Morning News, participants were challenged to read David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest at a rate of about 75 pages a week from June 21 to September 22, 2009.
Maria Joan Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Hyland is a lecturer in creative writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize.
Numéro Cinq was an online international journal of arts and letters founded in 2010 by the Governor-General's Award-winning Canadian novelist Douglas Glover. Numéro Cinq published a wide variety of new and established artists and writers with a bent toward the experimental, hybrid works, and work in translation as well as essays on the craft and art of writing. Its last issue appeared in August 2017.
Kenneth Womack is an American writer, literary critic, public speaker, and music historian, particularly focusing on the cultural influence of the Beatles. He is the author of the bestselling Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles and John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.