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John Reed and the Writing of Revolution
Daniel W. Lehman
Ohio University Press, 2002

John Reed (1887-1920) is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and as champion of the communist movement in the United States. Still, Reed remains a writer almost systematically ignored by the literary critical establishment, even if alternately vilified and lionized by historians and by films like Warren Beatty’s Reds.

John Reed and the Writing of Revolution examines Reed’s writing from a different critical perspective—one informed by a theoretical and practical understanding of literary nonfiction. In both politics and writing, John Reed defied fashion. In his short career, Reed transcended the traditional creative arts of fiction, poetry, and drama in favor of deeply researched histories composed with the cadence of fiction and the power of fact. Reed thereby alienated literary critics who had idealized timeless artistry against the rough-and-tumble world of historical details and political implications.

Working from a close investigation of rare articles, manuscripts, and the Reed papers at Harvard as well as from Reed’s published work, Daniel W. Lehman offers the first detailed literary study of the man who followed Pancho Villa into battle; wrote literary profiles of such characters as Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday; explicated the Byzantine factionalism of Eastern Europe; and witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace and the birth of Soviet Russia.

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Journalism 1908
Birth of a Profession
Edited by Betty Houchin Winfield
University of Missouri Press, 2008
The year 1908 was not remarkable by most accounts, but it was an auspicious year for journalism. As newspapers sought to recover from big-city yellow journalism and circulation wars that reached their boiling point a few years earlier during the Spanish-American War, press clubs began to champion higher education. And schools dedicated to journalism education, led by the University of Missouri, began to emerge. Now sanctioned by universities, journalism could teach acceptable behavior and establish credentials. It was nothing less than the birth of a profession.

Journalism—1908 opens a window on mass communication a century ago. It tells how the news media in the United States were fundamentally changed by the creation of academic departments and schools of journalism, by the founding of the National Press Club, and by exciting advances that included early newsreels, the introduction of halftones to print, and even changes in newspaper design.

Journalism educator Betty Houchin Winfield has gathered a team of well-known media scholars, all specialists in particular areas of journalism history, to examine the status of their profession in 1908: news organizations, business practices, media law, advertising, forms of coverage from sports to arts, and more. Various facets of journalism are explored and situated within the country’s history and the movement toward reform and professionalism—not only formalized standards and ethics but also labor issues concerning pay, hours, and job differentiation that came with the emergence of new technologies.

This overview of a watershed year is national in scope, examining early journalism education programs not only at Missouri but also at such schools as Colgate, Washington and Lee, Wisconsin, and Columbia. It also reviews the status of women in the profession and looks beyond big-city papers to Progressive Era magazines, the immigrant press, and African American publications.

Journalism—1908 commemorates a century of progress in the media and, given the place of Missouri’s School of Journalism in that history, is an appropriate celebration of that school’s centennial. It is a lode of information about journalism education history that will surprise even many of those in the field and marks a seminal year with lasting significance for the profession.
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Journalism and Jim Crow
White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America
Edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2022 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize.

White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.

Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy.

Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii

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Journalism and Realism
Rendering American Life
Thomas B Connery
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Both newspaper and magazine journalism in the nineteenth century fully participated in the development and emergence of American Realism in the arts, which attempted to accurately portray everyday life, especially in fiction. Magazines and newspapers provided the raw material for American Realism, but were also its early and vocal advocates. This symbiotic relationship reached its peak from 1890 to 1910, when writers who might be called the first literary journalists (or, much later, “new journalists”) closed the circle by more fully adopting the fiction writer’s style of attempting to “show the reader real life,” as their literary progeny Tom Wolfe would put it many years later. Journalism and Realism fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship of American Realism.
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Journalism and Truth
Strange Bedfellows
Tom Goldstein
Northwestern University Press, 2007
The complaint is all too common: I know something about that, and the news got it wrong.  Why this should be, and what it says about the relationship between journalism and truth, is exactly the question that is at the core of Tom Goldstein’s very timely book. 

Other disciplines, Goldstein tells us, have clear protocols for gathering evidence and searching for truth.  Journalism, however, has some curious conventions that may actually work against such a goal.  Looking at how journalism has changed over time--and with it, notions about accuracy and truth in reporting—Goldstein explores how these long-standing and ultimately untrustworthy conventions developed.  He also examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves.  From a historical overview to a reconsideration of a misunderstood book about journalism (The Journalist and the Murderer) to a reflection on the coverage of the war in Iraq, his book offers a remarkably wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of how journalism and truth work—or fail to work—together, and why it matters.
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Journalism Ethics
21 Essentials from Wars to Artificial Intelligence
Eric Wishart
Hong Kong University Press, 2024
A necessary guide to responsible journalism in a challenging media landscape.

This concise and authoritative work offers the latest guidance on journalism ethics for students and media professionals and will help empower news consumers to make informed decisions about the trustworthiness of their sources of information. It offers advice on all aspects of journalism ethics including accuracy and seeking the truth, representation of women, LGBTQ coverage, climate change, mental health, use of images, conflict reporting, elections, and how to use artificial intelligence. The author brings a unique perspective and depth of knowledge to the complex challenges facing journalists and news consumers in this era of fake news, disinformation, and artificial intelligence.
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Journalism in the Movies
Matthew C. Ehrlich
University of Illinois Press, 2006

From cynical portrayals like The Front Page to the nuanced complexity of All the President’s Men, and The Insider, movies about journalists and journalism have been a go-to film genre since the medium's early days. Often depicted as disrespectful, hard-drinking, scandal-mongering misfits, journalists also receive Hollywood's frequent respect as an essential part of American life. 

Matthew C. Ehrlich tells the story of how Hollywood has treated American journalism. Ehrlich argues that films have relentlessly played off the image of the journalist as someone who sees through lies and hypocrisy, sticks up for the little guy, and serves democracy. He also delves into the genre's always-evolving myths and dualisms to analyze the tensions—hero and oppressor, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and falsehood—that allow journalism films to examine conflicts in society at large.

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A Journalism of Humanity
A Candid History of the World's First Journalism School
Steve Weinberg
University of Missouri Press, 2008

It might seem unlikely that a midwestern university located far from national media centers would be home to the world’s first journalism school, but the University of Missouri holds that distinction. Now celebrating its centennial, the School of Journalism, founded by a newsman who lacked a college education, is regarded as one of the highest-rated in the world.

Steve Weinberg, an alumnus and investigative reporter who returned to teach at Missouri, now covers—and uncovers—the many-faceted history of its School of Journalism, from the days of Walter Williams through the Dean Mills era. A Journalism of Humanity balances the dynamics of the university that set the school’s course with the external forces that shaped journalism and society. True to journalism, it reveals the school’s flaws as well as its virtues.

Bringing his investigative expertise to bear, Weinberg tells the school’s complex story through thematic chapters. He draws on internal documents and correspondence to uncover the politics of the school from its founding to the present—the struggles over resources as well as the constant battle to balance scholarly ambitions with professional mission. In the course of his chronicle, he depicts an institution ahead of its time in professional education but often lagging in dealing with social issues such as race and gender.

Weinberg’s account embraces faculty and staff members, students and alumni, supporters and detractors, as it covers all professional sequences taught at the school. It captures the freewheeling debate that has been a hallmark of the school and includes the perspectives of women, blacks, and gays, who all too often were marginalized. It also incorporates a wealth of insider detail, from a typical day at the school during the Williams era to tales of the “Missouri Mafia.”

Key players, significant programs, legal and ethical battles—all are covered in a candid history that makes captivating reading for those associated with the school or for anyone interested in the development of journalism education. A Journalism of Humanity is a story as big as its subject that looks back on a trailblazing century and forward toward a continuing dedication to journalistic excellence.

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Journalism Re-examined
Digital Challenges and Professional Orientations (Lessons from Northern Europe)
Edited by Martin Eide, Helle Sjøvaag, and Leif Ove Larsen
Intellect Books, 2016
The digital era has posed innumerable challenges to the business and practice of journalism. Journalism Re-examined sets out an institutional theoretical framework for exploring the journalistic institution in the digital age and analyzes how it has responded to those profound changes in its social and professional practices, norms, and values. Building their analysis around the concept of these changes as reorientations, the contributors present a number of case studies, with a particular emphasis on journalism in the Nordic countries. They explore not just straight news and investigative journalism, but also delve into lifestyle and documentary coverage, all with the aim of understanding the reorientations facing journalism and the ways they might present a sustainable future path.
 
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Journalism, Society and Politics in the Digital Media Era
Edited by Nael Jebril, Stephen Jukes, Sofia Iordanidou, and Emmanouil Takas
Intellect Books, 2020
Advances in digital communication have affected the relationship between society, journalism, and politics within different contexts in varied ways and intensities. This volume, combining interdisciplinary academic and professional perspectives, assesses the impact of the digital media environment on citizens, journalists, and politicians in diverse sociopolitical landscapes. The first part evaluates the transformative power of media literacy in the digital age and the challenges that journalism pedagogy encounters in global and fragmented environments. The second part critically examines the methods in which social media is used by politicians and activists to communicate during political campaigns and social protests. The third part analyzes the impact of digitalization on professional journalism and news consumption strategies. The fourth part offers a range of case studies that illustrate the significant challenges facing online media regarding the framing and representation of communities in crisis and shifting contexts. The book is intended to introduce readers to the crucial dynamic and diverse challenges that affect our societies and communitive practices as a result of the interplay between digital media and political and societal structures.
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Journalistic Autonomy
The Genealogy of a Concept
Henrik Örnebring
University of Missouri Press, 2022
Winner, 2023 AEJMC Tankard Book Award

The idea that journalism should be independent is foundational to its contemporary understandings and its role in democracy. But from what, exactly, should journalism be independent? This book traces the genealogy of the idea of journalistic autonomy, from the press freedom debates of the 17th century up to the digital, networked world of the 21st. Using an eclectic and thought-provoking theoretical framework that draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and theoretical biology, the authors analyze the deeper meanings and uses of the terms independence and autonomy in journalism.
 
This work tackles, in turn, questions of journalism’s independence from the state, politics, the market, sources, the workplace, the audience, technology, and algorithms. Using broad historical strokes as well as detailed historical case studies, the authors argue that autonomy can only be meaningful if it has a purpose. Unfortunately, for large parts of journalism’s history this purpose has been the maintenance of a societal status quo and the exclusion of large groups of the population from the democratic polity. “Independence,” far from being a shining ideal to which all journalists must aspire, has instead often been used to mask the very dependencies that lie at the heart of journalism. The authors posit, however, that by learning the lessons of history and embracing a purpose fit for the needs of the 21st century world, journalism might reclaim its autonomy and redeem its exclusionary uses of independence.

 
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Just a Journalist
On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between
Linda Greenhouse
Harvard University Press, 2017

In this timely book, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter trains an autobiographical lens on a moment of remarkable transition in American journalism. Just a few years ago, the mainstream press was wrestling with whether labeling waterboarding as torture violated important norms of neutrality and objectivity. Now, major American newspapers regularly call the president of the United States a liar. Clearly, something has changed as the old rules of “balance” and “two sides to every story” have lost their grip. Is the change for the better? Will it last?

In Just a Journalist, Linda Greenhouse—who for decades covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times—tackles these questions from the perspective of her own experience. A decade ago, she faced criticism from her own newspaper and much of journalism’s leadership for a speech to a college alumnae group in which she criticized the Bush administration for, among other things, seeking to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo Bay—two years after the Supreme Court itself had ruled that the detainees could not be hidden away from the reach of federal judges who might hear their appeals.

One famous newspaper editor expressed his belief that it was unethical for a journalist to vote, because the act of choosing one candidate over another could compromise objectivity. Linda Greenhouse disagrees. Calling herself “an accidental activist,” she raises urgent questions about the role journalists can and should play as citizens, even as participants, in the world around them.

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