Artforum named Tina Rivers Ryan as its next top editor on Thursday, selecting the curator to lead the prestigious magazine after a tumultuous year.

“For decades, Artforum’s editors have ensured that this landmark magazine remains a trusted and indispensable source for conversations about contemporary art and its role in the broader culture,” said Ryan, who specialized in digital art as a curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, said in a statement.

Five months ago, the magazine fired David Velasco, editor-in-chief, after he signed and published a letter calling for Palestinian liberation shortly after the war between Israel and Hamas began. Some staff members were angry about his dismissal; Old editors resigned in protest and artists declared a boycott. Some writers withdrew their essays and some advertisers withdrew their spots in the publication, resulting in a noticeably smaller issue after events unfolded.

Penske Media Corporation, which owns the publication, has been trying to rebuild it in recent months.

Ryan, who has contributed to Artforum over the years, received attention for a popular essay criticizing the NFT boom. She later softened her stance and helped the Buffalo museum raise money for the craze by creating a online exhibition and fundraising.

“We couldn’t be more excited about this next chapter of Artforum, with Tina leading the editorial team,” the magazine’s publishers, Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza, said in a statement. “Tina is a brilliant writer and uniquely positioned to uphold the magazine’s reputation for publishing long-form criticism of the highest quality, while also contributing to a dynamic vision of audience expansion through continued digital growth and live events.”

William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker expressing his idiomatic subjects and honed the prose of some of the country’s celebrated writers as an associate editor before bringing that magazine’s meticulous standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor-in-chief for twenty years, died Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.

His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was treated at a hospital after several falls and surgeries.

As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth left a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to pursue a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.

He reported breaking news for The Arkansas Gazette and later for The New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues eventually included some of the most exciting voices in American journalism, including Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.

In 1966, William Shawn, the prim but dictatorial editor of The New Yorker, invited Mr. Whitworth to the venerated weekly. He took the job even though he had already accepted one at The New York Times.

At The New Yorker, he injected humor into pensive “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiled the well-known and the lesser-known, including jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos by his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow into a 1970 book, “Naïve Questions about War and Peace.”

Mr. Whitworth provided ample opportunity for each individual he profiled to be quoted, and provided each with equally ample petards on which to hoist himself.

In 1966 he wrote with characteristic detachment about Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an amiable man from Queens who had run a small advertising agency and now, as president of a flock of the Church of God, had declared himself King of the World. Bishop Tomlinson claimed millions of church members – including all Pentecostals. “He thinks they are his,” Mr. Whitworth wrote, “whether they know it or not.”

Of Joe Franklin, the enduring television and radio host, Mr. Whitworth wrote in 1971 that his office “if it were a person, it would be a bum” — but that “on the air, Joe is more cheerful and positive than Norman.” Vincent Peale and Lawrence Welk combined.”

From 1973 to 1980 at The New Yorker and then at the venerable Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor until his retirement in 1999, and later, when he worked on books, Mr. Whitworth was most respected as a nonfiction editor.

Aside from the writers he guided, encouraged, and protected, his role outside the publishing world was largely unknown. To colleagues who often wondered why he had given up reporting, he suggested that he couldn’t lick them, so he joined then: he had simply grown tired of editors, especially newspaper editors, mangling his prose, that would nevertheless be published under his direction. byline.

“You want to fail on your own terms, not with the voice of someone else who looks like you,” he said at the meeting Oxford American Summit for Aspiring Writers in 2011.

Mr. Whitworth edited in grim perfectionists like film critic Pauline Kael (who nearly came to blows with Mr. Shawn) and Robert A. Caro (who was ultimately so pleased with the final excerpts from “The Power Broker,” his biography of Robert Moses , published in The New Yorker — after Mr. Whitworth intervened with Mr. Shawn — that when The Atlantic published a summary of the first volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography, he asked Mr. Whitworth to edit it).

How did he win over recalcitrant writers?

“As long as you kept them in the game and didn’t do things behind their backs, and slowly explained why this would help them, whatever it would do, it protected them and not us, and they came around,” he said. the Oxford American Summit.

For Mr. Whitworth, said the essayist Anne Fadiman, who worked with him at The American Scholar after he left The Atlantic, “editing was a conversation and also a form of teaching.”

At times, Mr. Whitworth offered wise counsel that went beyond editing.

After Garrison Keillor wrote an article for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry, “he pushed me to do a Saturday night variety show of my own, modeled on the Opry, which led to ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ which is my work for years to come,” Mr. Keillor said by email. “Unusual. Like a sportswriter who becomes a major league pitcher, or an obituary writer who opens a mortuary. I’ve been grateful ever since.”

New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg wrote on his blog in 2011 that, despite Mr. Whitworth’s capacity for self-deprecation, he and Mr. Shawn had much in common, “including a gentle manner, a keen understanding of writerly neuroses and a deep love of jazz.”

In 1980, Mr. Whitworth was considered the most likely candidate to succeed Mr. Shawn, who was stubbornly unwilling to be succeeded. Rather than being complicit in what he described to a friend as “parricide” in a plot to oust Mr. Shawn, he accepted the editorship of The Atlantic from its new owner, Mortimer Zuckerman. He didn’t regret it.

“I got over The New Yorker a long time ago.” he wrote in a letter to Corby Kummer, former editor-in-chief and food columnist at The Atlantic — which, he said, “fulfilled all my expectations and hopes.”

“I couldn’t have been so happy and proud in any other job,” he added.

Under Mr. Whitworth’s editorship, The Atlantic won nine National Magazine Awards, including the 1993 Citation for Overall Excellence.

He also spent months editing copy of Renée C. Fox’s “In the Field: A Sociologist’s Journey” (2011) in a mail exchange that lasted for months without them ever meeting in person.

Mr. Whitworth’s suggestions, Professor Fox recalled Commentary in 2011, “are usually written in his characteristic spicy style, always courteous, friendly and modest in tone, sometimes self-mockery and often dryly witty.”

“The editor,” she continued, “taught the author about intellectual, grammatical, aesthetic, historical, and moral components of writing and editing that were previously imperceptible or unknown to her.”

William Alvin Whitworth was born on February 13, 1937 in Hot Springs, Ark. His mother, Lois (McNabb) Whitworth, was a china and silver buyer at Cave’s Jewelers (where she often assisted Bill Clinton in buying gifts for Hillary). His father, William C. Whitworth, was an advertising executive.

He attended Central High School while working part-time as a copy boy in the advertising department of The Arkansas Democrat. After graduating, he studied English and minored in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, but dropped out before his senior year to play trumpet in a six-piece jazz band.

He married Carolyn Hubbard; she died in 2005. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by a half-brother, F. Brooks Whitworth. A son, Matthew, died in 2022. Mr. Whitworth had lived in Conway since retiring from The Atlantic.

Literary agent Lynn Nesbit remembered Mr. Whitworth as a “stunningly brilliant and critical editor” whose “own ego never got in the way of his editorial genius.” Charles McGrath, another former New Yorker editor who later edited The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Whitworth, unlike Mr. Shawn, was “more loved than feared.”

But he was not a braggart. Although he often quoted Mr. Shawn as saying that “the failure to achieve perfection is merely an endless process,” he more or less replicated what he called The New Yorker’s “neurotic system” of meticulous editing at The Atlantic.

“He taught me that the worst approach for an editor is to do your entire piece with your hands in the hair because you knew how to organize and write it better,” says Mr. Kummer, who is now executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute. .

“The writer’s name was on the piece, not yours,” he continued, “and no matter how fierce the arguments about phrasing, punctuation, paragraph order, or word choice, the writer had to be happy with a piece or it wouldn’t to work. .”

When he assigned Mr. Kummer to edit an article by George F. Kennan, the eminent diplomat and historian, Mr. Whitworth warned Mr. Kummer in no uncertain terms: “No matter how much work you think is needed, remember: he is a giant. ”

But when Mr. Kennan later complained that Mr. Kummer “gave me as much trouble as he gave The New Yorker,” Mr. Whitworth responded, “That’s exactly what I pay him for.”

Noah Shachtman, Rolling Stone's top editor, will step down at the end of this month after more than two years at the helm of the pop culture bible.

In a brief letter to employees seen by The New York Times, Mr. Shachtman said his last day as president of the magazine would be March 1, but he did not elaborate on the reasons for his departure.

His resignation was prompted by editorial disagreements with Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

“It is the right decision that Gus Wenner and I made after many discussions about the direction of the brand,” Mr. Shachtman said in the letter.

Mr. Wenner told employees in a separate note that Mr. Shachtman would be replaced in the interim by Sean Woods, the magazine's deputy editor, and Lisa Tozzi, its digital director. The magazine will begin a search for a new top editor in the coming weeks, he said. Mr. Shachtman will continue as a contributing writer for the magazine.

“I would like to thank him for all the work, passion and dedication he has put into our publication over the years,” Mr. Wenner wrote.

The Daily Beast's former top editor, Mr. Shachtman, imported the news website's hard-hitting, investigative sensibility to Rolling Stone. During his tenure, the magazine published investigations into prominent musicians and actors, including Jonathan Majors and Marilyn Manson. The publication also won a National Magazine Award for Digital Design and was nominated for its first Emmy Award interactive media under his supervision.

In recent years, Rolling Stone has focused on expanding beyond its roots as a traditional magazine, focusing on events, licensing, online commerce, film, TV and podcast activities.

Rolling Stone was thrown into crisis last year when Jann Wenner, one of the magazine's founders, made comments in an interview with The Times that were widely considered racist and sexist. Jann Wenner, Gus Wenner's father, left the publication in 2019, but he was still influential in the music world as a board member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found. After his comments were published, he was expelled from the foundation and condemned by the Black Rock Coalition, a brand that Mr. Shachtman Rolling Stone had tried to cover.

A former top editor of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn pleaded guilty Tuesday to obstructing police officers' efforts to hold back the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The editor, Elliot Resnick, entered a plea before Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Federal District Court in Washington to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder. Mr. Resnick, 40, of Manhattan, is expected to be sentenced in June.

Clay Kaminski, a federal public defender representing Mr. Resnick, declined to comment.

At the time of the riot, Mr. Resnick was the editor-in-chief of The Jewish Presswhich began publishing in 1960 and describes itself on its website as “the largest independent Jewish weekly in the United States” and “politically incorrect long before the term was coined.”

After Politico reported in April 2021 that Mr. Resnick, who started working at The Jewish Press in 2006, had been part of the Jan. 6 gang, the newspaper's editorial board published a statement saying he had been in Washington as a journalist covering the events of that day.

“The Jewish press fails to see why Elliot's personal views on former President Trump should make him any different from the dozens of other journalists covering the events, including many at the Capitol during the riots,” the editorial wrote.

Citing court records, Justice Department officials said Tuesday that Mr. Resnick had not been acting as a journalist that day. Shlomo Greenwald, who replaced Mr. Resnick as editor-in-chief of the paper in May 2021, did not respond to email and telephone inquiries on Tuesday.

According to court documents, Mr. Resnick took a bus from New York to Washington on the day of the riot and eventually joined the horde that descended on the Capitol after a speech by Mr. Trump. After climbing a staircase on the east side of the building, he turned and urged others to climb the stairs, court records show.

At that point, according to court documents, Mr. Resnick and others began fighting with police officers who tried to keep the crowd at bay. When an officer tried to extinguish some rioters with pepper spray, Mr. Resnick grabbed the officer's arm to stop the action, court records show.

The group, which included Mr. Resnick, forced open a door and entered the Capitol Rotunda, court documents show. Mr. Resnick then turned around and joined others in trying to force open a second door. An officer who tried to intervene was thrown to the ground, and Mr. Resnick reached through the open door, grabbed other rioters and pulled them into the Capitol past officers who tried to keep them out, according to court documents.

Mr. Resnick spent nearly an hour in the building, walking through several rooms before returning to the Rotunda and repeatedly urging others to come in, patting some of them on the back after they entered, according to court records .

According to the Justice Department, Mr. Resnick is one of more than 1,265 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot. A federal investigation into the day's events continues. Separately, a 40-year-old New Jersey man, Lee Giobbie, was charged Tuesday with several felonies and misdemeanors for what prosecutors said was his role in the riot.

Supporters of Mr. Trump stormed the Capitol that day in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination in this year's presidential election, faces federal conspiracy and other charges stemming from the riot. He has pleaded not guilty.

When Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, hired Kevin Merida as the newspaper's top editor nearly three years ago, praising the journalist as someone who would maintain the publication's high standards and journalistic integrity.

This winter, the professional heat between the two men had cooled. Their relationship was strained in part by a December incident when Dr. Soon-Shiong tried to dissuade Mr. Merida from pursuing a story about a wealthy California doctor and his dog, three people with knowledge of the interactions said . The doctor was an acquaintance of Dr. Soon-Shiong, the people said.

The previously unreported incident occurred as The Los Angeles Times, the largest news organization on the West Coast, struggled to reverse years of losses amid a tough newspaper market. Mr Merida resigned this month. Shortly thereafter, the company laid off about 115 journalists, or about 20 percent of its newsroom.

It is not unheard of for a publication's owner to be consulted about sensitive reporting, especially if it could put the newspaper in legal or financial jeopardy. But it is unusual for an owner or publisher to pressure editors to stop reporting on a story well before publication, especially in cases where government secrets or human lives are not at risk.

In a statement on Friday, Dr. Soon-Shiong characterization of his actions and called it 'factually incorrect'. The Los Angeles Times said in a statement that Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper in 2018, had requested “truthful, factual reporting” of the story.

In a letter to staff this month, Mr Merida said he had decided to resign after “considerable soul-searching into my career at this stage”. Dr. Soon-Shiong said at the time that it had been “mutually agreed” that Mr Merida would leave.

The confrontation of Dr. Soon-Shiong with Mr. Merida about the unfinished article arose from the work a business reporter did on Dr. Gary Michelson, a California surgeon who made his fortune through medical patents, said the three people with knowledge of the situation.

The reporter investigated dueling lawsuits involving Dr. Michelson was involved and allegations that his dog had bitten a woman in a Los Angeles park. In a lawsuit that Dr. Michelson in May, he said the woman had tried to extort him. The woman filed a personal injury lawsuit against Dr. Michelson.

Dr. Michelson, who lives in Los Angeles, and Dr. Soon-Shiong are among a small and rarefied group of medical professionals who have become billionaires through their innovations and investments. Dr. Soon-Shiong made his fortune in biotechnology. Both are philanthropists.

A spokesperson for Dr. Michelson did not return a request for comment.

Last month, before the news about Dr. Michelson had come to fruition, Dr. Soon-Shiong became aware of the story and contacted Mr. Merida to express his displeasure, the people said. Dr. Soon-Shiong told Mr Merida he did not believe the newspaper should continue with the article.

Mr. Merida conveyed Dr. Soon-Shiong to editors including Scott Kraft, a managing editor, and Jeff Bercovici, the business editor, the people said. The editors agreed to keep Mr. Merida informed about the article, which the newspaper continued to work on. Mr Bercovici was fired this month.

At one point Dr. Soon-Shiong for a draft of the article, which Mr. Merida deemed inappropriate, the people said. Dr. Soon-Shiong also told Mr. Merida in a phone call that he would fire journalists if he found out they were hiding the completed article from him, the people said.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times said in a statement that Dr. Soon-Shiong did not want the newspaper to be used as a “source of exploitation” in the dispute between Dr. Michelson and the woman who accused him.

“Dr. Soon-Shiong had insisted that the facts be gathered from both sides,” she said. “This request for truthful, factual reporting was made by Dr. Soon-Shiong, no matter who was involved in this “dog bite” story. He simply urged the editors to ensure an investigation was done before publishing a story.

The incident weighed on Mr. Merida, two of the people said. The editor had already had an argument with the Soon-Shiong family over issues including the newspaper's budget. Mr. Merida was willing to possibly resign if the article about Dr. Michelson was ready and Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked its publication, the two people said.

The newspaper has not had a single article about Dr. Michelson published.

Laurence Darmiento, the reporter who worked on the article, said he continued to tell the story. He said he was aware the story was sensitive, like all articles about wealthy Los Angeles residents, adding that his editors never told him to stop working on it.

“Furthermore, I had no first-hand knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes,” Mr. Darmiento said. “Last week, despite all the unrest at The Times, I did some reporting on it.”

Brad Stone, a veteran technology journalist, will become the next editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, the company said Wednesday.

Mr. Stone, 52, was most recently senior executive editor of Bloomberg News' global technology team, which he has led since 2015. He regularly co-hosts the Bloomberg Technology Summit and is the author of several books on big tech companies, including “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.” He was previously a reporter at The New York Times and Newsweek. He will start in the new role immediately.

“Technology is a big part of my background and my identity,” Mr. Stone said in an interview. “We are in a world where companies and executives have many questions about the future, about AI”

Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media company of billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, purchased Businessweek in 2009. It was renamed Bloomberg Businessweek and continued as a weekly print magazine. In recent years, the brand has expanded with podcasts and a TV show.

In November, Bloomberg announced that Businessweek would transition to monthly publication in 2024. Newsroom leaders told staff in a note at the time that “the market for a weekly news magazine has been challenging for some time.”

“But we see demand in both digital and print for the ambitious long-form journalism that Businessweek is now known for,” she added.

David Merritt, Bloomberg's media editorial chief, said in a letter to employees on Wednesday that Mr. Stone would lead Businessweek through the transition and help relaunch the publication's digital products.

“We continue to invest and reinvent and make it a home for the best of what Bloomberg News produces,” Mr. Stone said, adding that Businessweek draws on the work of Bloomberg's 2,700 journalists and analysts around the world.

He said Businessweek stories “tend to be among the top performers on the Bloomberg website and the Bloomberg app.”

Mr. Stone, who will remain based in San Francisco, said he hoped to continue reporting and writing. Since 2010, he has written more than two dozen Businessweek cover stories.

The Los Angeles Times’ top editor, Kevin Merida, told employees Tuesday that he is resigning “after much soul-searching about my career.”

He said his last day would be Friday.

Mr. Merida was named top editor of The Los Angeles Times in 2021. He had previously worked as a top editor at The Washington Post and ESPN.

This is a development story. Check back for updates.