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      in Music

      Maureen Cleave, Pop Journalist and Beatles Confidante, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Cleave’s interview with John Lennon, in which he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” drew worldwide attention.Maureen Cleave, a British journalist who was one of the first music writers to introduce readers to the Beatles, and who recorded John Lennon’s famous observation that the band was “more popular than Jesus,” died on Nov. 6 at her home in Aldeburgh, England. She was 87.Her daughter Dora Nichols confirmed her death. She did not give a cause but said Ms. Cleave had Alzheimer’s disease.When Ms. Cleave began writing the column “Disc Date” for The London Evening Standard in 1961, serious writing about pop music was in its infancy. She helped raise its profile, in columns that featured conversations with luminaries including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Rolling Stones. She became a marquee byline; in 1976, The Standard called her “the writer who gets people to talk about themselves in the way no other writer can match.”But she was best known for her regular reporting on the Beatles, with whom she had a warm relationship, and whom she described affectionately in the newspaper’s pages. Her piece headlined “The Year of the Beatles,” published in The Standard in 1963, was one of the first major newspaper articles about the band.“Their behavior ranges from the preposterous, farcical and impossible to the kindly, thoughtful and polite,” Ms. Cleave wrote. “You are outraged, diverted and charmed. You are never, ever bored.”Her biggest moment stemmed from an interview with Lennon published in March 1966, in which she delved into his thoughts on organized religion. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”Readers, and the rest of the British press, paid little notice. But in July, a month before the Beatles began a tour of the United States, the American magazine Datebook reprinted the interview and provoked a frenzy.Lennon’s remark, which came to be widely known as a claim that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” prompted demonstrations and drew the ire of many American Christians. Lennon was accused of blasphemy — as, by extension, was Ms. Cleave.A Baptist pastor in Cleveland threatened excommunication for members of his parish who attended a Beatles concert. The Ku Klux Klan protested Lennon’s remarks. The Vatican issued a statement condemning the comparison.Lennon apologized — albeit reluctantly — at a news conference during the American tour, under pressure from the band’s manager, Brian Epstein.Paul McCartney said in the multimedia release “The Beatles Anthology” that Ms. Cleave was one of the band’s go-to journalists. “Maureen was interesting and easy to talk to,” he said. Lennon, he added, “made the unfortunate mistake of talking very freely because Maureen was someone we knew very well, to whom we would just talk straight from the shoulder.”Lennon’s line made it into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.The 1966 American tour, fraught with protests and the lingering fear of violence, was the Beatles’ last.Maureen Diana Cleave was born on Oct. 20, 1934, in India, which was part of the British Empire at the time.Her father, Maj. John Cleave, was a British officer stationed in India. Her mother, Isabella Mary Fraser Browne, was a homemaker. She had two sisters.Ms. Cleave attended high school in her mother’s native Ireland after the family returned there.After graduating from St. Anne’s College at Oxford in 1957, Ms. Cleave found a job at The Evening Standard as a secretary.An avid fan of pop music, she pitched a column on the subject to the paper’s editors. That idea became “Disc Date.” She traveled to Liverpool in 1963 to see the Beatles in person.She married Francis Nichols, an Oxford classmate, in 1966, and they later moved to his ancestral home at Lawford Hall in Essex. He died in 2015. Her survivors include their daughters, Dora and Sadie Nichols; their son, Bertie Nichols; and three grandchildren.After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Ms. Cleave continued covering the music scene for The Evening Standard. In a series of articles in the 1970s under the rubric “Maureen Cleave’s Guide to the Young,” she explained the hippie movement to Standard readers and explored the Hells Angels, among other topics.Ms. Cleave was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, after collapsing on a London Underground platform in 1992. She documented her experience with the ailment in The Standard the next year. “The medical profession lagged behind in M.E. awareness,” she wrote; “because there is no test, ergo it doesn’t exist.”“Apart from having it, I knew little about it myself,” she added. She saw homeopathic doctors as well as traditional practitioners in an effort to manage her condition.Among the other topics she explored was women’s fitness. She also wrote profiles of painters, writers and philanthropists.But she also continued publishing reflections on her time with the Beatles. In 2005, she wrote a piece for The Daily Telegraph tied to what would have been John Lennon’s 65th birthday.“Charisma rarely survives the aging process,” she wrote, “but, killed in the prime of life, Lennon remains a very powerful absence.” More

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      in Television

      Gadsby and Netflix Employees Pressure Executive Over Dave Chappelle Special

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      Tensions at Netflix continued to flare on Friday, 10 days after the release of a special by the comedian Dave Chappelle that critics inside and outside the company have described as promoting bigotry against transgender people.Early on Friday, a Netflix star criticized the company and Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive, in a stinging social media post. Later in the day, Netflix said it had fired an employee for sharing documents related to Mr. Chappelle with a reporter, and Mr. Sarandos fielded pointed questions from employees during a companywide virtual meeting.In a rare public rebuke, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby upbraided Mr. Sarandos by name for his defense of Mr. Chappelle. Ms. Gadsby, whose 2017 Netflix special, “Nanette,” earned an Emmy and a Peabody Award, is the most prominent entertainer to criticize Mr. Sarandos and Netflix, which she referred to in an Instagram post as an “amoral algorithm cult.”Mr. Sarandos and Netflix’s other co-chief, Reed Hastings, have been unwavering in their support of Mr. Chappelle, who signed a lucrative multiyear deal with the company in 2016 and has won Emmys and Grammys for his Netflix work. In a note this week, Mr. Sarandos countered the arguments of Netflix staff members who had suggested that Mr. Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” could lead to violence against transgender people, writing that he had the “strong belief that content on-screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”Mr. Sarandos, who joined Netflix two decades ago and became its co-chief executive last year, also said that the company would go to great lengths to “ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story.” He cited inclusive Netflix programs like “Sex Education” and “Orange Is the New Black” as well as Ms. Gadsby’s specials, which also include “Douglas,” released in 2020.In her social media post on Friday, Ms. Gadsby, who is a lesbian, objected to the executive’s references to her in his defense of the company and Mr. Chappelle’s special.Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix specials were critical and popular successes, called the company “amoral” in a social media post on Friday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Hey Ted Sarandos!” Ms. Gadsby wrote. “Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view.”She continued: “You didn’t pay me nearly enough to deal with the real world consequences of the hate speech dog whistling you refuse to acknowledge, Ted.”Netflix declined to comment on Ms. Gadsby’s remarks.At a virtual company meeting that started at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, Mr. Sarandos replied to a series of tough questions from employees, who asked about Mr. Chappelle’s special and how the company had responded to criticisms of it, according to three people with knowledge of the gathering. The event became emotional when several employees were persistent in their questioning of Mr. Sarandos and his support for someone who they feel engages in hate speech, the people said.After the meeting, Netflix said in a statement that an employee had been fired for sharing internal documents pertaining to Mr. Chappelle with the press.“We have let go of an employee for sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company,” the statement said. “We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company.”The documents included private financial information regarding Mr. Chappelle’s Netflix specials that were published this week by Bloomberg, according to a person with knowledge of the termination. The documents included the costs for the specials — $24.1 million for “The Closer” and $23.6 million for Mr. Chappelle’s previous special, “Sticks & Stones” — as well as an internal metric that determines the value of the specials relative to their budgets.Such data is available to Netflix staff but rarely made public. The appearance of the statistics in a published article is a further sign of how deep the schism is between some Netflix employees and company leadership.Several organizations, including GLAAD, which monitors the news media and entertainment companies for bias against the L.G.B.T.Q. community, have criticized Mr. Chappelle’s special as transphobic. A group of Netflix workers has planned a walkout for next week in protest.Nicole Sperling More

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      in Movies

      Netflix Employee Who Criticized Dave Chapelle Is Among 3 Suspended

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      Netflix recently suspended three employees, including a transgender employee who posted a Twitter thread last week criticizing a new Dave Chappelle stand-up special on the streaming service as being transphobic.The employees were suspended after they attended a virtual business meeting among top executives at the company that they had not been invited to, a person familiar with the decision said on Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter. Netflix said in a statement that the transgender employee, Terra Field, was not suspended because of the tweets critical of Mr. Chappelle’s show.“It is absolutely untrue to say that we have suspended any employees for tweeting about this show,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. “Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly, and we support their right to do so.”Mr. Chappelle’s comedy special, “The Closer,” debuted on Netflix on Tuesday, and was quickly criticized by several organizations, including GLAAD, for “ridiculing trans people.” Jaclyn Moore, an executive producer for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” said last week that she would not work with Netflix “as long as they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content.”Ms. Field, who is a software engineer at Netflix, tweeted last week that the special “attacks the trans community, and the very validity of transness.”On Monday, after news of her suspension went public following a report by The Verge, she tweeted: “I just want to say I appreciate everyone’s support. You’re all the best, especially when things are difficult.”As criticism of Mr. Chappelle’s special began last week, Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos sent a memo to employees defending the comedian.“Several of you have also asked where we draw the line on hate,” Mr. Sarandos wrote in the memo. “We don’t allow titles on Netflix that are designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe ‘The Closer’ crosses that line. I recognize, however, that distinguishing between commentary and harm is hard, especially with stand-up comedy which exists to push boundaries. Some people find the art of stand-up to be meanspirited, but our members enjoy it, and it’s an important part of our content offering.”Mr. Sarandos also cited Netflix’s “longstanding deal” with Mr. Chappelle and said the comedian’s 2019 special, “Sticks & Stones,” was also “controversial” and was “our most watched, stickiest and most award-winning stand-up special to date.”In 2019, Netflix was criticized when it blocked an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s topical show, “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj,” in Saudi Arabia after the kingdom’s government made a request for it to do so. In the episode, Mr. Minaj criticized the Saudi Arabian government and questioned the role of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.“We’re not in the news business,” Netflix’s co-chief executive Reed Hastings said in 2019, explaining the decision. “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.” More

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      in Movies

      Bobby Zarem, ‘Superflack’ and Maker of Stars, Dies at 84

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      As a spirited impresario of public relations, he promoted entertainers, films and the “I Love New York” tourism campaign.Bobby Zarem, the exuberant press agent who fulfilled his childhood fantasies by catching rising stars and promoting them to stellar careers, died early Sunday morning at his home in Savannah, Ga. He was 84.His death was confirmed by Bill Augustin, a longtime colleague, who said the cause was complications of lung cancer.A gregarious and ingratiating Yale graduate, Mr. Zarem lasted barely 18 months on Wall Street before stumbling into a career as an indefatigable show business promoter.A largely affable Barnum, he cannily cultivated a symbiotic bond with reporters, greeted favored guests at his parties by obsequiously dropping to his knees and kissing their hands, and gushed with joyful benevolence one moment only to unleash a vitriolic but lyrical X-rated tirade the next, prompted by a perceived slight or an underling’s lapse.Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.Mr. Zarem with Michael Douglas in 2010. Mr. Douglas was one of Mr. Zarem’s many celebrity clients.Dave Allocca/Starpix/ShutterstockHe also played a role in initiating the “I Love New York” tourism campaign — although just how much of a role is unclear; he was one of a number of people who claimed credit for originating the slogan (the logo was designed by Milton Glaser).He was hired by William S. Doyle, the state’s deputy commerce commissioner, and said he recruited the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency to produce a television advertising campaign starring Broadway celebrities.He also promoted his own birthplace, transforming John Behrendt’s true-crime book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) into a tourism magnet for Savannah. He helped launch a film festival there in 1998 and retired there in 2010.Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times called him “Super Flack.” Spy magazine characterized him as “preternaturally energetic.” Marion Meade wrote in her biography “The Unruly Life of Woody Allen” (2000) that Mr. Zarem was “fueled by an inexhaustible tank of hot air.”And Hal Erickson, likening him to the fading publicist he inspired who was played by Al Pacino in the film “People I Know,” wrote in his book “Any Resemblance to Actual Persons” (2017) that Mr. Zarem “never worried about getting into heaven as long as he could get his people into print.”Like his theatrical clients, Mr. Zarem could deftly switch roles: from the choleric control freak grappling with the last-minute glitches in staging an event to the chivalrous host greeting every guest like a best friend.He wanted badly to be liked, but he could develop a grudge when he wasn’t.Mr. Zarem feuded venomously with the columnist Liz Smith in the 1980s after he discovered that she was writing a separate syndicated column under a pseudonym, Robin Adams Sloan, that denigrated his clients.In contrast to many of his less gregarious colleagues, Mr. Zarem’s own boldfaced name punctuated gossip columns nearly as frequently as his clients’.But despite his personal visibility, Mr. Zarem insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 2001 that his career “was for a long time hurt because I didn’t promote myself.”“People don’t know half of what I’ve done because I’m not a bragger,” he had told The Times four years earlier. He added, though, that while most of his competitors were “handlers or caterers,” he himself had “elevated publicity to an art form.”He regularly dined at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side (where he said he introduced Mia Farrow to Woody Allen), helped organize an annual Oscar-night gala (“Almost everybody here is somebody,” he said at one event), and, in an era of antiseptic tweets, was known for sending personalized handwritten notes.Endowed with a discerning eye that could identify potential stars, Mr. Zarem delivered on his boyhood dreams.“I sit here now,” he said in an interview with South magazine in 2017, “and I realize that everything I fantasized about became real.”Robert Myron Zarem was born on Sept. 30, 1936, in Savannah, the youngest of three sons in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Harry, owned a wholesale shoe company. His mother, Rose (Gold) Zarem, was a pianist.“I’ve had major identity problems all my life because I’m obsessed with meeting stars,” he told The Times in 1997When he was 8, he said, he and a friend cut Sunday-school classes to collect an autograph from the tempestuous actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was staying at a Savannah hotel.They planned and executed an elaborate subterfuge — learning her room number from a bellhop who worked for Bobby’s father; walking up eight flights to avoid the elevator operator; knocking on the door and refusing to be cowed when she shrieked, “Go away! I don’t sign autographs”; and then sneaking in behind a maid’s breakfast cart, prompting Miss Bankhead to lob a newspaper at them.Many years later, as a prominent publicist, he encountered Miss Bankhead and made one more fruitless effort. He was equally unsuccessful. “I still don’t sign autographs,” she said.He would continue to collect them, though. Before his father died of cancer when Bobby was 13, he would accompany him when he came to New York for treatment at a New York hospital. They would stay at the Waldorf Astoria, where Bobby would forage for famous guests.After his father died, he told Hamptons magazine, “I was scared to get close to anybody out of fear that that person, too, would disappear.”Despite a lifelong struggle with attention deficit disorder that made reading demanding, he followed his two older brothers to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and then to Yale, where he graduated in 1958. (Danny Zarem, a fashion retailer, died in 2013. Dr. Harvey Zarem, a plastic surgeon, died in 2015. No immediate family members survive.)After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science, he worked for the United States Trust Company in New York; served briefly in the Air National Guard; was hired by Columbia Artists Management; and, starting in 1968, discovered his gift as a publicist while working for the producer Joseph E. Levine.In 1969 he went to work for Rogers & Cowan, the public relations firm, where his client roster included Dustin Hoffman. He opened his own agency, Zarem Inc., in 1974.Mr. Zarem, a workaholic, never married and didn’t drink, although he smoked marijuana to relax. He cultivated a devil-may-care style in untucked shirts and New Balance sneakers, but that style belied a fierce temper.The publicist Peggy Siegal, who once worked for him, swore that Mr. Zarem lobbed a typewriter at her when she erred in taking a phone message. (He responded that he wouldn’t have missed at such short range.) Mr. Schwarzenegger recalled in his 2012 memoir, “Total Recall,” that Mr. Zarem “always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end.”He bemoaned the current state of public relations, he told New York magazine in 2010, because the warp speed of digital media pre-empted what to a pro like him was a fine-tuned battle plan of leaks and exclusive stories.About the state of the art as he practiced it, Mr. Zarem noted, “Nobody knows what a press agent does, and if you’re smart, you keep it that way.”He claimed that he had gained self-awareness after more than three decades of analysis with Dr. Samuel Lowy, a psychiatrist who specialized in interpreting dreams. Mr. Zarem concluded that he promoted other people to magnify his own self-image.“I think that’s why I did what I did,” he told Hamptons magazine. “Not feeling that I had anything to communicate, I felt that if I made the rest of the world accept Dustin Hoffman and Ann-Margret and Cher, and all these people, then I would be accepted.”In retrospect, he said, he saw his role in the “I Love New York” campaign as a breakthrough.“My therapist once told me, ‘Anyone who saved the single greatest metropolis can’t be that screwed up,’” Mr. Zarem said. “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel the need to jump out a window if someone cancels dinner on me. Now I know who and what I am.” More

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      in Television

      Lloyd Dobyns, Co-Anchor of an Innovative TV Newscast, Dies at 85

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      He teamed with Linda Ellerbee on “NBC News Overnight” in 1982 to set an unusual tone for network news in an equally unusual time slot.Lloyd Dobyns, an award-winning NBC News correspondent who in the early 1980s was the co-anchor of the innovative television newscast “NBC News Overnight,” died on Sunday in Mebane, N.C., northwest of Raleigh. He was 85.His son Kenneth said the cause was complications of a series of strokes.Mr. Dobyns worked for NBC News in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and won more than two dozen awards for reporting, writing and anchoring. He was probably best known for working with Linda Ellerbee on “NBC News Overnight,” the first of several late-night news programs begun by the broadcast networks in an attempt to compete with the 24-hour news coverage introduced in 1980 by CNN.Lloyd Allen Dobyns Jr. was born on March 12, 1936, in Newport News, Va. After serving in the Army, he began his broadcasting career in 1957 as a reporter for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Va. Three years later, he became a news anchor at WAVY-TV, the NBC affiliate in Virginia’s Tidewater area. He later became the station’s news director.In 1969 he moved to New York, where he worked first as managing editor for news at WNEW-TV, then as part of the NBC News team. He was a foreign correspondent before returning to New York to anchor the TV newsmagazine “Weekend,” for which he won a Peabody Award in 1975.Mr. Dobyns set the style for “Weekend” with a wry and witty style as both a writer and a reporter that was later complemented by the equally droll and irreverent Ms. Ellerbee. The two were teamed again in July 1982 for “NBC News Overnight,” which was seen from 1:30 to 2:30 a.m. weekdays and 2 to 3 a.m. Saturdays.Reviewing “NBC News Overnight” for The New York Times in 1982, John J. O’Connor called it “one of the classier new acts in television news” and noted, “Both Mr. Dobyns and Miss Ellerbee take some pride in their writing abilities and, more than anything else, their collaborations in this area lend the program its appealing personality.”But the program’s ratings were poor, and NBC canceled it in November 1983. “It was our finest hour of news and remains the model for an hour news product,” Reuven Frank, the president of NBC News, said at the time. “But merely being best is not enough when the cost is so much greater than the income.” (Mr. Dobyns had left by then to anchor the NBC newsmagazine “Monitor,” which also had a short life because of low ratings.)In a statement, Ms. Ellerbee called Mr. Dobyns “a friend, teacher, troublemaker, and a world-class journalist.”Mr. Dobyns retired from NBC in 1986 and later taught journalism at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Ala.In addition to his son Kenneth, he is survived by his wife, Patti; two daughters, Denise and Alison; and eight grandchildren. Another son, Brian, and a brother, Norman, died before him.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      A Rush of News: Behind The New York Times's Live Coverage

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      When readers need information immediately, teams of journalists collaborate to tell a single unfolding story.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.When the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan began accelerating with stunning speed, The New York Times quickly shifted into live coverage mode: Reporters and editors posted developments as they happened on the collapse of Kandahar, the disintegration of the Afghan military, the global response to the U.S. government’s actions and more, all packaged together.The live coverage format, which allows journalists to share the news as they learn it, has become a familiar one at The Times for reporting big events. So far this year, the newsroom has published more than 800 live stories, each consisting of a series of dispatches and updates that together can amount to thousands of words. On a typical day, The Times publishes four live packages — on the coronavirus, politics, business news and extreme weather — but there have been days with as many as eight.In the middle of it all is the Live team, a unit of about a dozen reporters and editors that was formed at the beginning of the year to collaborate with desks across the newsroom in creating and executing breaking news coverage.The Times has outgrown its role as a New York-centric print newspaper, Marc Lacey, an assistant managing editor who leads the Live team, said. It is now a global digital news organization that also produces podcasts, videos and newsletters along with a newspaper — the investment in the Live team is just the latest step in its continuous evolution, he added.“I want people all over the world to think about us when a big story breaks,” he said. “Whether it’s in Times Square or Tiananmen Square or somewhere in between.”Front-page news events — wildfires, the earthquake in Haiti, the resignation of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — are obvious candidates for live coverage. But The Times has offered live coverage of the Grammy Awards, the National Spelling Bee, the Olympics, even Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.“Anything people want to know information about immediately is a good fit,” Traci Carl, one of two deputy editors on the Live team, said.Live stories are anchored by beat reporters who are experts on their subject matter, and the Live team works as a group of consultants to other departments. Its journalists will offer ideas, troubleshoot problems, assist in reporting and editing, and at times create or manage a live story. “We act as a support system for desks,” Ms. Carl said. “We help them get a team in place and advise on the best approaches, but we don’t want to run their coverage.”While The Times’s Express desk, another unit of reporters and editors, initially responds to many breaking news stories, the Live team, working with other departments, focuses on setting up live coverage. Express reporters are frequently critical in contributing to live coverage as other desks like International and National dispatch correspondents to the scene.The Times mainly uses two types of live formats. A fast-moving blog, in which the latest information appears at the top, allows for short comments by reporters interspersed with concise reported items, a format used for the Derek Chauvin trial and the Emmy Awards. Briefings, which have an index of their entries at the top, “are more of a synthesis of a big story, a little higher altitude,” Mr. Lacey said.“A blog is like a fire hose of news,” Melissa Hoppert, a deputy editor for the Live team, said. “A briefing is a curated experience with takeaways at the top: Here’s what you need to know if you read only one thing on the subject all day.”The Times has experimented with live blogs for about a decade, and it turned to live coverage to report on momentous events like the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. The Times published its first daily coronavirus briefing on Jan. 23, 2020, and has not stopped since, making it the organization’s longest running 24-hour live briefing.The reader demand for live coverage, especially the coronavirus briefing, which recently surpassed 900 million page views, led The Times to create the Live team.Producing the daily live briefings requires collaboration among dozens of editors, reporters and researchers around the world: The coronavirus briefing, for instance, is a 24-hour relay involving multiple time zones and three hubs in Seoul, South Korea; London; and New York.The editors overseeing the briefings stay in constant contact through video conferences as well as email, multiple encrypted apps, internal chat groups and Google Docs.“It’s intense,” Ms. Hoppert said of working a briefing shift during a fast-breaking news event. “You’re essentially figuring out what’s going on at the same time readers are.” More

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      in Movies

      Joe Galloway, Decorated Vietnam War Correspondent, Dies at 79

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      He chronicled the first major battle of the war in “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” and raised questions about the invasion of Iraq.Joe Galloway, a war correspondent whose wrenching account of the first major battle of the Vietnam War was the basis for the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” which became a best seller and the basis of a hit movie, died on Wednesday in Concord, N.C. He was 79.His wife, Dr. Grace Liem, said the cause was complications of a heart attack.Mr. Galloway started in journalism at 17 and worked for 22 years as a war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International. He was the only civilian awarded a medal of valor by the Army for combat action in the Vietnam War.He later wrote for U.S. News & World Report and for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. He played a vital role in the skeptical reporting by the chain’s Washington bureau about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, claims the administration used to justify the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.“He hates war, and he loves soldiers,” Lewis Lord, a former colleague at U.S. News, told the Military Writers and Editors Association when it honored Mr. Galloway in 2006 on his return to his home in Texas from his reporting base in Washington.Mr. Galloway and Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore collaborated on a wrenching account of the first major battle in Vietnam, published in 1992.In the foreword to “We Are Soldiers Still,” a sequel to “We Were Soldiers,” General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led allied forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, called Mr. Galloway “the finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”Mr. Galloway, who carried a weapon while covering the Vietnam War as a U.P.I. correspondent, was embedded with American troops during the four-day battle of Ia Drang, in the jungle of the Central Highlands, which began a day after his 24th birthday in 1965. He was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with the “V” device, denoting heroism, for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire during the engagement.Both sides claimed victory, with the United States convinced it could win a war of attrition and North Vietnam confident it could withstand whatever technological advantage the Americans wielded over Vietnamese guerrillas.The U.S. troops were commanded by Harold G. Moore, then a lieutenant colonel and later a lieutenant general, with whom Mr. Galloway would collaborate on “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.” The book was published in 1992 and adapted 10 years later into the Randall Wallace film “We Were Soldiers,” starring Mel Gibson, in which Barry Pepper played Mr. Galloway.Nicholas Proffitt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young” was “a car crash of a book; you are horrified by what you’re seeing, but you can’t take your eyes off it.”Mr. Galloway and Lieutenant General Moore published “We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam” in 2008.Articles by Mr. Galloway reconstructing the battle, which became the basis of the first book, won a National Magazine Award for U.S. News & World Report in 1991.As a result of Mr. Galloway’s critical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld summoned him to a meeting with high-ranking officers and accused him of relying on sources who were retired and out of the loop. As John Walcott, a colleague of his at U.S. News, Knight Ridder and McClatchy (which bought Knight Ridder), recalled, Mr. Galloway startled the group by declaring that some of his sources “might even be in this room.”He later admitted that he only said that to rattle the assembled military brass, and that “it was fun watching ’em sweat.” Mr. Galloway was an author, along with other U.S. News staff members, of “Triumph Without Victory: The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War” (1992). His coverage of the later Persian Gulf conflict was portrayed in Rob Reiner’s film “Shock and Awe” (2017), in which Tommy Lee Jones played Mr. Galloway.In the 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers Once,” based on their book, Barry Pepper, left, played Mr. Galloway and Mel Gibson played General Moore, who was a lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War.Stephen Vaughan/Paramount PicturesJoseph Lee Galloway Jr. was born on Nov. 13, 1941, in Refugio, Texas, to Joseph Galloway Sr. and Marian (Dewvell) Galloway. His father worked for Humble Oil.Less than a month after he was born, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four of his mother’s brothers went to war; so did his father and five of his brothers.“I did not meet my father until the end of 1945, when he came home from the service,” Mr. Galloway said in an interview seen on C-SPAN. “My earliest memories,” he added, “are of living in houses full of frightened women looking out the window for the telegraph boy.” He was so affected by the war, he said, that he decided to become a war correspondent.He was hired by The Advocate in Victoria, Texas, when he was 17, joined U.P.I. at 19 and was bureau chief or regional manger in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi, Singapore, Moscow, Los Angeles and Vietnam, where he served four stints.In addition to Dr. Liem, whom he married in 2012, he is survived by two sons, Joshua and Lee, from his first marriage, to Theresa Magdalene Null, who died in 1996. (His second marriage, to Karen Metsker, ended in divorce.) He is also survived by a stepdaughter, Li Mei Gilfillan; three grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. He lived in Concord.Mr. Galloway acknowledged that when he arrived in Vietnam, most of what he knew about war he had learned from John Wayne movies, but he understood the need for accuracy in a combat zone. “You really don’t want to screw up a story about men who are armed and dangerous and who you will likely see again,” he said in an interview with historynet.com.He was also torn about reporting his doubts about American prospects for an honorable exit strategy.“I thought, ‘This war we can’t win, but I’m not going to say that, because I don’t want to hurt my friends, the soldiers who are fighting this war.’” he recalled. “You know the one thing about soldiers is that if they are in combat and they are losing their friends and buddies, you can’t tell them that they died for nothing. You can’t say that; you wound them, you hurt them, you damage them. And that I could not do.”Still, he said, he wished he could have “written a story so powerful about that battle” that it would have driven President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw.Mr. Lord, his former colleague, described Mr. Galloway as “a most unlikely antiwar activist — a big, blunt Texan, proud to bear arms, as politically incorrect as he could be, full of unprintable epithets and anecdotes.” But, he added, Mr. Galloway “had a heart as big as his home state, a superb intellect that shone mischievously through smiling Irish eyes, and an openness that made it possible for him to conclude that it was an unpardonable sin to send young Americans to fight meaningless wars.”Mr. Galloway’s view of war came through when he responded to criticism from the Pentagon after he profiled a retired Marine general who had critiqued Mr. Rumsfeld’s conduct of the Iraq war.In an email exchange, Mr. Rumsfeld’s spokesman maintained, “We’re all hard at it, trying to do what’s best for the country.” So was he, Mr. Galloway replied, during four decades of covering America’s valiant warriors.“Someone once asked me if I had learned anything from going to war so many times,” Mr. Galloway told the Pentagon spokesman. “My reply, ‘Yes, I learned how to cry.’” More

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      Times Analyzed 3,000 Videos of Capitol Riot for Documentary

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More