New Books in Journalism

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013) Those six words – If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead – appear on the back cover, on the inside jacket, and in the very first paragraph of the book’s introduction. The authors focus on th...

Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) is the fascinating product of Anderson’s research into the Philadelphia journalism scene during the first decade-pl...

Eric Deggans doesn’t just want to see the media transformed. He has his eye on something even more profound. “The goal is to transform the audience,” he said, “because the audience has the power.” Deggans, media critic for the Tampa Bay Times, is the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The title comes from a 2008 episode of Fox...

“You live in media. Who you are, what you do, and what all of this means to you does not exist outside of media.” So begins Mark Deuze‘s critical look at media, society, and culture, Media Life (Polity Press, 2012). Media are everywhere, and like fish in water, most are blissfully unaware of the very surroundings in which they live. Deuze uses hope to separate his book from many scholarly works on...

It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography, The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop (Lyons Press, 2011), which charts the simultaneous rise of the former President...

One of the hardest jobs in journalism is making sense of conflict. Seeing through the fog of war and through what each side wants you to report is fantastically difficult, before you come across issues such as access, logistics, safety and context. James Rodgers has a deep understanding of why this is so hard because for many years (Reuters TV and BBC) he was one of the journalists who spent time...

In his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (Sentinel HC, 2012), Jonah Goldberg, founding editor of National Review Online and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, analyzes various media strategies used by liberals to “cheat in the war of ideas.” He believes radical ideas are frequently presented swathed in cliches and aphorisms, and attempts to disentangle some...

Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network.  Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate.  Fr...

“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune‘s founder, the cousin of the Tribune‘s editor and the sister of the founder of the New York Daily News, Patterson’s family were said to have ink in their veins and she was no exception....

In his new book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), Tim Groseclose, Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA, discusses his quantitative measurements of political bias in the American news media. Based on years of in-depth studies, he concludes that nearly every mainstream media outlet is skewed to the left of the American elect...

Few places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers, charlatans, showmen and chancers, all shrouded in charcoal smoke from dozens of makeshift food stalls. It feels like a glimpse into a different world in a different age. One part of that different age, however, is dying out. A handful of storytelle...

As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek’s lovely book, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Indiana University Press, 2011), can only give a boost to its campaign. This book is a discrete, yet integrated, collection of narratives from Ahmedabad throughout the twentieth century. The stories t...

In February 2002, British journalist James Brabazon set out to travel with guerrilla forces into Liberia to show the world what was happening in that war-torn country. To protect him, he hired Nick du Toit, a former South African Defence Force soldier who had fought in conflicts across Africa for over three decades. What follows is an incredible behind-the-scenes account of the Liberian rebels kno...

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German; poor but rich. I could go on. It was the unnatural product of the Cold War, so when the Cold War ended...

The modern newspaper is not as old as you think. Until the early nineteenth century, they were thin and expensive. It was only with the advent of the penny press circa 1830 that the truly mass broadsheet was born. Yet selling a paper for a cent was not a straight-forward business proposition. In order to turn a profit, you needed to sell a lot of copy. You won’t be surprised to learn that the best...

Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren’t at all what they appear to have been in hindsight. James Zug‘s wonderfully written The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper (Michigan State UP, 2007) is one such book. For years I studied and wrote about Russia and the Soviet Union. In that time, I came to think of communists as at best horri...

Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. The interview focuses on Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a new book which Dr. Gardner both authored an introduction to and edited. This is the first collection from an African American journalist writing for the San Francisco base...