As if murder doesn’t take enough from us, PW titles its piece on Steven Vincent, “Posthumous Book Unlikely for Journalist Murdered in Iraq.”
But Spence editor-in-chief Mitchell Muncy said in an interview yesterday that Vincent was still in the research stages when he was killed and likely wouldn’t have committed enough to paper. “I’m not optimistic we’ll have a book out of this,” Muncy said. The only hope is that the author may have had some notes–and that they were well stashed away.
Further down, Muncy also contributes this piece of muddled logic:
The first reporter to die in a targeted killing in Iraq, Vincent generally didn’t travel with a bodyguard. … “His background was as an art critic, so very few media organizations were going to pay for a bodyguard,” Muncy says.
Um, is that because art critics are renowned for their impressive musculature, or because so few media organizations care what happens to their art critics?