Morning Brief — Wednesday, July 23

If I have been sending any of you email messages with links to naughty videos of Angelina Jolie, I must apologize.  I send myself these links.  Every morning.  IT needs to add Angie to the list of words/ phrases that get messages flushed to our spam accounts.  Speaking of banned words, did you know “Lolita” raises a red flag?  (I wouldn’t have guessed until I tried pitching a book whose author had performed in a production of Nabokov’s classic and I discovered a number of my pitches weren’t going through.)

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Carole Goldberg at the Hartford Courant is the latest book editor to be laid off, although supposedly book coverage will continue under the features editor.

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The UK Press Gazette reports that American newspapers “turn their back on the world.”  This is news? According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Centre, 64 percent of the newspapers surveyed have slashed foreign news pieces and only 10 percent considered foreign news “essential.”  And we’re fighting how many wars overseas?  Oh this bodes well for coverage of foreign affairs books …