From my early teens I aspired to a career in journalism and publishing, manifest in my being editor of my junior high newspaper, my high school paper, and my college paper. After the army and grad school, I pursued my dream, covering Washington, D.C., for the Wall Street Journal for a dozen years and becoming an executive at Congressional Quarterly for 22 years, including 12 years as CEO. The great triumphs and struggles of the news business as it grew and evolved have stirred my consciousness throughout my life, and these five books provide some of the best narrative treatments on the topic that I have encountered throughout a lifetime in the publishing business.
I wrote...
A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent
By
Robert W. Merry
What is my book about?
A Country of Vast Designs is the story of James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, and his remarkable one-term presidency, during which he transformed America into a transcontinental nation facing two oceans and poised to dominate global politics in the next century. Polk was in many ways a smaller-than-life figure, but he harbored larger-than-life ambitions. And by dint of his vision, resolve, persistence, wiles, and prodigious work ethic, he accomplished all of the big goals he set for himself, including completing the annexation of Texas and acquiring California, Oregon, and what is now the American Southwest. He also slashed tariff rates (a highly emotional issue in those days) and created what was known as the independent treasury, a forerunner to today’s Federal Reserve.
A highly controversial president in his own time, he remains controversial in history. But presidential historians consistently rate him a “near great” chief executive in the periodic academic surveys of presidential performance. How did he do all that in the single term he allotted for himself? The answer is grist for what I regard as a compelling human and political story.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism
By
Eric Burns
Why this book?
Burns brilliantly tells the story of those first potent American journalists, the pamphleteers, who brought to their craft lively, probing, acerbic, and often angry commentary and reporting. Some ripped into George Washington and the Federalists, thus establishing a tradition of journalism that extends to our own time. Others went after Jefferson and the fledgling Democratic-Republicans. And one, James Callender, broke the story of the now-famous Jefferson dalliance with his slave Sally Hemmings.
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The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune
By
Richard Kluger
Why this book?
This is primarily the story of three newspapers--James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and the merged paper under the ownership of diplomat and politician Whitelaw Reid and his heirs, including his daughter-in-law, Helen Rogers Reid, a firecracker of an executive and woman about town. But it is also a comprehensive story of New York newspapering from the 1830s to the 1960s and about the city and country that served as the focus for news coverage during those decades. It is a poignant tale of soaring triumphs and ultimate decline as new challenges beset the newspaper business and even large cities could no longer support multiple papers.
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The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of LIFE
By
Loudon Wainwright
Why this book?
No other magazine ever burst upon the national scene with as much financial and editorial force as Life, founded by Henry Luce in 1936 to exploit the new technology of high-shutter-speed cameras that could capture events and activities like never before. Luce’s vision (actually, it came initially from his future wife, Clare Boothe Luce) was to stir the human spirit with photos of sports stars in action, the magnitude of huge structures such as the Grand Coulee Dam, a baby being born, the agony of war. With such photography mixed with probing and discursive long-form journalism, Luce transformed American magazine journalism--and got very, very rich in the process.
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Decline and Fall: The struggle for power at a great American magazine: The Saturday Evening Post
By
Otto Friedrich
Why this book?
Before Life there was the Saturday Evening Post, a roaring success capturing the spirit of Middle America at a time when Middle America defined the cultural ethos of the nation. But by the late 1950s the potent reach of television advertising undermined the general-interest magazine business model, and the Post slipped into an inexorable spiral of decline that its top executives could never quite handle or even understand. There’s plenty of pathos and human drama as they struggle with forces beyond their control.
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Paper Losses: A Modern Epic of Greed and Betrayal at America's Two Largest Newspaper Companies
By
Bryan Gruley
Why this book?
The big Detroit newspaper market eventually narrowed down to two newspapers--the News and Free Press--neither of which could knock out the other while neither could turn a profit in a competitive market. This is the story of the struggle of the two greatest newspaper chains--Gannett and Knight-Ridder--to forge a “joint operating agreement” allowing them to merge production and business efforts while retaining separate newsrooms. Few participants cared much about editorial standards as the rush for huge profits drove the process. In the end, it all came a cropper. It’s a sordid tale in many ways but a riveting one.
