Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era-from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup-he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life. The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner reintroduces this journalistic giant and his work and shows Lardner to be the rarest of writers: a spot-on chronicler of his time and place who remains contemporary to subsequent generations.

Writing as a newspaper reporter for nearly forty years, Curtis Wilkie covered eight presidential campaigns, spent years in the Middle East, and traveled to a number of conflicts abroad. However, his memory keeps turning home and many of his most treasured stories transpire in the Deep South. He called his native Mississippi, ""the gift that keeps on giving."" For Wilkie, it represented a trove of rogues and racists, colorful personalities and outlandish politicians who managed to thrive among people otherwise kind and generous. Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest collects news dispatches and feature stories from the author during a journalism career that began in 1963 and lasted until 2000. As a young reporter for the Clarksdale Press Register, he wrote many articles that dealt with the civil rights movement, which dominated the news in the Mississippi Delta during the 1960s.Wilkie spent twenty-six years as a national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe. One of the original ""Boys on the Bus"" (the title of a best-selling book about journalists covering the 1972 presidential campaign), he later wrote extensively about the winning races of two southern Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Wilkie is known for stories reported deeply, rife with anecdotes, physical descriptions, and important background details. He writes about the notorious, such as the late Hunter S. Thompson, as well as more anonymous subjects whose stories, in his hands, have enduring interest. The anthology collects pieces about several notable southerners: Ross Barnett; Byron De La Beckwith and Sam Bowers; Billy Carter; Edwin Edwards and David Duke; Trent Lott; and Charles Evers. Wilkie brings a perceptive eye to people and events, and his eloquent storytelling represents some of the best journalistic writing.

Amy Jacques Garvey was one of the most prolific women within any Black nationalist group, yet she has largely only been discussed in relationship to her husband, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and as the editor of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Much of her writing has remained unavailable to the public, lost to the archives, until now. Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923-1928 seeks to fill this void by making her writings in the Negro World widely available for the first time. Editor Louis J. Parascandola compiles a wide swath of Jacques Garvey's work in this groundbreaking collection. Born and educated in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey's atypical opportunity to receive education at elite Jamaican schools, along with her later jobs as a clerk and secretary, prepared her for future positions as journalist and political administrator. She also possessed the rhetorical skills and independent thinking that would help her challenge Marcus Garvey and the other men in Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). In allowing Jacques Garvey's work to largely speak for itself, the volume reveals that she concerned herself with a diversity of important and often controversial political and social issues rather than the stereotypical domestic matters expected of most woman's pages of the time period. By examining her selected writings in the Negro World, this volume affords its readers a better understanding of Jacques Garvey's powerful contribution not only to Garveyism but also to the growth of Black radical thought, anti-imperialist ideology, and the rights of third-world women. This timely study sheds new light on Jacques Garvey's pivotal role as a Black female writer and thinker during the twenties.

Media reform plays an increasingly important role in the struggle for social justice. As battles are fought over the future of investigative journalism, media ownership, spectrum management, speech rights, broadband access, network neutrality, the surveillance apparatus, and digital literacy, what effective strategies can be used in the pursuit of effective media reform? Prepared by thirty-three scholars and activists from more than twenty-five countries, Strategies for Media Reform focuses on theorizing media democratization and evaluating specific projects for media reform. This edited collection of articles offers readers the opportunity to reflect on the prospects for and challenges facing campaigns for media reform and gathers significant examples of theory, advocacy, and activism from multinational perspectives.

Joint winner: Prize for Australian History, 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Awards This award-winning biography is a long overdue reassessment of the iconic Australian war correspondent 'The book I have enjoyed most in recent times has been Ross Coulthart's on the great war correspondent Charles Bean' - Peter FitzSimons, Sun Herald 'Fascinating biography ...strongly recommend it' Hon. Malcolm Turnbull via Twitter Charles Bean's wartime reports and photographs mythologised the Australian soldier and helped spawn the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation-defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe. In his quest to get the truth, Bean often faced death beside the Diggers in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front - and saw more combat than many. But did Bean tell Australia the whole story of what he knew? In this timely new biography, Ross Coulthart investigates the untold story behind Bean's jouralistic dilemma - his struggle to tell Australia the truth but also the pressure he felt to support the war and boost morale at home by suppressing what he'd seen. '[Bean] had an obsession with recording the truth and Coulthart has lived up to his legacy in this superb biography' - Tim Hilferty, Adelaide Advertiser 'This is among the best biographies of an Australian historian available, fittingly released during the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the events Bean meticulously recorded.' - Justin Cahill, Booktopiablog

Allister Sparks joined his first newspaper at age 17 and was pitched headlong into the vortex of South Africa’s stormy politics. The Sword And The Pen is the story of how as a journalist he observed, chronicled and participated in his country’s unfolding drama for more than 66 years, covering events from the premiership of DF Malan to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, witnessing at close range the rise and fall of apartheid and the rise and crisis of the new South Africa.

In trenchant prose, Sparks has written a remarkable account of both a life lived to its full as well as the surrounding narrative of South Africa from the birth of apartheid, the rise of political opposition, the dawn of democracy, right through to the crisis we are experiencing today.

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: Distinction, Swansea University, course: Erasmus Mundus M.A. in Journalism, Media and Globalization (War and Conflict), language: English, abstract: Since the 1970s, commercial pressures on news media organizations have increased and as a result, television news networks have started to adapt marketing and product differentiation strategies from the Hollywood movie industry. So today, even the war and conflict coverage of 24-hour news networks is subject to heavy promotion and part of the networks' advertising and branding campaigns. These commercial aspects of news production, however, seem to oppose concepts of journalistic quality. Conflict coverage promotion and image spots of 24-hour news networks therefore pose a great opportunity to investigate a phenomenon at the cross-roads of both commercial entertainment television and quality journalism. This study analyses claims of journalistic quality and 'high concept' in these spots and how they are linked to better understand the ideological complexes of CNN International and Al Jazeera English. The findings show an equal number of quality and 'high concept' claims with differences in the nature of the claims between the two networks. The way the claims are distributed throughout the modes of visual, voice, sound and music, as well as the way they are linked within and across modes, however, show very similar patterns. These patterns exist for quality and 'high concept' claims as well as for both 24-hour television news networks. The largest number of claims appears in the visual mode. The research also shows that analysing this kind of media text needs to be multimodal and that a social semiotic approach is appropriate for analysing claims-making and linking in conflict coverage promotional spots.

Reporting and Writing on Journalism's New Frontier teaches students the fundamentals of good reporting tactics and gives them a solid command of basic writing techniques. The book emphasizes practical skills a good journalist needs before even beginning to report, explains the kind of stories that work best for each medium, explores good news-gathering habits, and describes successful interviewing tactics. It provides clear guidelines for quality writing including the importance of organizing a story before writing, purging cliches, redundancies, and euphemisms, creating great headlines, and writing with clarity. Individual chapters are devoted to the specific needs of writing for radio, television, and the web. The book also contains sound advice on libel and slander laws that are essential information for avoiding litigation. Reporting and Writing on Journalism's New Frontier is a concise, current, engaging exploration of practical tools and techniques that writers can employ immediately and use every day. The book is designed for multimedia journalism courses.

From an award-winning black journalist, a tough-minded look at the treatment of ethnic minorities both in newsrooms and in the reporting that comes out of them, within the changing media landscape.
From the Rodney King riots to the racial inequities of the new digital media, Amy Alexander has chronicled the biggest race and class stories of the modern era in American journalism. Beginning in the bare-knuckled newsrooms of 1980s San Francisco, her career spans a period of industry-wide economic collapse and tremendous national demographic changes.
Despite reporting in some of the country's most diverse cities, including San Francisco, Boston, and Miami, Alexander consistently encountered a stubbornly white, male press corps and a surprising lack of news concerning the ethnic communities in these multicultural metropolises. Driven to shed light on the race and class struggles taking place in the United States, Alexander embarked on a rollercoaster career marked by cultural conflicts within newsrooms. Along the way, her identity as a black woman journalist changed dramatically, an evolution that coincided with sweeping changes in the media industry and the advent of the Internet.
Armed with census data and news-industry demographic research, Alexander explains how the so-called New Media is reenacting Old Media's biases. She argues that the idea of newsroom diversity--at best an afterthought in good economic times--has all but fallen off the table as the industry fights for its economic life, a dynamic that will ultimately speed the demise of venerable news outlets. Moreover, for the shrinking number of journalists of color who currently work at big news organizations, the lingering ethos of having to be "twice as good" as their white counterparts continues; it is a reality that threatens to stifle another generation of practitioners from "non-traditional" backgrounds.
In this hard-hitting account, Alexander evaluates her own career in the context of the continually evolving story of America's growing ethnic populations and the homogenous newsrooms producing our nation's too often monochromatic coverage. This veteran journalist examines the major news stories that were entrenched in the great race debate of the past three decades, stories like those of Elian Gonzalez, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Tavis Smiley, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and the election of Barack Obama.
"Uncovering Race" offers sharp analysis of how race, gender, and class come to bear on newsrooms, and takes aim at mainstream media's failure to successfully cover a browner, younger nation--a failure that Alexander argues is speeding news organizations' demise faster than the Internet.

"From the Hardcover edition."

At the height of his career, around the time he was working on Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. In the persona of 'the Uncommercial', Dickens wanders the city streets and brings London, its inhabitants, commerce and entertainment vividly to life. Sometimes autobiographical, as childhood experiences are interwoven with adult memories, the sketches include visits to the Paris Morgue, the Liverpool docks, a workhouse, a school for poor children, and the theatre. They also describe the perils of travel, including seasickness, shipwreck, the coming of the railways, and the wretchedness of dining in English hotels and restaurants. The work is quintessential Dickens, with each piece showcasing his imaginative writing style, his keen observational powers, and his characteristic wit. In this edition Daniel Tyler explores Dickens's fascination with the city and the book's connections with concerns evident in his fiction: social injustice, human mortality, a fascination with death and the passing of time. Often funny, sometimes indignant, always exuberant, The Uncommercial Traveller is a revelatory encounter with Dickens, and the Victorian city he knew so well.

Paddy McGuffin turns his bilious wit on a procession of fools, liars, hypocrites and war criminals from David Cameron to the Queen in this collection of his best columns for the Morning Star, the daily socialist newspaper

Launched at the 1982 Notting Hill Carnival, The Voice newspaper captured and addressed a generation figuring out what it meant to be Black and British. Written for and by Black people, the newspaper shone a light on systematic injustices as well as celebrating Black Britain's success stories. From hard hitting news reports covering the murder of Stephen Lawrence to championing the likes of Sir Lewis Hamilton and Idris Elba, the newspaper has campaigned, celebrated and educated people for the last forty years. As well as celebrating amazing successes in sport, politics and the arts, The Voice documented everyday life in the community, from the emergence of a Black middle class in the '90s and the achievements of Black entrepreneurs to how different facets of the community were explored in contemporary music and literature. Since its small beginnings in Hackney, The Voice has also become a fantastic training ground for prominent journalists and figures including former politician Trevor Phillips, broadcaster Rageh Omaar and writer Afua Hirsch. Today, The Voice is Britain's longest running and only Black newspaper. Told through news reports, editorials and readers' personal letters, this emotive book documents the social history of Black Britain over the last four decades. Each chapter is illustrated with amazing newspaper pages from The Voice's extensive archives as well as iconic and dramatic front covers from 1982 to the present day. With a foreword from Sir Lenny Henry and written by former and current Voice journalists, this powerful book is a celebration of the ground-breaking paper which gave a voice to the voiceless.

Carl R. Osthaus examines the southern contribution to American Press history, from Thomas Ritchie's mastery of sectional politics and the New Orleans Picayune's popular voice and use of local color, to the emergence of progressive New South editors Henry Watterson, Francis Dawson, and Henry Grady, who imitated, as far as possible, the New Journalism of the 1880s. Unlike black and reform editors who spoke for minorities and the poor, the South's mainstream editors of the nineteenth century advanced the interests of the elite and helped create the myth of southern unity. The southern press diverged from national standards in the years of sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Addicted to editorial diatribes rather than to news gathering, these southern editors of the middle period were violent, partisan, and vindictive. They exemplified and defended freedom of the press, but the South's press was free only because southern society was closed. This work broadens our understanding of journalism of the South, while making a valuable contribution to southern history.

In Our Stories, author and journalist Ian Wishart brings out the most fascinating forgotten tales of our past, told through the eyes of the people who were there. Read about the tsunamis that washed away the homes and lives of our early European immigrants, or the earthquakes that toppled Christchurch buildings more than a century ago and lifted Wellington out of the sea. Read the real story about the search for gold, or the visiting circuses whose lions and leopards escaped, or the dinosaur found on a Taranaki riverbank (it's still there because it was too big to move ) Discover the heroes and villains of our past through long forgotten news stories from New Zealand, the USA, UK and Australia, and find out how life really was in pioneer days. These, and many more, are our stories...

For nearly ten years John Griswold has been publishing his essays in "Inside Higher Ed," "McSweeney's Internet Tendency," "Brevity," "Ninth Letter," and "Adjunct Advocate," many under the pen name Oronte Churm. Churm's topics have ranged widely, exploring themes such as the writing life and the utility of creative-writing classes, race issues in a university town, and the beautiful, protective crocodiles that lie patiently waiting in the minds of fathers.

Though Griswold recently entered the tenure stream, much of his experience, at a Big Ten university, has been as an adjunct lecturer--that tenuous and uncertain position so many now occupy in higher education. In "Pirates You Don't Know," Griswold writes poignantly and hilariously about the contingent nature of this life, tying it to his birth in the last American enclave in Saigon during the Vietnam War, his upbringing in a coal town in southern Illinois, and his experience as an army deep-sea diver and frogman. He investigates class in America through four generations of his family and portrays the continuing joys and challenges of fatherhood while making a living, becoming literate, and staying open to the world. But Griswold's central concerns apply to everyone: What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to think, feel, create, and be whole? What is the point of this particular journey?

"Pirates You Don't Know" is Griswold's vital attempt at making sense of his life as a writer and now professor. The answers for him are both comic and profound: "Picture Long John Silver at the end of the movie, his dory filled with stolen gold, rowing and sinking; rowing, sinking, and gloating."

Arnie Wilson started hunting down "big names" after being hired by a news agency to telephone titled people and charm them into divulging stories he would sell to Fleet Street gossip columns. But the 'celebrity' landscape was changing. Instead of targeting lords, baronets knights and their ladies, he was determined instead to find 'real' celebrities, persuading them with a combination of cheek, charm and chutzpah to divulge funny and intimate anecdotes for publication. Ten years as an ITV on-screen news reporter reinforced his skill at putting interviewees at their ease, and he started working on many of the columns he had once himself supplied with tales of the famous. Even during 15 years as the Financial Times ski correspondent he kept the gossip tap turned on, interviewing Hollywood stars on the slopes. He chatted to (and sometimes skied with) film stars, rock stars, astronauts, comedians, authors, government ministers, former prime ministers and the odd American president. Although celebrities today are two a penny, he's still at it, chatting to anyone famous he can find.