100 books every journalist must read
Publish and Be Damned, Hugh Cudlipp
Your mileage may differ, but I’ve worked in several newsrooms that were quite parochial — in the sense that most of the people there had little idea how things operated in any other newsrooms of the same size or larger. If that’s true, imagine how little most American journalists know about the practice of the craft outside their country. You should at least know what British journalism is like and how it got that way; at least they write the same language. Cudlipp’s “Publish and Be Damned” describes his rise and that of the Mirror.
Other voice: Roy Greenslade, The Guardian. “For all his faults, Cudlipp was a towering figure in popular journalism, masterminding the editorial formula that made the Daily Mirror of the 1950s and 60s not only the nation’s best-selling daily national paper but one with real social and political clout.”
Sledge-hammer headlines appeared on the front-page in black type one inch deep, a signal that all could see of the excitements to come. Human interest was at a premium, and that meant sex and crime.
The Red Smith Reader, Red Smith
It could be argued that I have neglected sports writing on this list, but, as Spencer Tracy said of Kathryn Hepburn in “Pat and Mike,” “not much meat on her, but what there is, is cherce.” Red Smith’s 1976 Pulitzer was one of those rare occasions when the jury lifts its collective nose out of the news and opinion pages and realizes there’s good stuff elsewhere. The recognition of Smith was long overdue. John Leonard, quoted more below, said Smith “was to sports what Homer was to war.” This book collects his best prose poems. (How great was Smith? “To Absent Friends” is a marvelous collection of just his obituaries.)
Other voice: John Leonard, New York Times. “He wrote each column as a sort of short story, with a tantalizer and a punch line. Who could resist an article that described Lefty Grove as ‘the only player ever traded for an outfield fence,’ or Cliff Mooers as ‘the man who bet his tonsil on a horse,’ or Red Smith himself who, after catching a trout, ‘was down on all fours in a bramble patch at the moment and his mouth was full of wild raspberries’?”
The guy who started the fight thirty-four years ago is around here today to see it finished. His is a big, twinkling old free-style cusser with a plainsman’s face, weathered to a bright terra-cotta shade, under a cattleman’s soft gray hat. His name is Jesse Harper, and it is he who united Notre Dame and Army in the holy bonds of football, which will be put asunder here day after tomorrow.
Reporting, Lillian Ross
If you had the time, a strong education in writing could be acquired simply by reading every copy of The New Yorker from its first week. That being slightly impractical, this list includes a few samplings of individual reporters. Here, Lillian Ross. These are long pieces (the shortest occupies 20 pages in my paperback edition) and the author is invisible within them even when writing in the first person. In the introduction, Ross lays out her principles, which are strict and, it must be said, stuffy: “Do not write about anyone you do not like.” “If you are on the staff of a newspaper and if what you want is to become a writer, don’t stay on the staff for more than two or three years.” “Don’t show your writing to other writers or ask their opinion of what you write.” “Do not go on television to sell yourself or your books.” For a mind-bending comparison, read “Reporting” and Tom Wolfe’s “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby” back to back.
Other voice: Matt Zoller Seitz, Slant. “Detractors would call her approach excessive, even punishing. … But there are advantages to reporting at length that do not exist in shorter form: the ability to seem to live with a subject, and observe him not just during dramatic high points, but moments of reflection, even boredom; and to spend time with other people as they describe how they see the subject, and how they believe he sees himself.”
‘Hel-lo, kid,’ [John] Huston said as we shook hands. He took a step back, then put his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned forward intently. ‘Well!’ he said. He made the word expand into a major pronouncement.
Sarajevo Daily, Tom Gjelten
The Bosnian war of the early 1990s is, I suspect, neither old enough for high school history teachers to get to it nor recent enough to be within the memory of today’s college students. The war, one of the bloodier results of the collapse of Communist regimes in Europe, encapsulated almost all of the 20th century’s martial causes: ethnic rivalries, religious rivalries, territorial disputes and nation-states fighting via proxies. In the middle of the mess was Sarajevo, where Tom Gjelten was a reporter for National Public Radio. In “Sarajevo Daily,” he focuses on a newspaper, Oslobodjenje, whose staff (of mixed ethnicities) went underground during the war but kept publishing. Like “Prisoner Without a Name,” this book is on the list to remind American journalists that the craft they pursue can have great value (and perhaps to keep them from whining too much when the office vending machine stops making change).
Other voice: Scott Simon of NPR, naming it one of his “five best” for the Wall Street Journal. “Even though at some points staffers were being paid in cigarettes, they dared sniper fire to bring back stories and to deliver the papers; they lost loved ones and struggled with ruptured friendships across ethnic lines. Just when the dangers of war made it seem impossible to do bold, honest reporting, they learned that it was more necessary than ever to try.”
Walking home from Oslobodjenje one day, Vladimir was caught in a mortar barrage. Hearing a shell fired off in the distant hills, he paid no heed; three seconds later the incoming round landed a mere block from him. When Vladimir heard another outgoing round a few minutes later, he immediately ducked for cover; this time the shell came even closer. He started running, only to hear a third detonation in the distance. ‘I felt like someone was watching me with a binoculars,’ he said. He dove behind a brick wall and covered his head with his hands. the mortar landed on the other side of the wall, knocking bricks loose and throwing up a cloud of dust and debris.
Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
It’s said that every journalist has an unpublished novel in his or her bottom drawer. Half of those novels, at least, are biting satires of the journalist’s own profession. “Scoop” is the paradigm. Through a confusion of names, William Boot is hoisted from “a bi-weekly half-column devoted to Nature” into war-torn Ishmaelia in East Africa. (Stop that Google search and close that tab; “Ishmaelia” doesn’t exist.) Waugh draws on his own experiences and builds characters out of correspondents he’d met. (Presumably he had also met native Africans, but in the book they match the prejudiced cliches of the era.) Not only the classic newspaper novel, “Scoop” has also been called one of the best novels ever.
Other voice: Alexander Nazaryan, NPR. “Journalism does not acquit itself well once the clueless Boot reaches Ishmaelia, where the country is already rife with all manner of reporters: strong-jawed Americans, whiny French and cynical Brits. A more seasoned reporter who belongs in the last of these categories explains to the clueless Boot why they are all there: ‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it.’ With insight like that, who needs journalism school?”
I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
Short Takes, Damon Runyon
You can find several different collections of the “best of” Damon Runyon, New York sports writer, columnist and storyteller. I chose this out-of-print one because it focuses only on his newspaper columns, where he was at least lightly anchored to the facts. The language is less syncopated than in his short stories that led to plays and movies including “Guys and Dolls.” Those stories are wonderful. In these columns, though, you see that Runyon didn’t need the tricks of those stories — the stilted grammar, the constant present tense — to tell good stories.
Other voice: Baseball Hall of Fame. “Runyon was a moody man who always showed just a hint of a smile. As Fred Lieb recalled, ‘you felt he was laughing at the world, not with it.’ ”
I once knew a chap who had a system of just hanging the baby on the clothes line to dry and he was greatly admired by his fellow citizens for having discovered a wonderful innovation on changing a diaper.
Show Me the Money, Chris Roush
Chris Roush’s textbook is the classic background for financial reporting. I don’t feature a lot of specialist reporting books on this list. This one’s here because knowledge of financial matters is important to almost every beat. And because too many journalists are too afraid of numbers, and books like this give them the tools they need. 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.
Other voice: Bill Barnhart, Reynolds Center for Business Journalism in a review of the 2004 edition. “Roush presents an extensive menu of business reporting tasks — macroeconomics; corporate financial statements and other SEC disclosures; mergers and acquisitions; the stock market and initial public offerings; corporate organization and compensation; private and small businesses; not-for-profit businesses; business litigation; bankruptcy; real estate; regulation and regulatory agencies; and Internet tools for business journalists.”
Although reporting and writing in business sections is much better than it was three decades ago, some of it still lacks the contextualization that would help local readers better understand what business means to them. … The chief problem appears to be reporting and editing staffs that do not fully understand business issues and complicated economic topics.
Find in my store | Find on Biblio.com
The Soccer War, Ryszard Kapuscinski
It is helpful to remember that journalism exists outside the English-speaking world. Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish journalist. “The Soccer War” is a collection of pieces about the many revolutions and wars he’s covered. (The title refers to a 100-hour war in Central America started by a soccer game.)
Other voice: Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly. “For all its bitter honesty, The Soccer War is as compassionate and oddly uplifting a book about the Third World as one could possibly read. Besides the idiosyncratic brilliance of Kapuscinski’s reporting — which comes across nicely in William Brand’s brisk translation — the author’s self-deprecating sense of humor and his fundamental humanity shine through on every page.”
I ask here and there: What’s going to happen? Nobody knows. They were told to come, and so they are here. … And then, the surprised face of someone I’ve accosted: Why are you asking all these questions? … There’s Welbeck now: Welbeck will tell us. Minister of State Welbeck, stately and modest in a black Mulsim skull cap, picks up the microphone. Hearing him is difficult, but you can pick up the sense: ‘Imperialism is pushing … Nkrumah has been insulted … this slap in the face … we cannot …’ Ah, this is serious!
The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
I was just out of college and in my first full-time job, reporting on small towns and schools in central Michigan, when I read “The Soul of a New Machine.” I knew then that it was well-written and unusual in that it made an interesting, even exciting story out of a company trying to get a new minicomputer ready for manufacturing and sales. Kidder has gone on to write several more books employing the same practice of burrowing deep into a a subject, and he’s one of the most accomplished of the book-length literary journalists. But what I couldn’t have foreseen in 1981 was that, about 20 years later, I would be an editor in a newspaper business section, and having read “The Soul of a New Machine” would make me think about business journalism in a somewhat unusual way. This is a business book, you see, but it’s about how things actually get done, not about dollars divorced from labor. There is a general problem with journalism: We talk to owners and CEOs, mayors and senators. We pull in “regular people” for eyewitness accounts of tragedies and to be amused by their uninformed comments on news events. But we don’t write about what people experience every day. Kidder does.
Other voice: Evan Ratliff, Wired. “More than a simple catalog of events or stale corporate history, Soul lays bare the life of the modern engineer – the egghead toiling and tinkering in the basement, forsaking a social life for a technical one. It’s a glimpse into the mysterious motivations, the quiet revelations, and the spectacular devotions of engineers – and, in particular, of West. Here is the project’s enigmatic, icy leader, the man whom one engineer calls the ‘prince of darkness,’ but who quietly and deliberately protects his team and his machine. Here is the raw conflict of a corporate environment, factions clawing for resources as West shields his crew from the political wars of attrition fought over every circuit board and mode bit. Here are the power plays, the passion, and the burnout — the inside tale of how it all unfolded.”
West and Alsing usually went out for coffee in the middle of the morning, but not now.
Alsing poked his head into West’s office. ‘Coffee, Tom?’
‘Go away, Carl,’ West replied.
Alsing tried on another day. Without looking up from his worked, West said, in a flat, calm voice, ‘Get out, Alsing.’
Alsing sensed that there was nothing personal in these rebuffs, and he found it impossible to get angry at West. After seven weeks, West emerged, the completed design for the IOP in his hands.
Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production, Jonathan Kern
National Public Radio’s news and public affairs broadcasts revolutionized the way radio reporting sounded. Alas, corporate homogenization of the rest of the radio dial has corralled that revolution. This guide will not tell you how to blurt out headlines in between a morning zoo’s bleats and belches. If you want to do audio reporting properly, however, this is the source. It covers all forms of news reports and provides not only advice on how to get the news but how to present it. Its discussion of editing audio explains the ethical principles behind the smooth sound of so many public radio stories. (Hear what I mean in this “On the Media” story about its own editing practices.)
As a side note, I wish I’d read this book before I started podcasting for my old paper. The lessons here extend beyond broadcast.
Other voice: Jane Pauley. “I think ‘Sound Reporting’ ought to be required reading for anyone aspiring to a career in journalism, audio or otherwise. … This is not just ‘how to do it,’ but how to do it fairly, responsibly, and intelligently.”
No one in public radio argues that it’s ethical to deceive the listener. What people are constantly trying to define is when deception occurs. After all, the production process necessarily involves a certain amount of manipulation of audio.
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.