Newspaper columnists entertain and inform millions of readers each day, yet their lives and careers have received relatively little attention. This reference offers concise career profiles of some 600 columnists who write or have written for U.S. newspapers. It contains entries for all the giants in the field, plus other syndicated, self-syndicated, and local columnists. Included are columnists who have written on politics, humor, and topics of general interest.

What newspaper columnists have won the Nobel Peace Prize? What political columnist later became president of ABC-TV? What New York Times columnist won an unprecedented four Pulitzer prizes? This reference offers concise profiles of some 600 columnists who write or have written for U.S. newspapers. Included is a wealth of information about these influential writers who inform and entertain millions of Americans each day.

The volume contains entries for the giants in the field, plus other syndicated, self-syndicated, and local columnists. Included are columnists, living or dead, whose works contain fairly general reading matter, including politics and humor. Excluded are those who write columns on specialized topics, such as gardening, bridge, computers, and health. Entries are arranged alphabetically and show how these individuals became columnists and what later career paths many of them followed. When possible, entries conclude with bibliographies of works by and about the columnists.

The figure of the newspaper columnist, which emerged in America in the mid-nineteenth century, plays a key role in modern newspapers. Columnists nowadays add a decidedly personal touch to the newspapers in which they appear--an important consideration in an increasingly impersonal, corporate, no-nonsense medium. This volume provides the most complete look available at the emergence of the columnist and at who the leading columnists have been from the Civil War era to the present. In total, 780 columnists and their work are examined chronologically--according to when their columns first appeared--within several categories: early (1800s), humor, column poets, syndicated political, other syndicated, local, and minority.

This reference book profiles corporate magazines, those sponsored by and produced for a single business firm. Some of these periodicals are internal, aimed at the company's own employees and retirees. Others are mainly external and are directed at a broader audience of stockholders, customers, and readers outside the corporation's immediate family. Still others have a dual role, and target both internal and external audiences. Some of these magazines are quite old--the oldest profiled here dates from 1865. Some have enormous circulations, the largest having reached nearly 12 million bimonthly, though they rarely produce circulation revenue. This is the first book to fully consider this genre of magazine publishing. Journalism and communication scholars examine a representative sample of 52 of these magazines in individual descriptive essays, each with appended publishing history and information sources. Bibliographic information is necessarily limited. Entries are arranged alphabetically and each entry appears in additional appendixes which classify the profiled magazine by founding date and geographic location. An end-of-volume appendix provides brief data on 232 additional magazines.

Consumer magazines have a long history in the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning in the seventeenth century, and a number of them that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are still flourishing. This reference volume offers a representative sample of the current British magazine market, providing detailed profiles of fifty magazines, written mainly by scholars from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and supplementary data on many others. The separately profiled magazines range from the venerable The Scots Magazine (1739), Spectator (1828), Punch (1841), and The Illustrated London News (1842) to relative newcomers of the 1980s such as Country Living (1985), Prima (1986), Q (1986), and House Beautiful (1989). Included are major circulation leaders like Radio Times, Smash Hits, and Woman's Own, prestigious and influential journals like The Economist and New Scientist, regional magazines like Cumbria and The Dalesman, general interest magazines, and a wide variety of magazines in targeted subject or readership categories, like cars, homes, nature, and sports. Each essay consists of a narrative history from the magazine's founding to the present, concluding with information sources and data on periodicity, publishers, locations of the magazines in the United States, editors, title changes, and circulation. Appendixes list the fifty magazines by date of founding and in subject categories; succinct data on 330 additional British consumer magazines appears in a directory. The volume opens with a concise history of British periodicals. Intended specifically for reference use on British journals, this volume will also be useful for research in journalism history and British cultural history.

In Regional Interest Magazines of the United States, Sam G. Riley and Gary W. Selnow focus on those magazines that direct their attention to a particular city or region and reach a fairly general readership intersted in entertainment and information. This work is a follow-up to their earlier Index to "City and Regional Magazines of the United States." Titles are arranged alphabetically to facilitate access; each entry includes a historical essay on the magazine's founding, development, editorial policies, and content. Entries also include two sections that provide data on information sources and publication history, arranged in tabular form for ready reference.

In choosing the magazines to be profiled, Riley and Selnow attempted to represent not only the biggest and most successful of this genre, but also some smaller and newer titles, plus significant earlier magazines that are no longer in print. Special care was also taken to achieve an even geographical spread. To attain greater accuracy, regional writers were enlisted to do the entries on their own region. These writers provide valuable information on how the various magazines began, how conditions have caused them to change, their problems, their editors and publishers, and their content as well as colorful and little known facts of their operation. Magazines were arranged alphabetically, and two informative appendices list the profiled titles by founding date and geographic location. This volume will be a valuable resource for students of magazine publishing history.

This book provides a listing of 920 general-interest consumer magazines that specialize geographically. Comprising this highly active magazine genre are city magazines (i.e., "New York," "Washingtonian"); regional magazines ("Sunset," "Vermont Life"); city speciality magazines ("Houston Home and Garden," "Hartford Woman"), which specialize both geographically and by subject matter; and regional speciality magazines ("Southern Homes," "Virginia Wildlife"). The book's three main sections--arranged alphabetically by title, chronologically by founding date, and geographically by state--cover regional interest magazines that have been in publication since 1950. Each entry in the alphabetical listing shows title, any known title changes, dates of publication, city and state of publication, and a sample of libraries that hold files of the magazine's back issues.

For historical perspective, an appendix provides a representative alphabetical listing of magazines that published and perished prior to 1950 and that identified themselves by city, state, or region. The index's companion volume, "Regional Interest Magazines of the United States" (Greenwood), forthcoming, will contain in-depth profiles of roughly 100 of these magazines. This unique reference source will make a valuable addition to any library.

"Recommended on all levels, particularly for those libraries with southern collections and journalism holdings." Choice

This balanced examination looks at America's pervasive celebrity culture, concentrating on the period from 1950 to the present day. Star Struck: An Encyclopedia of Celebrity Culture is neither a stern critic nor an apologist for celebrity infatuation, a phenomenon that sometimes supplants more weighty matters yet constitutes one of our nation's biggest exports. This encyclopedia covers American celebrity culture from 1950 to 2008, examining its various aspects—and its impact—through 86 entries by 30 expert contributors. Demonstrating that all celebrities are famous, but not all famous people are celebrities, the book cuts across the various entertainment medias and their legions of individual "stars." It looks at sports celebrities and examines the role of celebrity in more serious pursuits and institutions such as the news media, corporations, politics, the arts, medicine, and the law. Also included are entries devoted to such topics as paranoia and celebrity, one-name celebrities, celebrity nicknames, family unit celebrity, sidekick celebrities, and even criminal celebrities.

This book provides a listing of nearly 7,000 Southern non-newspaper periodicals that started publication from 1764 to 1984. The initial section of the index is arranged chronologically, by the date the periodical was founded; an alphabetical list and a chronological listing by state are provided in appendixes. Each entry includes information on title, place or places or publication, dates of publication, any title changes or information on supersessions, absorptions, or continuances, and a sample of libraries that hold files of the periodical's back issues.

The Best of the Rest presents the work of 77 of America's most talented local newspaper columnists from 41 states. They represent the rest because editor Sam G. Riley has excluded nationally syndicated columnists in order to expose to a wider audience many equally talented columnists whose fame generally is localized. The columnists chosen for inclusion were nominated by a nationwide panel of 100 journalism professors--two from each state. Those writers who agreed to participate either self-selected their two favorite columns or sent a larger sampling for the editor's choice. For this first such book on local columnists, Riley has concentrated on news columnists, personal or general interest columnists, and humor columnists, exempting those who write more or less exclusively on topical areas, such as sports, business and finance, fashion, or travel.

In his lively and insightful introduction, Riley identifies three main characteristics of newspaper column writing much in evidence in these selections: humanity or people-centeredness, wit, and freedom of approach. He also sketches a brief history of newspaper column writing and provides a sense of what local columnists do, offering his opinion that being a columnist is the most fun a person can legally have at a newspaper. The selection of columns makes for delightful reading and will be instructive and inspiring to journalism major students and other students of writing. A selective bibliography is included.