And so, after five years in France, it came time for Adam Gopnik to leave. As The New Yorker‘s Paris correspondent, he’d covered the trial of a former secretary-general for complicity in war crimes during the Nazi occupation and the media circus that ensued (“a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove”). He’d spoken with chefs on the state of haute cuisine and watched the city shut down as mailmen and metro workers went on strike. His journalism was good, but his personal essays on foreign culture—the comedies of difference between Paris and New York City life—were especially well received.

The local gym was a far cry from its American counterpart, it turned out. A single weekly visit was considered disciplined. In “The Rookie,” he’d tried to explain baseball to his son, Luke—there were, understandably, few local teams—mythologizing its rules and rivalries for added amusement. And in a recurring Gopnik theme, he would visit Luxembourg Gardens, with its carousels and puppet shows, relics of old-world living. “You grasp more of French life by seeing how they birth a baby than by following election returns,” he explained. Paris to the Moon, a collection from his five-year correspondence, is now an international bestseller.

But in 2000, it was time to go home. He and his wife had a newborn daughter, and the couple wanted to send their son to a New York school. Meanwhile, Gopnik had grown wary of repeating himself. “Your readers know it even if they can’t put their finger on what it is,” he says. “The moment I thought self-consciously about how I would engineer a little comedy of difference”—learning how to drive, for example—”that’s shtick.”

When the 55-year-old author and essayist writes about himself, he’s not really the subject. We don’t read Adam Gopnik to hear about him, but to hear from him—what he thinks and how the world looks through his eyes. His comic sentimental essays are not merely inward-looking observations; he avoids self-indulgence in pursuit of a greater truth. He excels at this style of writing—and yet, he is ready to move on. His children are getting older, their experiences no longer his to share. And so he writes about them less. Where he once documented the death of his daughter’s fish or his young son’s linguistic errors, he now draws connections between Darwin and Lincoln instead. And just as he left Paris, in part, fearful of shtick, he’d rather not be typecast as the man who primarily writes about his kids.

In the prime of his career, he no longer hesitates to call himself an essayist, and has set his sights on a higher standard defined by The New Yorker‘s early literary greats—a difficult goal for any writer to achieve. His focus has shifted to grander, more humanist subjects, from information overload to the history of romanticized winter. But in becoming an old-school essayist, there is certainly an element of risk. On the one hand, readers are enthusiastic about long-form writing again in a way that no one could have predicted. Online sites such as Longreads exist for the sole purpose of finding the best in-depth stories on the web. On the other, a declining print industry means smaller budgets and fewer features, things once in abundance for essayists of old. And perhaps most importantly, there is no guarantee that new readers will take to Gopnik’s style, or that it will succeed in any enduring way. But if a classical revival is what Gopnik wants, there might not be a better time than now.

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here. 

Matthew Braga talks about his profile “Classic Gopnik” in the Summer 2012 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Freeloaders, it’s time to pay up. That’s the message being sent by The New York Times, anyhow, as the paper announced yesterday it was changing the number of free articles visitors to the website could access each month.

When the paywall was first introduced in March of last year,the Times said that visitors to the paper’s website could access up to 20 articles per month free. This number has now been decreased to 10. When the limit has been reached, users can pay $15 per month for web and mobile access, $20 for web and tablet access, and $35 for access to all three.

It’s easy to forget that newspapers aren’t all words and type—there are, in fact, large armies of software developers and engineers working behind the scenes to develop the mobile apps and websites you see online. Take The Guardian, for instance, which has over 40 employees on its software team alone.

Every once in a while, The Guardian turns its collective brainpower to experimental tasks—so-called “hack days” that provide a reprieve from everyday routine. The purpose of a hack day is to prototype new methods of interpreting and displaying the vast amounts of data published on The Guardian‘s website. At other papers, such as The New York Times, some of these hacks have actually become full-fledged features or products, such as the newspaper’s impressive HTML5 newsreader.

At first glance, Beta620 sounds especially nefarious—perhaps, the name of a chemical substance that will turn us all into Republicans, or a Bond movie plot to destroy United Nations HQ. But in truth, it’s the code name for The New York Times’ experimental projects group. That such a group even exists is a sign that the direction and scope of the journalism industry is shifting, that it’s no longer enough to simply report on the issues of the day, but present and interpret them in a meaningful way. Of course, it probably helps that the projects created by the group are actually quite cool too.

The latest, according to a Nieman Lab post on the subject:

In the summer 2012 masthead’s first episode, Torontoist editor-in-chief Hamutal Dotan talks about her most extreme city council meeting.