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22 books match the query 'Reporters and reporting'

cover of After the Czars and Commissars: Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

After the Czars and Commissars

Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

Eric Freedman

Michigan State University Press, 2011

From Czarism and Bolshevism to the current post-communist era, the media in Central Asia has been tightly constrained. Though the governments in the region assert that a free press is permitted to operate, research has shown this to be untrue. In all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the media has been controlled, suppressed, punished, and often outlawed. This enlightening collection of essays investigates the reasons why these countries have failed to develop independent and sustainable press systems. It documents the complex relationship between the press and governance, nation-building, national identity, and public policy. In this book, scholars explore the numerous and broad-reaching implications of media control in a variety of contexts, touching on topics such as Internet regulation and censorship, press rights abuses, professional journalism standards and self-censorship, media ownership, ethnic newspapers, blogging, Western broadcasting into the region, and coverage of terrorism.
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cover of Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules

Before Journalism Schools

How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules

Randall S. Sumpter

University of Missouri Press, 2018

Randall Sumpter questions the dominant notion that reporters entering the field in the late nineteenth century relied on an informal apprenticeship system to learn the rules of journalism. Drawing from the experiences of more than fifty reporters, he argues that cub reporters could and did access multiple sources of instruction, including autobiographies and memoirs of journalists, fiction, guidebooks, and trade magazines. Arguments for “professional journalism” did not resonate with the workaday journalists examined here. These news workers were more concerned with following a personal rather than a professional code of ethics, and implemented their own work rules. Some of those rules governed “delinquent” behavior. While scholars have traced some of the connections between beginning journalists and learning opportunities, Sumpter shows that much more can be discovered, with implications for understanding the development of journalistic professionalism and present-day instances of journalistic behavior.
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cover of Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination

Behind the Scenes

Covering the JFK Assassination

Darwin Payne

University of North Texas Press, 2023

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cover of Embargoed Science

Embargoed Science

Vincent Kiernan

University of Illinois Press, 2006

The popular notion of a lone scientist privately toiling long hours in a laboratory, striking upon a great discovery, and announcing it to the world is a romanticized fiction. Vincent Kiernan's Embargoed Science reveals the true process behind science news: an elite few scholarly journals control press coverage through a mechanism known as an embargo. The journals distribute advance copies of their articles to hundreds and sometimes thousands of journalists around the world, on the condition that journalists agree not to report their stories until a common time, several days later. When the embargo lifts, airwaves and newspaper pages are flooded with stories based on the journal's latest issue.

In addition to divulging the realities behind this collusive practice, Kiernan offers an unprecedented exploration of the embargo's impact on public and academic knowledge of science and medical issues. He surveys twenty five daily U.S. newspapers and relates his in-depth interviews with reporters to examine the inner workings of the embargo and how it structures our understanding of news about science. Kiernan ultimately argues that this system fosters "pack journalism" and creates an unhealthy shield against journalistic competition. The result is the uncritical reporting of science and medical news according to the dictates of a few key sources.

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cover of Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart

Forward Positions

The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart

Homer Bigart

University of Arkansas Press, 1992

Among journalists—and particularly war correspondents—Homer Bigart was both legend and example. In a career of four decades, first with the New York Herald Tribuneand then, through 1972, with The New York Times, Bigart distinguished himself as a superb writer and tireless digger for the realities that could be learned only in the field and not at headquarters. In 1943 Bigart sailed for England to cover the air war and was soon on mule-back in Sicily, and hanging on at Anzio. He then went to the Pacific, where his dispatches won him his first Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. When hostilities erupted in Korea he was again on the front lines in the front lines in the Orient, and again recipient of a Pulitzer. By the time of the American involvement in Vietnam, he was an old-timer, a seasoned correspondent admired and celebrated for his wit but regarded with awe for his masterly stories, in which straightforward prose, informed by tenacious reporting, cut to the heart of the issues.

Previously available only n crumbling library copies of the Tribune and the Times, or in microfilm repositories, his dispatches, with their rare insights into warefar and he minds of those who wage war, are now collected in Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Home Bigart, edited by Betsy Wade and introduced by Harrison E. Salisbury, himself the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

Forward Positions does honor to a breed of journalist that had passed into history by the time of Bigart’s death. It includes one of the first accounts of the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima, a report on the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a number of dispatches on “hot” battles of the Cold War, and a probing dispatch on Lieutenant William Calley’s testimony on the Mỹ Lai Massacre. With this representative selection of more than fifty of Bigart’s accounts of war on the ground, in the air, and in the courtroom, Wade provides a wealth of background material about his career, as well as glimpses of his impact on journalism. The book promises hours of captivating and informative reading for journalists, historians, veterans, and anyone who likes a good story tautly told.

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cover of Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century

Going Solo

Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century

G. Stuart Smith

University of Missouri Press, 2011

The traditional model of video news reporting has always had two separate roles: reporting and videography. For years, however, small-market news outlets have relied on “one-man bands”—individual reporters who shoot and edit their own video—for stories and footage. Lately, as the journalism landscape has evolved, this controversial practice has grown more and more popular. With the use of video constantly expanding, many large-market TV stations, networks, and newspaper Web sites are relying on one person to carry out a job formerly executed by two. News outlets now call these contributors VJs, digital journalists, backpack journalists, or mobile journalists. But no matter what they are called, there’s no denying the growing significance of solo videojournalists to the media landscape.
            Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century details the controversy, history, and rise of this news genre, but its main objective is to show aspiring videojournalists how to learn the craft. While other textbooks depict the conventional reporter-and-videographer model, Going Solo innovates by teaching readers how to successfully juggle the skills traditionally required of two different people.
            Award-winning journalist G. Stuart Smith begins by describing how and why the media’s use of solo videojournalists is growing, then delves into the controversy over whether one person can cover a story as well as two. He illuminates how, together, the downsizing of the media, downturn in the economy, and growth of video on the Web have led to the rise of the solo videojournalist model. Going Solo profiles TV stations and newspaper Web operations across the country that are using the model and offers helpful advice from VJs in the field. The book presents useful guidelines on how to multitask as a reporter-videographer: conducting interviews, shooting cover video, and writing and editing a good video story. Readers will also learn how to produce non-narrated stories and market themselves in a competitive field.
            Smith, who started his career as a “one-man band,” insightfully covers an area of journalism that, despite its growing market demand, has received little academic attention. Going Solo: Doing Videojournalism in the 21st Century is useful for students learning the basics and those already in the field who need to upgrade their skills. By presenting industry know-how and valuable tips, this unique guidebook can help any enterprising videojournalist create a niche for him- or herself in the increasingly fragmented news media market.
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cover of Louder Than Bombs: A Life with Music, War, and Peace

Louder Than Bombs

A Life with Music, War, and Peace

Ed Vulliamy

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Part memoir, part reportage, Louder Than Bombs is a story of music from the front lines. Ed Vulliamy, a decorated war correspondent and journalist, offers a testimony of his lifelong passion for music. Vulliamy’s reporting has taken him around the world to cover the Bosnian war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism, the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 onward, narco violence in Mexico, and more, places where he confronted stories of violence, suffering, and injustice. Through it all, Vulliamy has turned to music not only as a reprieve but also as a means to understand and express the complicated emotions that follow.

Describing the artists, songs, and concerts that most influenced him, Vulliamy brings together the two largest threads of his life—music and war. Louder Than Bombs covers some of the most important musical milestones of the past fifty years, from Jimi Hendrix playing “Machine Gun” at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan in Paris under siege in 2015. Vulliamy was present for many of these historic moments, and with him as our guide, we see them afresh, along the way meeting musicians like B. B. King, Graham Nash, Patti Smith, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, and Bob Dylan. Vulliamy peppers the book with short vignettes—which he dubs 7" singles—recounting some of his happiest memories from a lifetime with music. Whether he’s working as an extra in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Aida, buying blues records in Chicago, or drinking coffee with Joan Baez, music is never far from his mind. As Vulliamy discovers, when horror is unspeakable, when words seem to fail us, we can turn to music for expression and comfort, or for rage and pain. Poignant and sensitively told, Louder Than Bombs is an unforgettable record of a life bursting with music.
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cover of Manufacturing the News

Manufacturing the News

By Mark Fishman

University of Texas Press, 1980

There is little argument that mass media news projects a particular point of view. The question is how that bias is formed. Most media critics look to the attitudes of reporters and editors, the covert news policy of a publisher, or the outside pressures of politicians and advertisers. Manufacturing the News takes a different tack. Mark Fishman’s research shows how the routine methods of gathering news, rather than any hidden manipulators, determine the ideological character of the product.

News organizations cover the world mainly through “beats,” which tend to route reporters exclusively through governmental agencies and corporate bureaucracies in their search for news. Crime, for instance, is covered through the police and court bureaucracies; local politics through the meetings of the city council, county commissioners, and other official agencies. Reporters under daily deadlines come to depend upon these organizations for the predictable, steady flow of raw news material they provide.

It is part of the function of such bureaucracies to transform complex happenings into procedurally defined “cases.” Thus the information they produce for newsworkers represents their own bureaucratic reality. Occurrences which are not part of some bureaucratic phase are simply ignored. Journalists participate in this system by publicizing bureaucratic reality as hard fact, while accounts from other sources are treated as unconfirmed reports which cannot be published without time-consuming investigation.

Were journalists to employ different methods of news gathering, Fishman concludes, a different reality would emerge in the news—one that might challenge the legitimacy of prevailing political structures. But, under the traditional system, news reports will continue to support the interests of the status quo independently of the attitudes and intentions of reporters, editors, and news sources.

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cover of Murder in Montauk

Murder in Montauk

Judy Soloway Kay

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Charlie Anderson, a reporter on leave from the Boston Globe, becomes entangled in an unusual mystery when he stumbles upon a news article about his own death. Confused and still very much alive, Charlie travels to Montauk, Long Island, to learn more about the deceased man and learns more about himself in the process.

The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers are original fiction written for students who wish to improve their reading skills. The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers support the need for extensive reading on topics of interest to today's students. The Readers offer students books in the genres of mystery, science-fiction, and romance. Activities that practice vocabulary and reading skills are provided on the companion website.
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cover of Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work

Navigating White News

Asian American Journalists at Work

David C Oh

Rutgers University Press, 2023

NCA Asian Pacific American Caucus & Communication Studies Division Outstanding Book Award 

Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their understanding of news. This adds to the existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways they navigate and understand White newsrooms. Employing in-depth interviews with twenty Asian American journalists who are actively working in large and small newsrooms across the United States, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work argues that Asian American reporters for whom racial identities are important questioned what counted as news, questioned the implicitly White perspective of objectivity, and actively worked toward providing more complex, substantive coverage of Asian American communities. For Asian American reporters for whom racial identity was not meaningful, they were more invested in existing professional norms. Regardless, all journalists understood that news is a predominantly and culturally White institution.
 
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cover of On The Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism

On The Condition of Anonymity

Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism

Matt Carlson

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Matt Carlson confronts the promise and perils of unnamed sources in this exhaustive analysis of controversial episodes in American journalism during the George W. Bush administration, from prewar reporting mistakes at the New York Times and Washington Post to the Valerie Plame leak case and Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS News.
    
Weaving a narrative thread that stretches from the uncritical post-9/11 era to the spectacle of the Scooter Libby trial, Carlson examines a tense period in American history through the lens of journalism. Revealing new insights about high-profile cases involving confidential sources, he highlights contextual and structural features of the era, including pressure from the right, scrutiny from new media and citizen journalists, and the struggles of traditional media to survive amid increased competition and decreased resources.
 
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cover of Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World

Edited by Charles A. Laughlin and Li Guo

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World examines reportage as an important aesthetic form of cultural production in the Sinophone world. Originating as a proletarian nonfiction form in interwar Europe, reportage spread around the world, coming into its own in the Sinophone world from the 1930s to today. Going beyond fact-based journalism, reportage is pursued through a variety of artistic forms and media, from nonfiction writing to photography to documentary film. Reportage’s plurimedial representations facilitate and amplify intersectional struggles against multiple forms of social and political oppression. Engaging its audiences in affective ethico-political exchanges with (human or nonhuman) subjects, reportage promotes audiences’ empathetic responses to the democratic appeals of marginalized groups whose status, identity, or situation manifest emergent ethical challenges in the society of their time.

This work offers new understandings of reportage’s dialectical relationship with its readership by evoking sympathetic identifications with personal contemplations of place, hearth, and senses of belonging. Covering a breadth of media across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diaspora in the United States and Japan, this book examines how intermediality cultivates distinctive expressions in reportage, cross-cultural empathy, and ethico-political relationships between the reporter, photographer, filmmaker, and their surroundings.

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cover of Reporting on Risk: How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Other Hazards

Reporting on Risk

How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Other Hazards

Eleanor Singer

Russell Sage Foundation, 1993

After acts of airline terrorism, air travel tends to drop dramatically—yet Americans routinely pursue the far riskier business of driving cards, where accidents resulting in death or injury are much more likely to occur. Reporting on Risk argues that this selective concern with danger is powerfully shaped by the media, whose coverage of potentially hazardous events is governed more by a need to excite the public than to inform it. Singer and Endreny survey a wide range of print and electronic media to provide an unprecedented look at how hundreds of different hazards are presented to the public—from toxic waste and food poisoning to cigarette smoking, from transportation accidents to famine, and from experimental surgery to communicable diseases. Their investigations raise thought-provoking questions about what the media tell us about modern risks, which hazards are covered and which ignored, and how the media determine when hazards should be considered risky. Are natural hazards reported differently than man-made hazards? Is greater emphasis placed on the potential benefits or the potential drawbacks of complex new technologies? Are journalists more concerned with reporting on unproven cures or informing the public about preventative measures? Do newspapers differ from magazines and television in their risk reporting practices? Reporting on Risk investigates how the media place blame for disasters, and looks at how the reporting of risks has changed in the past twenty-five years as such hazards as nuclear power, birth control methods, and industrial by-products have grown in national prominence. The authors demonstrate that the media often fail to report on risks until energized by the occurrence of some disastrous or dramatic event—the Union Carbide pesticide leak in Bhopal, the Challenger explosion, the outbreak of famine in Somalia, or the failed transplant of a baboon heart to "Baby Fae." Sustained attention to these hazards depends less on whether the underlying issues have been resolved than on whether they continue to unfold in newsworthy events. Reporting on Risk examines the accuracy and the amount of information we receive about our environment. It offers a critical perspective on how our perceptions of risk, as shaped by the media, may contribute to misguided individual and public choices for action and prevention in an increasingly complex world. The authors' probing assessment of how the media report a vast array of risks offers insights useful to journalists, policy analysts, risk specialists, legislators, and concerned citizens.
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cover of Rewriting the Newspaper: The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

Rewriting the Newspaper

The Storytelling Movement in American Print Journalism

Thomas R. Schmidt

University of Missouri Press, 2020

Between the 1970s and the 1990s American journalists began telling the news by telling stories. They borrowed narrative techniques, transforming sources into characters, events into plots, and their own work from stenography to anthropology. This was more than a change in style. It was a change in substance, a paradigmatic shift in terms of what constituted news and how it was being told. It was a turn toward narrative journalism and a new culture of news, propelled by the storytelling movement.

Thomas Schmidt analyzes the expansion of narrative journalism and the corresponding institutional changes in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, he offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism’s evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of primary sources, industry publications, and oral history interviews, this study traces how narrative techniques developed and spread through newsrooms, advanced by institutional initiatives and a growing network of practitioners, proponents, and writing coaches who mainstreamed the use of storytelling. Challenging the popular belief that it was only a few talented New York reporters (Tome Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and others) who revolutionized journalism by deciding to employ storytelling techniques in their writing, Schmidt shows that the evolution of narrative in late twentieth century American Journalism was more nuanced, more purposeful, and more institutionally based than the New Journalism myth suggests.
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cover of Tamarack River Ghost: A Novel

Tamarack River Ghost

A Novel

Jerry Apps

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

When journalist Josh Wittmore moves from the Illinois bureau of Farm Country News to the newspaper’s national office in Wisconsin, he encounters the biggest story of his young career—just as the paper’s finances may lead to its closure.
    Josh’s big story is that a corporation that plans to establish an enormous hog farm has bought a lot of land along the Tamarack River in bucolic Ames County. Some of the local residents and officials are excited about the jobs and tax revenues that the big farm will bring, while others worry about truck traffic, porcine aromas, and manure runoff polluting the river. And how would the arrival of a large agribusiness affect life and traditions in this tightly knit rural community of family farmers? Josh strives to provide impartial agricultural reporting, even as his newspaper is replaced by a new Internet-only version owned by a former New York investment banker. And it seems that there may be another force in play: the vengeful ghost of a drowned logger who locals say haunts the valley of the Tamarack River.
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cover of The Big Story: The Oral History of Philadelphia TV News

The Big Story

The Oral History of Philadelphia TV News

David Grzybowski

Temple University Press, 2025

“He was much like the Walter Cronkite of Philadelphia.”—Ed Rendell, former Philadelphia Mayor and Pennsylvania Governor, about Jim Gardner, the trusted voice of WPVI’s Action News for 47 years

“We were the only station that stayed on the air continuously. We even pre-empted the CBS evening news.”—Larry Kane, anchor at WCAU, about covering the MOVE bombing

“The highs of working during the pandemic were keeping people informed of this deadly virus and what they had to do to take care of themselves and each other.”—Ukee Washington, KYW anchor, on the pandemic

The Big Story is David Grzybowski’s engrossing oral history of Philadelphia TV news from the perspective of reporters, photographers, producers, and news directors. Covering all the big stories from the late 1970s through the present, this fast-paced running commentary reflects on the uncertainty of the Three Mile Island disaster, the thrill of the Live Aid concert, the “Storm of the Century” (that wasn’t), and the championship victories of the Phillies and the Eagles, among other notable events, local, national, and global.

The Big Story features more than 200 interviews, including anecdotes from seasoned Philadelphia anchors Jim Gardner, Larry Kane, Lisa Thomas-Laury, Mike Jerrick, Vai Sikahema, Tamala Edwards, Pat Ciarrocchi, and Cecily Tynan, among others, about their experience on and off the job. Decision makers reflect on how to cover hot news stories such as Pennsylvania State Treasure R. Budd Dwyer’s on-air suicide. (“It was a big bloody horrifying mess,” according to Chris Wagner, WPVI anchor.)

Grzybowski highlights the Mummers, the launch of Good Day Philadelphia, off-the-air scandals, and how the Action News style secured a loyal following with Philadelphians while the Eyewitness News format competed hard to gain ratings. But the Big Story is how The Big Story provides compelling stories about Philadelphia’s news breakers and newsmakers.
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cover of The Great Reporters

The Great Reporters

David Randall

Pluto Press, 2005

Who are the greatest reporters in history?



This unique book is the first to try and answer this question. Author David Randall searched nearly two centuries of newspapers and magazines, consulted editors and journalism experts worldwide, and the result is The Great Reporters---13 in-depth profiles of the best journalists who ever lived. They include nine Americans and four Britons, ten men and three women, whose lives were full of adventure, wit, and the considerable ingenuity required to bring the story home. Among chapters are those on the reporter who:

Booked himself onto a ship likely to be sunk by the Germans so he could report its torpedoing Was called out to a multiple shooting, who interviewed 50 witnesses, went back to the office, and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of 4,000 words in two and a half hours Was deemed useless by her teacher but who went on to become the greatest crime reporter in history Wrote a story that changed the map of Europe Out-bluffed a top Soviet official to get into Russia so he could cover the appalling famine there Feigned madness to get herself locked up in an asylum so she could expose its terrible conditions Was the best ever to apply words to newsprint Became a national hero in America because he stood up for the little guy and his war reporting told it like it really was At the age of 63, and after three major operations, went under-cover in Iran so she could report on the regime's repression Was nearly fired for fouling up his first major assignment, but went on to shock his nation with his courageous war reporting Wrote faster than anyone who could write better and better than anyone who could write faster Single-handedly took on the tobacco industry Said no to William Randolph Hearst

Each profile tells of the reporter's life and his or her major stories, how they were obtained, and their impact. Packed with anecdotes, and inspiring accounts of difficulties overcome, the book quotes extensively from each reporter's work. It also includes an essay on the history of reporting, charting the technologies, economics, and attitudes that made it the way it is---from the invention of the telegraph to the Internet. The Great Reporters is not just the story of 13 remarkable people, it is the story of how society's information hunter-gatherers succeed in bringing us all what we need to know.

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cover of The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail

The Politics of Herding Cats

When Congressional Leaders Fail

John Lovett

University of Michigan Press, 2021

In The Politics of Herding Cats, John Lovett looks at the relationship between media, Congress, and public policy, showing that leaders in Congress under normal circumstances control public policy on issue areas due to their status both within Congress and in the media by and large. When issue coverage on topics increases in media, however, other members seize on the opportunities to engage in the issue and shift public policy away from leader desires. As more members engage and more groups become involved, leaders lose the ability to control the process and are more likely to have problems actually getting public policy enacted. Lovett look at this phenomenon using newspaper coverage in the Washington Post over a 40-year period, both in terms of general analysis as well as individual case studies exploring agricultural subsidies (a low coverage topic), immigration (a changing coverage topic), and health care (a high coverage topic). As coverage increases, the amount leaders can control in the process decreases. Only under extreme circumstances, as seen in the Affordable Care Act, can leaders get anything done at all. The Politics of Herding Cats would be useful for those who wish to better understand the relationship between the media and Congress. It will also be useful to those who want to understand the relationship between actors in government and how the media has influenced American politics, as well as how individual members of Congress can go against party leaders on major issues.
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cover of The Universal Journalist

The Universal Journalist

David Randall

Pluto Press, 2021

This is the only 'how to' book on journalism written by writers and editors who have operated at the top level in national news. It has long been the go-to book of advice for young reporters This edition includes a chapter on social media and is extensively updated throughout, with new content from Jemma Crew, an award-winning national news journalist. The book emphasises that good journalism must involve the acquisition of a range of skills that will empower trainees to operate in an industry where ownership, technology and information are constantly changing. This handbook includes tips and tricks learned from working at the very top of the business, and is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide.
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cover of The Weekly War: How the Saturday Evening Post Reported World War I

The Weekly War

How the Saturday Evening Post Reported World War I

Chris Dubbs

University of North Texas Press, 2023

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cover of Tides Of War: World News Reporting 1931-1945

Tides Of War

World News Reporting 1931-1945

Robert W. Desmond

University of Iowa Press, 1984

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cover of Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception

Undercover Reporting

The Truth About Deception

Brooke Kroeger, Foreword by Pete Hamill

Northwestern University Press, 2012

In her provocative book, Brooke Kroeger argues for a reconsideration of the place of oft-maligned journalistic practices. While it may seem paradoxical, much of the valuable journalism in the past century and a half has emerged from undercover investigations that employed subterfuge or deception to expose wrong. Kroeger asserts that undercover work is not a separate world, but rather it embodies a central discipline of good reporting—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public’s attention. Together with a companion website that gathers some of the best investigative work of the past century, Undercover Reporting serves as a rallying call for an endangered aspect of the journalistic endeavor.

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