100 books every journalist must read
The Last Editor, Jim Bellows
Jim Bellows was the last editor of the New York Herald Tribune and one of the last editors of the Washington Star and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. This track record might suggest he’s not one to listen to about good journalism. On the contrary. The dying days of newspapers are often their best. Either publishers are willing to accept any innovation in a desperate attempt to stay alive (accepting innovations is otherwise against the code of the Publishers Guild) or they have given up any illusion of being popular and powerful and instead let their editors produce actual journalism. Bellows reveled in the opportunities, and he even got into a wilder business after print: online journalism.
Other voice: Carl Sessions Stepp, AJR. “Ego sometimes gets bad press, and it should be said that strong journalists, especially editors, need a healthy dose of it. Bellows, fortunately, has the ego of an impresario, not a nitpicker. Says Jimmy Breslin, a writer Bellows unleashed: ‘He would praise and then fight for anything he liked. If the idea wasn’t his, he fought even more furiously.’ ”
We meet Jane Fonda, we set the thing up, and we start our little pitch. I look glowingly at Jane, Bruce, and the machine. I turn it on. The demonstration pops on the screen! It works! … We go on to our next meeting, we plug in the machine — not only does it now work, but smoke comes out of the back. Stories of our demonstrations in this primitive age of the Internet are legion.
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Let Truth Be the Prejudice, W. Eugene Smith
When I wanted to include an example of classic documentary photography, I went immediately to this book on my shelves. It is both a biography and a portfolio. The photos are richly captioned. The printing is impeccable, and the book is oversized to give them their due. The World War II section begins with a storytelling portrait of a sweaty, dirty-faced GI, half-smoked cigarette clenched in his lips, looking over his shoulder at the camera with weary suspicion. From the pages of Life magazine comes his landmark photostory “Country Doctor,” including the doctor, his thin body draped in loose-fitting scrubs, leaning back against a rural kitchen counter with a cup of coffee and a smoke in his hands. The book ends with Smith’s photographic Pieta, a mother gently bathing the daughter who was born horribly deformed by mercury poisoning.
Other voice: PBS, “American Masters.” “No matter where, what, or whom he was shooting, Smith drove himself relentlessly to create evocative portraits that revealed the essence of his subjects in a way that touched the emotions and conscience of viewers. The works of this brilliant and complicated man remain a plea for the causes of social justice and a testament to the art of photography.”
In Life, photographs were only deceptively primary; the real criterion was always the idea: what does this layout say? Their editors … could never give up their ownership of the main idea, of the editorial thrust. … The impossibility that Smith was demanding … was the authority of the author, the creator, and Life would be obliged to accept it wholly, or reject it.
W. Eugene Smith, Tomoko in her bath (original at christies.com)
Margaret Bourke-White, Vicki Goldberg
Margaret Bourke-White has been played in movies by Farrah Fawcett and Candace Bergen. At one point Barbra Streisand was set to direct a movie about her. This does not happen to many photojournalists. Bourke-White was famous and glamorous. Neither of those happens to many photojournalists, either. Yet she was a photojournalist — making industry heroic as the first photographer for Fortune magazine and making combat cinematic in World War II and Korea. She got her start in Cleveland, and her photos of the city and its industry make the town look like a place where gods would live.
Other voice: People magazine. “Success was not enough. Bourke-White wanted fame, too, and her single-minded pursuit of both is chronicled with straightforward detail in this candid biography.”
Margaret walked into the down-at-heels office [of the PM newspaper] in Brooklyn … wearing well-cut clothes, perfume, and her daily allotment of majesty.
Margaret Bourke-White, Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. (via photophilia)
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, John Allen Paulos
Once you’ve read “How to Lie with Statistics” (on the list above), take your supplemental course by turning to John Allen Paulos. Not only does it have updated examples, but Paulos is willing to go beyond formulae to attack wrong-thinking in general. He does it without nastiness, so you will feel embarrassed but not humiliated as you realize that some of the practices he denigrates exist in your own output.
Other voice: Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times. “This admirable little book is only 135 pages long. You can read it in 2 hours. Chances are that they could be among the most enlightening and even profitable 120 minutes you ever spent.”
The man-on-the-street-reaction story provides a manifestation, alternately annoying and humorous, of the widespread tendency to present blather and call it news. … Either a greater effort should be made to locate and interview local people with a new slant on the story or else the preface to these reaction pieces should be, ‘Here are some abbreviated, quite minor variations on our story recounted by an indiscriminate collection of neighborhood residents.’
A Mencken Chrestomathy, H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken loved words — big words, old words, obscure words, new words. His book “The American Language” is a classic of popular linguistics. Mencken’s attitude toward his fellow human beings and the society he lived in was less enthusiastic. In other words, he was a journalist’s journalist. The Chrestomathy — the word means a selection of an author’s works — is his own selection of his best work. Mencken’s antipathy toward humanity was not an equal-opportunity distaste. His diaries — not to mention any extensive reading of his public writings — reveals his confused thoughts about Jews, his disdain for white people living in poverty and his belief in the inferiority of African-Americans. As with I.F. Stone, also on this list, Mencken remains a must-read despite the revelations because of the impact he had in his lifetime and the way his writing — in his case, his acerbic attitude — influenced others.
Other voice: Jared Taylor, Taki’s Magazine. “When Mencken wrote a column calling Arkansas ‘the capital of Moronia’ and claiming that the people were starving to death through congenital stupidity, the Little Rock legislature voted to censure him. When Mencken was asked to comment, he said, ‘I didn’t make Arkansas the butt of ridicule. God did it.’ ”
All that the YMCA’s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needs to climb in and out of the bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, Finley Peter Dunne
Dialect — Irish, Jewish, African-American and “hick” in particular — was a common source of humor in American newspapers of the 1800s and the early decades of the 1900s. Most of those old columns are mercifully forgotten. Why does Finley Peter Dunne’s Irish bartender Mr. Dooley continue to be worth reading? Because the dialect here is not the joke. Mr. Dooley was a quietly sarcastic commenter on national and world events with a knack for coining phrases. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”? That’s Dooley. “Politics ain’t beanbag”? Yeah. “The Supreme Court follows the election returns”? Him, again — although, in all cases, originally masked in the quirky spellings of a printed dialect. There are many collections, including some best-of books; pick the one you can find easiest.
Other voice: Mark Shields, CNN. “Thanks go to religious broadcaster Pat Robertson for reminding us, in this presidential year, of the timeless political wisdom of Mr. Dooley. It was Pat Robertson who recently confided to his ‘700 Club’ television audience that he had it on very High Authority that President Bush ‘is going to win in a walk’ in November: ‘I’m hearing from the Lord that it’s going to be like a blow-out election.’ It’s hard to believe that Mr. Dooley did not have the Reverend-emeritus Robertson in mind when he asked a century ago, ‘Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergyman in politics?’ ”
‘ ‘Tis as much as a man’s life is worth these days,’ said Mr. Dooley, ‘to have a vote. Looke here,’ he continued, diving under the bar and producing a roll of paper. ‘Here’s th’ pitchers iv candydates I pulled down fr’m th’ windy [window], an’ jus’ knowin’ they’re here makes me that nervous f’r th’ contints iv th’ cash dhrawer I’m afraid to tur-rn me back f’r a minyit.’
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, Molly Ivins
I can’t deny that the selection of columnists in this list leans to the left. In my defense, the “afflict the comfortable” strain of journalism does seem to attract the best writers, or at least the funniest. Molly Ivins came out of the same Texas liberal tradition that produced John Henry Faulk, a once-blacklisted storyteller who was one of her earliest supporters. She had an unmatched talent for the barbed description: When Patrick Buchanan addressed a GOP convention, Ivins said his talk “probably sounded better in the original German.” Of U.S. Rep. James Collins of Texas, she wrote, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” She dubbed George W. Bush “Shrub.” Whether you agree with her politics or not, you must admire her writing.
Other voice: Charles Murphy, American Journalism Review. “If you’re looking for the absurd in politics, Texas is the place. Ivins discovered it first as editor of the Texas Observer, which followed the statehouse pretty closely. Twenty years later she’s still mining that mother lode…. Ivins admits to being a liberal. But unlike so many on the left nowadays, she doesn’t get indignant about everything. And liberals take their licks too. On Dukakis: ‘This man has got no Elvis. He needs a charisma transplant.’ ”
Texas is a mosaic of cultures, which overlap in several parts of the state and form layers, with the darker layers on the bottom. The cultures are black, Chicano, Southern, freak, suburban, and shitkicker. (Shitkicker is dominant.) They are all rotten for women. Humanism is not alive and well in Texas. Different colors and types of Texans do not like one another, nor do they pretend to.
Muckraking!, Julia & William Serrin (eds.)
Many other lists like this include Ida Tarbell’s immense history of Standard Oil Co. or other works of the original investigative reporters, the so-called muckrakers. I cannot in good conscience suggest that you dive so deep into those lead-weighted tomes. Instead, pick up this collection, which draws together reasonably-sized examples from the 1700s to 2000 of “the journalism that changed America,” as the subtitle says. The main title is slightly deceptive; this ranges beyond muckraking. However, it is much more selective than the “Treasury of Great Reporting” also on this list, and provides more context for the pieces it includes.
Other voice: Carl Sessions Stepp, AJR. “I regret that the authors almost totally overlook the past decade’s groundbreaking computer-assisted investigations. Another problem is that many entries are excerpted rather than printed in full. Perhaps that is inevitable, but it means you lose the sense of the whole and the flow of the writing. Still, the book succeeds in reinforcing faith that the journalist-as-reformer has long been, and still is, a mighty force.”
Can you conceive of what it means to work twelve hours a day? Twelve hours every day spent within the mill walls means thirteen or fourteen hours away from the home. … It doesn’t leave much chance to play with the children when a man’s job requires one week of heavy toil, during ten or eleven hours of daylight, six or seven days, and then an overturning of things and another week of night work, each shift thirteen or fourteen hours long, withthe ‘mister’ working while the children sleep, and sleeping while they play.
My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, Andrew Marr
Andrew Marr is one of England’s top political journalists, with a background in print but decades working for the BBC. Here he explains how he and his colleagues do their jobs — how politicians are persuaded to talk, how news decisions are made. His anecdotes keep the explanations lively. The distinctions between reporting conventions in the UK and the USA are numerous enough to make the American reader feel like she’s getting a peek into an alternative universe, while the behavior of politicians is universal enough to allow U.S. reporters to feel right at home.
Other voice: Roy Greenslade, The Guardian. “It is not really an autobiography, though we learn about Marr’s career. It is not, thankfully, one of those hand-wringing laments for a mythical golden past. It does contain anecdotes, though they are always relevant to his wider argument. It is not a sermon, but it does raise questions about the ethical morass of modern journalism. At the same time it is often witty, consistently self-deprecating and, most importantly, makes an important contribution to the increasingly bitter debate about the nature of the British media.”
Reporters have often been volunteer exiles, people who have left a secure working-class or professional world in order to live a more precarious and interesting life. … Also, I have been fascinated by the number of times in a journalist’s autobiography, or in conversation, that fatherlessness comes up. And anyone who reads about or watches journalists’ lives must be struck by our unreliability as partners.
Naked City, Weegee
In possession of a shiny bachelor’s or even master’s degree in journalism, some people I know decided that they were too good to be wasted on anything but the most important assignments. What they decided those assignments were might vary — overseas, for some; Washington politics for others; anything as long as the stories were lengthy and took months to report, for yet another group. “Naked City” is the antidote to such delusions. Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, having picked up some knowledge of photography as part of a collection of odd jobs around New York in the 1920s and early ’30s, created his own business. He hung out at police headquarters, running after reports of the juiciest crimes, and sold the resulting photos to newspapers. His style was in some ways crude — harsh, close-up flash (he mostly worked at night); very literal compositions. Yet “Naked City,” a book of those photos, made him famous, got him assignments for Life and Vogue magazines, even got him involved with movie directors including Stanley Kubrick. It is not the beat that makes for great journalism; it is what the journalist does with it. (Find some examples of his work at the International Center of Photography.)
Other voice: Mary Christian, Grove Art Online via the Museum of Modern Art. “He had little knowledge of, and little interest in, purely artistic photography, and neither his compositions nor his prints were made with particular care in the early part of his career. Weegee’s artistic ingenuousness is demonstrated by the one term he adapted from art, ‘Rembrandt lighting’: by this he referred to the use of a dark background with the subject in bright light; he accomplished tonal selection automatically by the use of flash. This lighting was the key to the striking effect of his photographs: with it, he claimed, he could render a gruesome scene less distasteful, while still providing enough high-contrast detail to help the publisher to sell newspapers, even when reproduced in the dots of newspaper half-tones.”
Weegee, “The Critic.” Original at museum.icp.org
I’d add “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune,” by Richard Kluger. The Trib was the great newspaper of the mid-’60s, with an oversized impact on our notions of quality — and effective — journalism. Too bad the numbers didn’t add up.
Thanks for commenting, Ed. I do have Jim Bellows’ book on the list, which includes his take as editor of the Trib. And Stanley Walker’s City Editor.
Some good books here, but some glaring omissions that I didn’t immediately find: Hiroshima by John Hersey, The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn, A Bright, Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. Something from Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane.
Good choices, Chris. I decided I covered Harding Davis with The First Casualty, and I think I remember him being in the Treasury of Great Reporting. I was a bit concerned about over-representing war reporting.
“Precision Journalism”, by Phil Meyer. This 1972 book launched the idea that reporters should use social science methods like polling and statistical analysis, and led to the widespread adoption today of data journalism in newsrooms around the world.
Thanks for the suggestion, Steve. I read that back in journalism school when I considered applying my computer science minor to a newsroom job. I went with the Data Journalism Handbook for the list, but you’re right, Meyer’s book launched the era of data journalism.
I agree about omitting Gellhorn.
Of your 100, only 18 are written or edited or about women. This seems unbalanced to me, given the preponderance of women in this industry, Nellie Bly onward. How about Marguerite Higgins?
Or the extraordinarily brave war reporter Marie Colvin or Janine Giovanni?
http://www.amazon.com/On-Front-Line-Collected-Journalism/dp/0007487967
I did the same count you did, Caitlin. It’s a concern. Some of the collections that are edited by men do, however, include women as contributors, so it’s not as lopsided as the count suggests. I considered adding a collection devoted solely to female journalists — the one already on my shelves is “Brilliant Bylines” by Barbara Belford, which includes short biographies. I wondered, though, if that might seem tokenism.
I would add my Ohio Wesleyan journalism professor’s book – Edwards, Verne. 1970. Journalism in a Free Society, Wm. C. Brown Co. Publishers.
I add the Journalist Code I once read – “If your Mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Thanks, Ann. That quote, by the way, comes from the (former) City News Bureau of Chicago (says this Chicago kid).
I’d certainly rethink In Cold Blood, given later information on how Capote cooked some of it. Ditto All the President’s Men, which played a little loose with narrative fact as a way to tee up the movie deal. And some of those j-school textbooks are by people who never wrote more than a memo or a term paper in their lives? No way do they belong. And lots of those books on this list are woefully out of date.
It Happened One Night, the Titanic book, deserves a mention. It was very early quality non-fiction narrative. And doesn’t anyone even remember Psmith: Journalist by Wodehouse, a classic in the genre?
James, I’m not sure who you’re referring to regarding the textbook authors. I explain my decisions regarding In Cold Blood and all the President’s Men in the list: Knowing those books, it seems to me, is essential to understand their impact on the craft.
I would add:
“Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties” – collects much of Esquire’s landmark journalism from that decade by Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and others.
“America: What Went Wrong?” by Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele – the only book I can think of that became an issue in a presidential campaign, in 1992, over its analysis of how the American middle class was losing out. (The same authors revisited that theme a couple of years ago in “The Betrayal of the American Dream.”)
“The Selling of the President 1968” by Joe McGinniss – the first book to look behind how candidates are packaged and marketed, as they’ve been ever since.
“What Liberal Media?” by Eric Alterman – the first book that really pushed back against the conservative meme that “the media are all liberals.”
Anything by Roger Angell, whose New Yorker reporting on baseball is unparalleled.
Michael, thanks for commenting. Esquire writers are already well represented on the list — not counting Mailer, who’s not one of my favorites. I admire Bartlett and Steele, but I couldn’t find a place for them on the list; worth thinking about again.
I’d have to add William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. He was in the belly of the beast, reporting on Hitler’s rise to power — he even accompanied the Wehrmacht on their drive into France — and then he joined Murrow in the early days of radio news. And his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich showed that some journalists do recognize the need to go back and do a much deeper version of their initial reporting.
Hmm. I recently reread Shirer’s Rise and Fall and was put off by his homophobia.
Give Berlin Diary a try. It’s “pre-history” in that while we know what all of this means and how it will turn out, Shirer doesn’t, so you get a great sense of how difficult it was for journalists on the scene and everyone else to understand where Hitler was headed.
What’s missing from Berlin Diary are the actual stories Shirer wrote. He’s there at all of the major Nazi rallies, at every step in Hitler’s rise to power, he repeatedly describes the look on Hitler’s face as he is standing a few yards away, but he has to deal with Goebbels and the censors, so while we read what he is thinking, we don’t know what he is telling his readers. He’s aware that Jews are in trouble and trying to get out of Europe, but you don’t know if he ever wrote about, e.g. He eventually leaves, a year before Pearl Harbor, in part because he realizes he can’t tell his readers what is happening (and in part because he fears the Germans are about to arrest him as a spy).
Thanks for a heroic achievement in concocting this list. I haven’t had the time to truly digest, analyze, contemplate specific trade-offs, etc., but off the top here are some things I would have considered.
Edmund Wilson, “The American Earthquake.” Remarkable reporting and writing about the 1920s and 30s Saturation reporting and New Journalism decades before they came into fashion.
“Speaking of Journalism,” ed. William Zinsser. Corby Kummer’s relatively brief piece “Editors and Writers” is one of the single best things I’ve ever read on the craft of editing, a much tougher topic to talk about than how to write well.
Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.” You don’t like Mailer? Tough. Too influential and important to ignore. This is his best non-fiction.
Joan Diddion, “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.” (anthology)
Nan Robertson, “The Girls in the Balcony.” History of discrimination against women at the NYT.
Kenneth Tynan, “Profiles.” Master of the form.
Jack Newfield, “The Education of Jack Newfield”
“The New Journalism,” ed. Tom Wolfe; “The Literary Journalists,” ed. Norman Sims. Two fine anthologies. Repeats stuff on your list but worth owning.
“The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy,” ed. Ronald Weber. Fantastic overview, valuable not only for examples of personal journalism but for discussions, critiques, interviews and dissents.
John Reed, “10 Days that Shook the World.” Classic all the way around.
Seymour Krim, “Missing a Beat.,” ed. Mark Cohen. A highly influential and original voice growing out of the beat generation who was already forgotten by his death in 1989. This is a recent anthology but I’d encourage folks to scour used book stores for Krim’s own collections like “Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer,” “Shake it For the World, Smartass,” etc.
Ralph Ellison, “Shadow and Act.” OK – Ellison’s essays aren’t conventional reporting, but no book will teach you more about the American experience, culture and race and therefore no book is more important for those who need to understand American culture, which is to say journalists.
Roger Angell, “Game Time.” An A+ anthology by the best baseball writer ever. Period. Full Stop. (Coda: Tom Boswell of the Washington Post is equally great on baseball and golf and it’s worth looking for his collections “How Life Imitates the World Series,” “Strokes of Genius” and “Why Time Begins on Opening Day.”
Solid choices, Mark. Thanks.
The “old editor” was right when he recommended the Bible and Shakespeare. Whether you’re an atheist or devout believer, every journalist should be up to speed on the literary and cultural allusions that have come into the language from the Bible: 40 days and 40 nights, manna from heaven, etc. Same goes for Shakespeare. And I would add Greek and Roman mythology. Too many journalists seem clueless at basic references.
In terms of books, I’ve recommended to many young (and not so young) journalists William Manchester’s “The Glory and the Dream,” a political AND cultural history of the United States covering the 1920s to early ’70s. I don’t know about anybody else’s high school education, but too often history classes ran out of time as they approached the World Wars and shortchanged all but the most basic stuff. The result: a relative “black hole” of knowledge on anything from that period on until the person was old enough to follow “current events.”
Don, I agree that journalists should have a basic cultural awareness. I don’t agree that such requires reading the Bible and Shakespeare. Knowing chapter and verse for manna from heaven won’t improve anyone’s writing or reporting. But I might even go along with the suggestion — if older journalists would agree that they must keep up to date with youth culture as well. For every young reporter who doesn’t know enough about post-War history, I can match you with older journalists who are still peppering their copy with allusions drawn from movies, songs, TV shows and books that are unknown to readers under 35.
An excellent suggestion, John. As an older journalist (23 years in the biz), I still try to read at least two books on the bestsellers list, see most of the major blockbuster films in the theater and listen to the songs that go viral. As for TV, I can’t stomach the reality shows, but the rest I watch on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/YouTube/iTunes. Now I just need to find a way to become immortal, so I can find the time do even more.
Before you say, oh, Jesus, who let Hunter S. Thompson in the room, please consider Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist / Gonzo Letters Volume II 1968-1976. These are the personal correspondences of a journalist at the height of his craft, committed to his craft at all costs, battling for truth and expenses.
Ed, I let Hunter in the room with “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” already. The Gonzo Letters are interesting, though.
Love your list. I am not a journalist, only a reader who is fascinated by reporting, a gift from my parents who let me listen to Morrow when I was but a boy and got me hooked on new for life. Thanks for including Mencken, introduced to me by my uncle, a journalist, whose collection of Mencken I have in addition to my own copies. And thanks for Liebling, whose Earl of Louisiana was my young introduction to my own home state and city, and whose writing showed me what great expository, lively prose was all about.
So glad you included Edna Buchanan, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Ernie Pyle. These were the people I idolized when I first entered the field. Others I would recommend:
“Front Row at the White House: My Life And Times” by Helen Thomas
“Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers” by Alana Baranick, Jim Sheeler and Stephen Miller
“Thank You, Mr. President: A White House Notebook” by A. Merriman Smith
“City Room” by Arthur Gelb
“Late Edition: A Love Story” by Bob Greene
“Deadline” by James Reston
and
“My First Year as a Journalist: Real-World Stories from America’s Newspaper and Magazine Journalists” by Dianne Selditch
Thanks for the suggestions, Jade. And on behalf of my former colleague at The Plain Dealer, Alana Baranick, special thanks for mentioning Life on the Death Beat.
Alana is amazing, and her co-authors are award-winners as well (Jim even won the Pulitzer). If any young journalist wants to learn how to become an obit writer, this is the book to read first.
Disappointing that Dick McCord’s The Chain Gang didn’t make the list. A great read into Gannett’s shady history of crushing independents.
I’d never heard of McCord’s book before, Patrick. Which is a surprise, because my mom grew up in Peshtigo, north of Green Bay, and I spent a lot of summers up there so I’m somewhat familiar with the saga of the Green Bay papers. I’ll give it a look. Thanks!
No love for Charles Kuralt? It was Kuralt, not Woodward or Bernstein, who made me want to become a journo.
Thanks for the comment, Sam. I’m a print guy, myself, and had to fight that bias in assembling the list. Also had some concern about tilting the broadcast focus too much toward CBS, same reason I bypassed Cronkite’s autobiography. But worth a second thought.
As soon as you listed an SND annual, I gave up on this list.
The SND annual is the museum of modern journalistic decay. Your description of the “evolution” of design is laughable. What actually happened: A bunch of people who couldn’t hack it as editors came up with a way to redefine the work and to make editing of lower priority.
The result: A 40-year con game in which papers continue to claim they “attract” readers with their design, even though all circulation and sales numbers indicate otherwise. Some might call this “lying.”
The credibility of your list dropped to zero with that inclusion. I’m sure many pseudojournalists and others trying to cling to a level of self-importance will ruminate deeply about this list, but I’ve seen what I need to see.
In addition:
“Of your 100, only 18 are written or edited or about women. This seems unbalanced to me …”
Quotas as a guideline for quality — mmmkay. Someone must not have read much Ray Bradbury.
The call for quotas — another example of the total failings of modern journalism.
Hi, Bob! I feel honored to get my very own Robert Knilands trolling comment. This blog has made the big time, apparently. (For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Knilands is a frequent sniper on Internet forums about journalism, particularly about design.)
That’s a pretty weak counterargument. I had expected better, but I guess anyone who includes an SND annual in a list of must-reads has some issues.
Back to the oh-so-horrible-omissions, aka any book a self-important journalist DEMANDS inclusion for: I actually fished Roger Angell’s “Late Innings” out of the pile just a couple of weeks ago. There was time only to flip through a few random pages, but I remember it being an above-average read years ago. The big disappointment today was seeing the “circle the wagons” mentality that plagues far too much of what passes for sportswriting today. Nevertheless, I plan to get the book out again in the future, as I fully expect it will be several levels above the sewage that flows through today’s “sports” sections, many of which have sold out to weak social commentary and lame comedy routines.
Also, the page designers who are blissfully ignorant about yellow journalism and what it entailed should read:
“Emery, Edwin. The Press and America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.), 1962.”
Stunning omission: ‘Byline: Ernest Hemingway’ – any journalist who wants to learn how to tell great stories can learn something here.
Bob, comments like yours are a good reason for lists like this — I’m finding out about great reads I haven’t seen on any similar lists. Thanks!
Homicide by David Simon is vital. So is The Word by Rene Capon–it is the single best book for a fledgling journalist–or any writer–to read. And Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is overrated from a journalistic perspective. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is much better. McGovern’s campaign manager called it the least factual and most accurate depiction of the campaign for good reason.
I’ve heard a lot of support for Homicide. I’d never heard of Capon’s book. Regarding Fear and Loathing — I take your point, and comparing Boys on the Bus with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail would be interesting. Thanks for your suggestions, Bruce.
How many of the books on this list are still in publication? I was searching for books on Nellie Bly a few years ago, and I never saw that one. I’m interested in picking up some of these.
Christie
All the books that have a “Find in my store” link underneath are available as new copies (or Kindle copies) from Amazon. For other books, the “Find on Biblio.com” or “Find on AbeBooks” links to send you to search results on those used-book sites. Using any of those links will earn me a small commission on books you purchase, helping cover the costs of assembling this list.
Indispensible Enemies by Walter Karp
Karp was Lewis Laphams right hand guy at Harpers.
Bill Moyers said he was one of the six greats whom
Molly Ivins would have joined by now.
Karp divides the world of politics into hacks and reformers
and shows the hacks of both parties colluding to keep
all reformers out of power. Karp also shows us the role
of dummy candidates and thrown elections.
Nothing in American politics makes sense before Karp
Everything in American politics makes sense
after you’ve read Karp.
Also Gothic Politics in the Deep South by Robert Sherrill.
Sherrill was an emeritus editor at the Nation and Ivins mentor
at Texas Monthly.
And George Seldes. And Molly Ivins.
Thank you all for your suggestions, which i will
print out and read.
How about Night of the Gun by David Carr?
Wonderful list. Thank you for sharing the wealth. I’m not a journalist (I used to teach English Lit and currently run workshops on Innovation) but I’m fanatical about journalism. I particularly loved William E. Blundell’s “The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on The Wall Street Journal Guide”. It’s a wee bit stodgy but it nails the vital importance of a clear underlying structure.