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After completing my doctorate in sociology and teaching at the University of Virginia, I looked forward to advancing my career in academia. But life had other plans, and I accepted offers to write histories and biographies under contract with individuals and organizations in my home state of Oklahoma. So, following both my muse (for the record, that’s Clio, the muse of history) and amazing book-writing opportunities, I became a dual citizen of Virginia and Oklahoma. These days, I write history and biography, seasoned with sociological imagination, in my home office just down the road from Monticello. Somehow, Jefferson makes it into almost all of them!
As a former professor of sociology and media studies at the University of Virginia, I was (and, of course, remain!) interested in the history of communication. In this book, I discovered the backstory to the creation of well-known documents that fueled the American Revolution and fostered lively debate in the ensuing decades.
I also enjoyed reading about writers, publishers, and printers (often, one and the same) whose literary works raised mudslinging to an art form and deepened divisions that threatened to upend the grand experiment of democracy in its infancy. But somehow, the incendiary press of the late eighteenth century became “the basis of a humane and enduring society.”
Infamous Scribblers is a perceptive and witty exploration of the most volatile period in the history of the American press. News correspondent and renonwned media historian Eric Burns tells of Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Sam Adams,the leading journalists among the Founding Fathers of George Washington and John Adams, the leading disdainers of journalists and Thomas Jefferson, the leading manipulator of journalists. These men and the writers who abused and praised them in print (there was, at the time, no job description of "journalist") included the incendiary James Franklin, Ben's brother and one of the first muckrakers the high minded…
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.
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.
The well-known columnist blends personal reminiscence, historical reportage, interviews, and social analysis in an authoritative history of "Life" magazine and its unique thirty-six-year history
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.
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.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
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.
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.
Gruley writes of the 25-year struggle between the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press--two proud, family-owned newspapers that became pawns in the hands of the largest newspaper chains of our time, Gannett and Knight-Ridder. A tale of greed and power, of Wall Street and the courts.
I’m the award-winning and bestselling author of four books about human-ing and healing. I’ve been featured in Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, GMA. CNN, CBS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and more. My books have been translated into sixteen languages and endorsed by notable authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert; Vikas Swarup; and Sanjiv Chopra, MD, Harvard Medical School. As a writing mentor, I work closely with authors to help them get their own words into books. I live with my beautiful wife and bad cat in New York City, where we all spend most of our time planning our next meals and next adventures.
For creatives, this book is the move. Many writers who find themselves in reading lulls, also find themselves in writing lulls. Over the last two decades, writing professor Susan Shapiro has taught more than 25,000 students of all ages and backgrounds at NYU, Columbia, Temple, The New School, and Harvard University. And now the content from her wildly popular course “Instant Gratification Takes Too Long” is in this book for everyone who wants to get published fast, and with all the best secrets of the trade.
Byline Bible is full of advice for writers on how to break into publishing, but also includes tons of essays and pieces published by Susan Shapiro’s students, which make for great reading in and of themselves.
Newspaper, magazine, and web editors are desperate for new voices and anyone, in any field, can break in. So why not you?
Over the last two decades, writing professor Susan Shapiro has taught more than 25,000 students of all ages and backgrounds at NYU, Columbia, Temple, The New School, and Harvard University. Now in The Byline Bible she reveals the wildly popular "Instant Gratification Takes Too Long" technique she's perfected, sharing how to land impressive clips to start or re-launch your career.
In frank and funny prose, the bestselling author of 12 books walks you through every stage of crafting…
My name is Susan Blumberg-Kason and I write books about strong women who have a strong sense of place. I think we are all partly defined by where we live and I enjoy examining how our environment informs our choices. My first book centers around someone I know very well—me! My memoir, Good Chinese Wife, takes place in my favorite city—Hong Kong—the place where I came of age and married for the first time, as well as China and a few cities in the US. I’m also a sucker for a good cover and I absolutely love my Good Chinese Wife cover!
This cover completely drew me in because the typewriter,
cityscape, and WWII airplanes all show an urgency and a story just waiting to be
told. Cohen writes about prominent WWII foreign correspondents, including
Dorothy Thompson and Frances Fineman, who travel the world in search of the
latest war update. It was certainly not as easy to get from country to country
back then—especially across vast oceans—so I really appreciated their
determination to travel.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism
“High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, BookPage
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles,…
I’m the author of a number of books for kids and teens, many of which imagine young characters having more influence than you might expect. My book The Museum of Lost and Found is about an 11-year-old girl who secretly curates a museum. The Campaign is about a 12-year-old who runs her babysitter’s campaign to become mayor of their town. And This Song Will Save Your Life is about a 16-year-old who secretly becomes an underground DJ. These characters have realistic and relatable kid problems, emotions, and relationships—but they also get to have responsibilities and power well beyond their years.
One of the things I like about this type of book is that the main characters often have a secret identity.
To their classmates or teachers or parents, they’re just an ordinary kid—but when they’re not being watched, they’re doing something important and impactful. I love the tension of worrying that their secret identity might get found out. In this series, the main character’s secret identity is that she’s an accomplished and influential restaurant critic and no one knows, not even her parents.
“A scrumptious gem of a story!”—Jennifer A. Nielsen, New York Times bestselling author of The False Prince
Meet Gladys Gatsby: New York’s toughest restaurant critic. (Just don’t tell anyone that she’s in sixth grade.)
Gladys Gatsby has been cooking gourmet dishes since the age of seven, only her fast-food-loving parents have no idea! Now she’s eleven, and after a crème brûlée accident (just a small fire), Gladys is cut off from the kitchen (and her allowance). She’s devastated but soon finds just the right opportunity to pay her parents back when she’s mistakenly contacted to write a restaurant review for…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
Some books center on an argument, some focus on narrative, and some revolve around characters. What impressed me about this book is that it does all three remarkably well.
I was amazed to learn how some of the most powerful publishers in the U.S. and U.K. either dismissed the Nazi threat or (like Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail) openly cheered for Hitler.
It also helps that the five men and one woman included in this “axis” all had fascinating backgrounds and quirky personalities, which Olmsted presents in wonderfully concise sketches.
How six conservative media moguls hindered America and Britain from entering World War II
"A damning indictment. . . . The parallels with today's right-wing media, on both sides of the Atlantic, are unavoidable."-Matthew Pressman, Washington Post
"A first-rate work of history."-Ben Yagoda, Wall Street Journal
As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the…
I’ve been fascinated by the news media and technology for as long as I can remember. I successfully campaigned for a VCR as a five-year-old, and watched multiple news programs with my grandfather growing up. Alongside these interests, I managed to read as many books as I possibly could. I’ve managed to somehow parlay that into a job as a researcher, where I study the news media sector and technological transformation. I read everything on this list while I was writing my latest book, and hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
I had the privilege of talking with Angèle at an event and discussing our different book projects.
The wonderful thing about this book it is reveals that the interaction between technology and journalism is incredibly culturally specific. We tend to think that every newsroom engages with technology in the same way, but Angèle shows that long-standing national journalistic cultures influence how technologies are adopted and used.
The book is also an ethnography, which means that it offers a wonderful insight into the day-to-day practices of the newsroom.
The starkly different ways that American and French online news companies respond to audience analytics and what this means for the future of news
When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists' work practices and professional identities? In Metrics at Work, Angele Christin documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders.
Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms…
"Captain Charles Kennedy" parachuted into a moonlit Austrian forest and searched frantically for his lost radio set. His real name was Leo Hillman and he was a Jewish refugee from Vienna. He was going home. Men and women of Churchill’s secret Special Operations Executive worked to free Austria from Hitler's…
I am a social and legal historian of late 19th and early 20th Century Latin America, and the majority of my work is about the emergence of the middle class. I first got interested in researching dueling because I had the idea that the duel probably played a role in creating and enforcing a social dividing line between the upper elite and the middle class. But once I got immersed in the historical documents I realized how wrong my initial hypothesis had been, how little dueling had to do with social class, and how much it was about maintaining—or sometimes gaming for advantage—the norms of decorum in politics and the press.
Covers some of the same ground as Joanne Freeman, regarding dueling, reputation, politics, and the press in the antebellum U.S.A. But what I really like about this book is how it makes those historical issues relatable to our contemporary era by drawing parallels and connections between the politicized press of the 19th century and present-day debates about free speech in social media. If modern Twitter warriors had lived in the 1800s, they would have needed to know how to handle a sword.
This book argues that dueling should be looked at as a fundamental part of the history of journalism. By examining the nineteenth century Code Duello, the accepted standards under which a duel could be conducted, the author examines the causes of combative responses between journalists. Each chapter examines an aspect of this relationship from the nineteenth century until the present, including the connections between the ritualized aggression of the nineteenth century and the feuding among blog journalists today. A comprehensive bibliography as well as an overview of accepted practices under the Code of Honor as faced by nineteenth century journalists…
