A look at the continuing discussions on Charlie Hebdo, cartoons and satire

It is now one week since the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people were killed, including some of France’s best-known and best-loved cartoonists. We have already covered the immediate responses of the illustration community but in the past seven days so much has been said and written about satire, cartoons, free speech and the subversive magazine that it’s been tricky to try and make sense of it all.

Monocle 24’s dedicated magazine programme The Stack did a good job of coverage on their special edition first broadcast on Saturday, with Private Eye cartoonist Nick Newman and The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon among the guests who gave informed opinions on the impact on satire and magazine journalism. Monocle also spoke to ABC correspondent Jeffrey Kofman who visited the Charlie Hebdo offices back in 2012.

The BBC did a good job with this backgrounder explaining what Charlie Hebdo is and looking at its role in the French media landscape, while there were some nuanced reflections on the attack and its wider repercussions from the photographer Teju Cole in The New Yorker and by Will Self on Vice, neither of whom accepted some of the things we’ve heard parroted by lots of commentators during the past week.

Talking of The New Yorker, art director Françoise Mouly spoke to Public Radio International about how they came to choose Ana Juan’s image from their cover this week. The fact that she’s French and well immersed in the illustration world added particular interest to her comments which you can listen to below.

The new issue of Charlie Hebdo hits the newsstands today, with a reported print run of five million copies (as opposed to 60,000 usually). The Guardian had an in-depth look into how it was put together, including video from a press conference in which the cartoonist who drew this week’s cover explains his thinking.

There has been a great deal of discussion about whether other media outlets should reprint the Charlie Hebdo cover – this article gives a good overview although there’s reams of comment on this topic out there if you’re interested.