100 books every journalist must read
A young journalism student once asked a newspaper editor what she should do to prepare for her hoped-for career as a political reporter. “Read,” the editor said. Absolutely, I thought, sitting between them, waiting for my own interview for a top job to resume.
“Read Shakespeare,” he said. “And the Bible.” Forsooth, I thought, that will not beget much gain. And, I added to myself, my interview is not going to end well.
I have a more mundane view of the must-read journalism books. I’ve assembled a list that is, if not the absolute best books on journalism, at least all strong contenders. My criteria:
- They must be examples of journalism, or about the practice or history of journalism and storytelling.
- They should be of long-term value.
- They should, in sum, provide the reader with a broad perspective on journalism as a craft and an understanding of key developments.
Those rules explain why most of the books on this list are older; it takes time to prove value. I’ve tried to represent the digital future, but technical books grow outdated quickly, and the future is so uncertain that I’m hesitant to anoint any book as prescient. And some books I simply dislike, even though they show up on many lists like this (“The Elements of Style,” “On Writing,” “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “Personal History”). I’ve explained my reasons in a separate post. (Also, I’m keeping a post of books that drop off the list.)
This is Version 1.0. I relied largely on my own library, along with recommendations from colleagues and a survey of the many similar lists available online. There are gaps — in my knowledge, and in the capability of the printed word. I include a couple books that provide radio transcripts, but didn’t try to provide examples of TV news or documentaries. Please add your suggestions for other books in the comments. Tell me, too, if you have an idea for a better excerpt or “other voice” to illuminate one of the books already on the list. Or talk to me on Twitter, @jkrolldigital; use the hashtag #100jbooks.
The African-American Newspaper, Patrick S. Washburn
Long before white Northern reporters discovered racial discrimination during the 1960s, America’s black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender were covering the outrages and trying to empower their readers. That history is hard to find. Libraries, for examples, generally didn’t save or commit copies of black newspapers to microfilm. Patrick S. Washburn presents the history of the black press from its beginnings in the early 1800s through its declining fortunes at the end of the 20th century.
Other voice: Felix F. Gutierrez, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. “Washburn, who brings more than a quarter-century of research on the black press to the task, helps expand our understanding by writing a highly readable story using a wide range of sources. [The book] demonstrates his eye for identifying interesting tales embedded in a larger story, digging into published and archival materials and interviewing sources, and then finding a way both to tell the tales and illustrate their importance in the larger story.”
Operating against a background of continual inequalities for blacks and a white America that routinely, and sometimes fiercely and even illogically, fought the granting of any new rights, black newspapers came to be in the vanguard of the struggle. Because white newspapers virtually refused to cover blacks unless they were athletic stars, entertainers, or criminals, blacks were forced to read their own papers to learn about everyday black life in communities across the country.
Aim for the Heart: Write, Shoot, Report and Produce for TV and Multimedia, Al Tompkins
This revised edition still bears evidence of the original’s single-minded focus on TV news, but it’s been updated with new content to reflect the importance of online video. What appeals to me is that Al Tompkins emphasizes non-technical issues, helping to keep the advice relevant no matter what new gadgets come along. In particular, he argues that viewers will remember emotions rather than facts. I’m neither completely persuaded nor fully comfortable with the implications. But as a print veteran, I’m open to learning new things. (You may want to watch this 90-minute video of a presentation he gave on writing and storytelling.)
Other voice: Gary Villeneuve, Cheyenne Independent. “Tompkins lays out some basic guidelines in the new version. Firstly, it is an error, he says, to think that ‘online news should be the same as what we put on TV but shorter,’ or that ‘online news should be just like what we put on TV only longer.’ Tompkins argues that online news is different from TV or print journalism, but that it can also make stories better, and he champions the potential of the internet to make stories more personal, local, and interactive.”
Make me feel the story and I will never forget it. Tell me a load of facts and they will be gone from my memory in seconds.
All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward
This is the book that launched a thousand and more journalism careers — the inside story of how two young, hard-working reporters saved the United States from the corruption of Richard Nixon’s White House. Or something vaguely like that. Even discounting the exagerrated importance some have bestowed on Woodward & Bernstein, the Post’s dogged reporting on Watergate was a high mark of American journalism. And Woodstein’s account of how that came to be inspired many students and set a tone for the industry. I considered keeping the book off this list because of questions raised about its fidelity to the truth and because of concerns about the quality of the reporting in Woodward’s many later books. However, this is a must-read because of its historical significance.
Other voice: Ben Stein, The American Spectator. “Chutzpah is defined as that quality which allows a person who has just killed his parents to throw himself on the mercy of the court and ask for leniency as an orphan. Bernstein and Woodward had it in spades.”
June 17, 1972. Nine o’clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?
The Americans, Robert Frank
A journalist coming to “The Americans” may be struck at first at how little information the individual photos seem to convey. Here’s a jukebox in an anonymous cafe, its bright colors merely washed-out highlights in the black-and-white shot, with an older couple dimly seen in a booth to the left and someone’s sleeve intruding on the frame to the right. Here’s another juke, dark and (one imagines) silent amid a sun-splashed cafe with a baby crawling across its rough pine floor. But put “The Americans” alongside Weegee’s stark images (in “Naked City,” also on this list), and you see certain commonalities. Look through all the images in “The Americans” and a picture of America in the ’50s emerges.
Other voice: Tom Cole, NPR. “There are few single works of art that have changed the direction of their medium. In 1959, one book dramatically altered how photographers looked through their viewfinders and the way Americans saw themselves.”
Robert Frank, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955. Private Collection, San Francisco
American Way of Death Revisited, Jessica Mitford
I have read and reread all of Jessica Mitford’s books (including her delightful autobiography), but “The American Way of Death” is her best. She pursued the topic for long years, immersing herself in trade journals and interviewing scores of those in the know. The book indicts the death industry (that is, funeral parlors and merchants of post-mortem accoutrements), but Mitford retains a wry sense of humor that keeps this from being a polemic. After you read this book, realize that until it came out, most of the details in it were invisible to people outside the industry — hidden in plain sight. And yet most Americans have had some encounter with funeral parlors, cemeteries or such. Investigative journalism tends to be spurred by public incidents, by whistleblowers, by a reporter noticing something out of the ordinary. Mitford, instead, focused her reporting on something very ordinary, yet mysterious.
Other voice: Bess Lovejoy, Lapham’s Quarterly. “Though Jessica wrote ten books, mostly memoir and muckraking nonfiction, The American Way of Death is her most famous, and probably the best-known book about death published in the twentieth century. The entire first print run of twenty thousand copies sold out the day the book was released, and it stayed on bestseller lists for six weeks. It’s still routinely assigned in classrooms as an example of crisp prose, biting satire, and a fearless approach to a difficult subject.”
No matter what the more gullible customers may be led to believe about eternal preservation in the privacy of the arrangements room conference, undertakers do not try to mislead the serious investigator about this. They will generally admit quite readily that their handiwork is not even intended to be permanent.
And So it Goes: Adventures in Television, Linda Ellerbee
Unlike many of the older journalists featured on this list, Linda Ellerbee may be very familiar to today’s college students — she’s that woman in the brightly colored sneakers on “Nick News with Linda Ellerbee,” and she has been since 1992. But before that she was Linda Ellerbee of NBC, and most notably of “NBC News Overnight.” Tucked away in the dark hours, she had full rein to demonstrate her intelligence, sparkling writing and sardonic charm. The duPont-Columbia awards, honoring the show in 1984, called it “”conceivably the best written and most intelligent news program ever.” And so, naturally, the show was cancelled. “And So It Goes,” published in 1986, looks back at her years in broadcast journalism. There were other female pioneers who have written about the sexism of the industry, but none as wittily as Ellerbee.
Other voice: Nicole Hollander, New York Times. “In the chapter about women in television, Miss Ellerbee tells who they are, how they got their jobs (over the pained protests of almost every man in the business), why they are so rarely in management and why they are never ugly. We’re reminded that women used to be recruited from the land of print journalism rather than from Miss Artichoke pageants and that without those hardy pioneers, things would not be as good as they are, which is to say, pretty dismal.”
I was fired only because the AP’s legal department told them it was absolutely against the law to shoot me, no matter how good an idea it might be. What was an embarrassment to me was funny to many other people, and some of them had jobs to offer.
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert
If this list seems to have a preponderance of Chicago journalism, that’s not only because I’m from the city but also because it has been uniquely gifted with talent. No disrespect to Pauline Kael and other top film reviewers, but Roger Ebert is the pinnacle. This collection is the best single source because it combines all his talents — not only his reviews but also his interviews and essays. Ebert was a sophisticate, who could write an entire book about “The Perfect London Walk,” but also a guy whose would review a children’s movie by using the Thunder Index (a measure of the noise kids whilst ignoring the screen). He could champion an art film and conduct interviews that reached the heart of the acting art, but also write the screenplay for “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” He was a movie critic, but wrote about politics. He came of age in the print era, but enthusiastically embraced the digital world as a blogger. He was even nice to his copy editors. I know; I briefly was one. “Awake in the Dark” will give you an overview of his work. I hope it will inspire you to pick up more of his books, including his searingly honest autobiography, “Life Itself.”
Other voice: Douglas Martin, in Ebert’s New York Times obituary. “It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.”
‘Oh, I guess I’ve been asked often enough when I’m going to get around to playing a bad guy,’ [Jimmy Stewart] said at last. ‘I never have. Seems like everyone else has taken the plung. John Wayne. Henry fonda.’ He took another pause, and you could see the grin beginning around his eyes. It was a slow grin that took its time working around to the rest of his face. The Stewart grin.
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, David Halberstam (ed.)
This is a book to be kept on the bedside table (or bathroom counter) and dipped into from time to time. And, if need be, thrown with great force at a burglar creeping into your bedroom; it’s enough to take down the meanest thug. Crammed with about 60 pieces, from short columns to lengthy features, it’s hefty literally and figuratively. David Halberstam’s selections are wise and varied enough to bring you John Updike and Grantland Rice, Frank Deford and Hunter S. Thompson. A favorite of mine is Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”, excerpted below. The retired baseball hero’s life story is told in all its bitterness. For some reason, the best sports writing — not just columns, but features and game reports — doesn’t seem as affected by time as straight news. Maybe that’s because sports don’t mean as much, so the topic doesn’t carry with it the stench of history textbooks. Or maybe it’s because we put so much meaning into sports, making its contests into our legends and its players into our heroes.
Other voice: Michael Anft, Baltimore City Paper. “The difference between good sportswriting and its overwrought counterpart lies in its practitioners’ ability to hit the equivalent of the literary curve ball—that is, tell a story simply and eloquently, and with no overarching swings at morality or hero worship.”
The Red Sox gave him a single room and barred the press from the clubhouse for two hours before every game. But it wasn’t outside annoyance that was fueling Ted’s rage. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, screaming obscenities in the dark. … There were plenty of women who would have loved to help. But Ted would say ‘WOMEN?’ and then he’d grab his crotch. ‘ALL THEY WANT IS WHAT I GOT RIGHT HERE.’
The Best of I.F. Stone, I.F. Stone
News stories reported for periodicals have a rough time surviving the transition to books. Their topics fade from memory and the writing is rarely sharp enough to blow off the dust. But you must read this (or some other) collection from I.F. Stone’s Weekly and some of his other writing. From 1953 through 1971, the newsletter was almost entirely the product of its editor. His politics were radical; in the ’20s he had been a member of the Socialist Party. He left the party because he thought a journalist should be free of such ties, able to report critically on anyone. He’s best known for his investigative journalism, most often developed by digging deeply into obscure government publications and data. Though his weekly’s circulation was never large, it supported him (without advertising!) and his reporting was highly influential. It must be noted that after his death, it was revealed that he had a relationship of some sort with the Soviet Union’s KGB. Stone never made a secret of his opinions, but (as his praise for Stalin in 1953 indicates) at the very least, his critical faculties could be dimmed when he was looking to the left. (You can go straight to the source and read the whole run of the weekly at the the official I.F. Stone site.)
Other voice: Paul Berman, New York Times. “The relevance to our own time is hard to escape, given our own recent experiences with disastrous policies, official mendacities and a sometimes error-prone and manipulated press. To read Stone’s description of clueless Americans wandering around Saigon in 1966, reprinted in ‘The Best of I. F. Stone,’ is to plunge into glum reflections on the Green Zone of Baghdad, 40 years later.”
Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. Hackworth’s Digest, the State Department’s huge Talmud of international law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare, as authoritative on the subject. This says reprisals are never to be taken ‘merely for revenge’ but ‘only as an unavoidable last resort’ to ‘enforce the recognized rules of civilized warfare.’ Even then reprisals ‘should not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy.’ These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials. Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards.
Find free online (PDF)
Best of News Design annuals
For most of the last century, newspaper design was a formulaic art. There were many books describing headline styles, types of subheads and other arcana. They provided reproductions of “proper” newspaper pages, which all managed to seem alike despite coming from varied cities. With the news squarely forced into rigid columns and design in the hands of overworked copy editors, progress was slow. Somewhere around the ’80s or ’90s, though, design became increasingly the turf of actual designers. The old guidebooks were quickly left behind. The Society for Newspaper Design was a key factor in the revolution. It lives on as the Society for News Design, and its annual catalogs of award-winning design provide great inspiration. You don’t have to get the latest edition; you can find older ones at the SND online store, or by haunting used bookstores. Each edition is stuffed with design examples. SND is one of the Oprah Winfreys of the journalism contest world; you get an award and you get an award and you get an award! That magnificently magnanimous attitude does, however, lead to annuals that provide hundreds of design examples.
Other voice: Embody 3D, in a review of the 34th edition. “As usual the graphics, presentation and quality is top notch. The quality of articles and designs just seems to get better and better each year. For those in the field designing, this beautiful creations this is surely a book not to be missed. Likewise enthusiasts of newspapers, and there’s a lot of them, will also find this book very entertaining. Although it is a news design book there is no reason why elements of these designs [cannot] be put into a wide range of mixed media.”
Pages from the 33rd edition of SND’s Best of News Design. (Original at Parka Blogs)
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.