Journalism History

A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure's and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm - as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America. Tracing McClure's from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It's also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

Long before the current preoccupation with "fake news", American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant.

Throughout his almost four decades of life on the road, Charles Kuralt has introduced us to people and places that have warmed our hearts. Now in Charles Kuralt's Christmas, he retraces his most memorable Christmas sojourns to remind us of the many marvelous ways that we celebrate this special holiday.

First published in 1959 but now offered in a revised and expanded edition, The View from the Ground presents over six decades of Gellhorn's ruminations on political, civil, and social issues and crises, from a lynching in the American South in the 1930s through a recent visit to Cuba to see what is new and what remains the same in a country that is still off limits to most Americans. Gellhorn's ability to get to the truth of a situation makes her writing transcend the short shelf life of most reportage.

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, twenty-six-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge's order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.

Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere - rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives - are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator.

In Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing the global history of tactics, from modern pioneers right back to the beginning when chaos reigned. Along the way, he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the sport and probes why the English, in particular, have 'proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract'.

The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.

Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller, a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell confronted the company known simply as "The Trust".

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky, and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love.

Reporting on China has long been one of the most challenging and crucial of journalistic assignments. Nonetheless, American media coverage of China has profoundly influenced U.S. government policy and shaped public opinion not only domestically but also, given the clout and reach of U.S. news organizations, around the world. This book tells the story of how American journalists have covered China—from the civil war of the 1940s through the COVID-19 pandemic—in their own words.

In the second half of 2020 and continuing into 2021, protests against racial injustice spread across the United States after the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis Police Department officers. What transpired during this troubled time cast a bright light on the contemporary relationship between the press and police in the United States. The relationship between these two fundamental institutions is, however, a long and complicated one.

In the era of Watergate and rising feminist awareness, reporter Pam Zekman was queen of the muckrakers. Her biggest investigation: buy a bar, document the inevitable city department shakedowns and bribes, and publicly document Chicago’s institutionalized corruption. Her epic story changed Chicago and also raised serious questions about the future of journalism.

The purpose of this insider's account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. Andrew Marr's brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book is a guide to those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more. Andrew Marr tells the story of modern journalism through his own experience.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.

Our insatiable demand for animals - for jewelry, pets, medicine, meat, trophies, and fur - is driving a worldwide poaching epidemic, threatening the continued existence of countless species. Rachel Nuwer, an award-winning science journalist with a background in ecology, takes listeners on a narrative journey to the front lines of the trade: to killing fields in Africa, traditional medicine black markets in China, and wild meat restaurants in Vietnam. Through exhaustive first-hand reporting that took her to 10 countries, Nuwer explores the forces currently driving the demand.

It's December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote Russian village. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren't random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.

In February 1943, a group of journalists - including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney - clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the 64 bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. "I think I’m going to say," mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell."

Sara Daniel, a star European correspondent and one of the few women reporters covering Iraq, dares to venture where few have gone, in this gripping and fascinating memoir. In June of 2002, war looms and Saddam Hussein still has a brutal grip on a nation in disarray. Sara Daniel travels the length and breadth of Iraq, following the fast-evolving events and interviewing people from all walks of life and all religious and political affiliations: from the Kurds in the north to the rising new politicians in Baghdad and beyond....

Writer Michael Tallen is burnt out. He’s been trying to write a novel his whole life but to no avail and is now reduced to churning out ‘fluff piece’ articles for a small-time local paper. Things take an odd turn when Katz, his boss, sends him on a new assignment. For some unknown reason, an elderly woman in town asks for Michael specifically to help her pen a book about her life. Caught off guard and hesitant by this request, his curiosity is piqued when Ruth starts to share her story of growing up in the circus during the 1930’s. He agrees to write her book but soon realizes there...