100 books every journalist must read
The Great Picture Hunt 2, Dave LaBelle
Dave LaBelle is a caring, thoughtful person, who also happens to be an excellent photographer and teacher. (He directs the photojournalism program at Kent State, where I am an adjunct.) “The Great Picture Hunt 2” is the most recent version of his guide to recognizing feature photo possibilities and making the most of them. The concepts he preaches will be understandable even to those with no photojournalism experience, but his advice will be welcome even to those who were born with their fingers on shutter buttons.
Other voice: Bryan Farley, More Than Kids blog. “The book is impressive, and if you don’t have a chance to hear Dave speak, read the book; it is a must read for beginning photo journalists.”
The great photojournalists are not in love with the mechanics of photography — they are in love with people and with life. Photography is the brush they use to paint the world as they see it.
How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff
Sixty years old and going strong, this is a breezy (cute cartoons!) introduction to the misuse of research and data. Darrell Huff provides affable, nonthreatening advice on the dangers of inadequate or biased sampling, misleading charting and faulty logic. It is a stereotype that I’ve found to be mostly true that journalists are bad at numbers. “How to Lie” provides some tools to deal with this weakness.
Other voice: Profs. John L. Cotton, Randall J. Scalise & Stephen Sekula, SMU. “The book is just as useful now as it was in 1954. Everyone ought to read it.”
For a sample of unenterprising journalism take this item from a list of ‘new industrial developments’ in the news magazine Fortnight: ‘a new cold temper bath, which triples the hardness of steel, from Westinghouse.’ Now that sounds like quite a development … until you try to put your finger on what it means. … Does the new bath make just any kind of steel three times as hard as it was before treatment? Or does it produce a steel three times as hard as any previous steel? Or what does it do? It appears that the reporter has passed along some words without inquiring what they mean, and you are expected to read them just as uncritically for the happy illusion they give you of having learned something.
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
This is neither a true work of nonfiction (Truman Capote’s hazy relationship with the facts has been documented) nor the first bloom of literary journalism (Daniel Defoe has been called both the first journalist and the first novelist, and there are plenty of other examples). But “In Cold Blood” influenced generations of journalists. Plus, it’s a great read. Capote reports on the brutal murders of a Kansas family, from the perspective of both the killers and the police who tracked them down. He applied the mechanics of novels to the story. The risks and rewards of that approach are on display here. The story is compelling, the key characters precisely sketched. Unlike a traditional news story, the reader is placed in the moment. But the temptation is always there to clean up reality — to pick a hero and make him or her even more heroic, to adjust the timeline to make the narrative easier to follow or make a revelation more dramatic. Capote made some of those choices. Even so — and criticism of his facts was there from the get-go — many journalists looked to “In Cold Blood” as their model for a more engaging, more emotional way of reporting the news.
Other voice: Stanley Kaufmann, New Republic. “Capote’s structural method can be called cinematic: he uses intercutting of different story strands, intense close-ups, flashbacks, traveling shots, background detail, all as if he were fleshing out a scenario. There is nothing intrinsically defective in the method (although it seems the most obvious choice); but its mechanisms creak here because the hand of the maker is always felt, pushing and pulling and arranging.”
The desk was littered with what Dewey hoped would some day constitute courtroom exhibits: the adhesive tape and the yards of cord removed from the victims and now sealed in plastic sacks (as clues, neither item seemed very promising, for both were common-brand products, obtainable anywhere in the United States), and photographs taken at the scene of the crime by a police photographer — twenty blown-up glossy-print pictures of Mr. Clutter’s shattered skull, his son’s demolished face, Nancy’s bound hands, her mother’s death-dulled, still-staring eyes, and so on.
Inside Reporting, Tim Harrower
A lot of journalism students will have encountered this textbook already. Harrower — also known for his book on newspaper design, included on this list — has a knack for explaining and engaging. Like his design book, this is a visually beautiful presentation. I’ve read online criticism that says it’s too “cartoonish” or “distracting.” It certainly doesn’t look like traditional reporting textbooks. You can decide for yourself if that’s a bad thing. The image below is an excerpt from a page on multimedia (click the image to go to the full PDF). All the basic reporting concepts are turned into tightly written bits and pieces. Textbook note: In addition to the regular link for a new copy of the textbook, I’ve included a link for used (and considerably less expensive) copies.
Find in my store | Find on Biblio.com
Interpretative Reporting, Curtis D. MacDougall
For around half a century, “Interpretative Reporting” was the definitive book on how to do journalism. It hasn’t been updated since MacDougall’s death in 1987, so it’s missed a lot of developments. However, it is still stuffed with practical advice on writing and reporting, and MacDougall himself argued in the 1982 edition that technology didn’t change the basics: “No matter what Jules Verne or Buck Rogers types of inventions can be put into operation, the news will have to be gathered by human beings.” OK, so he didn’t see quite far enough into the future. Reading this book will help you understand why the journalism of the 1930s through the 1980s read and sounded the way it did. And discover that some of those horrible innovations of the Internet, such as lifting and condensing stories without attribution, are not so new.
Other voice: James G. Stovall, “Curtis D. MacDougall, Reactionary Liberal” in “Makers of the Media Mind.” “Many adjectives could be used to describe Curtis MacDougall: acerbic, liberal, prolific, narrow-minded, insightful, kind-hearted, irritating. … The most accurate long-term adjective for MacDougall, however, might be ‘influential.’ His basic reporting text … has been used at one time or another by almost every journalism education program in the country.”
There persists … a considerable amount of rewriting in the old sense; ‘borrowed,’ with little or no attempt to obtain additional facts, from other printed sources. … Usually, the rewrite person attempts to compose an item that will read as though it had been written up on original information.
Interviewing for Journalists, Sally Adams & Wynford Hicks
While data-driven journalism grows more popular, the interview remains the key tool in a reporter’s arsenal. Journalism classes will typically devote some time to it, but they cannot prepare students for every possibility. Neither can a book, of course, but Sally Adams and Wynford Hicks cover a lot of ground. They offer many sample interviews with alternative paths and discuss potential obstacles as well as ways to overcome them. This is a British book. I took exception to their suggestion that quotes may be rephrased with the permission of the interviewee; that’s not how we play the game in this country (at least I hope not). Overall, though, the advice serves America as well as England. (The same Media Skills series has a separate book on “Interviewing for Radio,” which I haven’t looked at.)
Other voice: Desley Bartlett, Asia Pacific Media Educator. “For journalism students and trainees Adams and Hicks cover fundamental issues, such as numbering the pre-determined interview questions and matching up the answer to avoid confusion, plus an explanation of some body language signals. ‘Rubbing the back of the neck is read as a sign of frustration – dealing with something or someone that’s a “pain in the neck”.’ And even some sage words about how to interpret handshakes.”
Don’t argue, judge or show embarrassment. Ask questions in a logical order. If your questions jump about it will confuse your interviewee and may interrupt the flow of the interview. But then again, don’t stick to your list of questions so rigidly that you miss an unexpected followup questions, new revelation or angle.
In Times of War and Peace, David Turnley & Peter Turnley
I had the great joy to work with David Turnley while at the Detroit Free Press. He and his brother are among the greatest photojournalists of all time, as well as being very nice people. Their photos are often taken in the rushed, chaotic midst of breaking news, yet they display an instinctive sense of framing and an eye for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment.” I was working the picture desk one day when David sent us a photo from apartheid South Africa of police with whips breaking up a protest. In the moment, I only recognized it as an excellent photo, one that commanded attention. Looking at it now, I realize how many things went into making it so: We see the police as individuals, their faces visible; the protesters are an anonymous mass, crowded together and hunched over so we can’t see into their eyes. The police are heading into the frame, aggressive; the crowd is scrambling out of the frame. A policeman’s whip is moving so fast that it’s just a blur. The composition reinforces the drama of the moment — and yet this was composed by a photographer in the middle of the scrum, with protesters streaming past and police attacking. There’s no chance in a situation like that to calmly size up the angles. The photographer has to know how to put himself in the right kinds of places and to recognize the instant when it happens — or when it’s just about to happen.
Other voice: Sarah Boxer, New York Times review of the exhibition based on the book. “Peter’s pictures are often shocking and hard to look at. He catches more bloody confrontations, more mangled bodies, more spectacles, focusing frequently either on one person or on a crowd. David, by contrast, often homes in on what lies between these extremes, the subtle and often surprisingly ordinary interactions between people in trouble. Peter’s view seems more dire and detached: how else to explain his luridly colored photo of a Haitian man stoned to death, a bright red gash on his brown head, a cinder block on his chest, a shocking white cigarette stuck mockingly in his mouth? David’s view looks a bit hopeful and human, inviting a longer look and pointing to a possible future, if not a happy one.”
©David Turnley/Corbis
Jazz Journalism, Simon Michael Bessie
A book called “The New York Graphic: The World’s Zaniest Newspaper” by Lester Cohen delves at length into the short life of a real daily paper run by an early exercise fanatic called Bernarr Macfadden, who also begat True Story magazine. Alas, the book doesn’t live up to the zaniness of its subject. That’s why I switched my recommendation to “Jazz Journalism,” which is a broader look at tabloid journalism in America. Its chapter on the Graphic is short but covers all the essentials, including the “composograph” — think Photoshopped photos before Photoshop — which the paper used to illustrate crime stories in the absence of lurid-enough real pictures.
The Graphic became more audacious but its formula never changed. As frequently as possible the news was written by the participants, or at least under their names. Even movie reviews were done by readers.
The John McPhee Reader, John McPhee
While Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson drew attention for a “new journalism” in which the writer’s voice mattered as much as the subject’s, McPhee built a library of articles and books using similar storytelling skills but a quieter voice. This collection is McPhee at the height of his powers. An interesting way to spend a few days would be to start by reading Gay Talese’s “Fame and Obscurity,” move on to this book, and finish with Tracy Kidder’s “Soul of a New Machine.” As you do, consider the role each writer assumes in the stories. Are they visible at all? How much or how little are you aware of their hand in selecting scenes, in interviewing rather than only narrating?
Other voice: George Core, Virginia Quarterly Review. “His commitment to character is fictive in its comprehensiveness and intensity, and his scenes are more powerful than most contemporary fiction, He has an ear for conversation that is Boswellian, and his natural sense of the dramatic is enhanced by his still stronger sense of narrative pace and proportion.”
Most basketball players appropriate fragments of other players’ styles, and thus develop their own. This is what [Bill] Bradley has done, but one of the the things that set him apart from nearly everyone else is that the process has been conscious rather than osmotic.
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe
You have to know Tom Wolfe to understand the tension in American newsrooms between the investigators and the storytellers. For several decades, both sides were convinced that they and they alone had the secret sauce that could save newspapers. They pushed their respective talents to greater and greater heights — zoom! — even as circulation plumbed new depths (eeeeeyaaaaa-BOOOOOOOOM!). Note: The preceding sentences are exagerration and based on personal observation unleavened by data. Which brings us back to Tom Wolfe. Catch him here early on, before pretension became as much a part of his wardrobe as his all-white suits. Groove on his descriptions and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Other view: Dwight MacDonald, The New York Review of Boooks. “He got Esquire to send him out to California where the Brancusis of hot-rod custom, or kustom, car design are concentrated. He returned full of inchoate excitements that he found himself unable to express freely in the usual condescending ‘totem’ story because he was inhibited by ‘the big amoeba god of Anglo-European sophistication that gets you in the East.’ At the ultra-last deadline, [his editor] asked him just to type out his notes and send them over for somebody else to write up. What happened was a stylistic break-through: ‘I just started recording it all [at 8 PM] and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen.’ By 6:15 next morning he had a forty-nine page memo, typed straight along no revisions at five pages an hour, which he delivered to [Byron] Dobell, who struck out the initial ‘Dear Byron’ and ran it as was.”
Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-Cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill Orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.
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.