New Books In Journalism

David Schmalz is a staff writer at the Monterey County Weekly, where his longform pieces have won numerous awards from the California News Publishers Association, including a first place for enterprise reporting in 2014 for an expose he wrote about a local church's attempt to evict residents from 98 federally subsidized apartments from a property it managed. Those residents were able to keep their homes, and the property remains the largest affordable housing complex on the Monterey Peninsula. His reporting also helped lead to the closure of the last remaining coastal sand mine in America, as well as overturning the approvals for one of the largest proposed developments in Monterey County history, which would have razed tens of thousands of coast live oaks to build single family homes and a horse-racing track. Other than the four years he's spent working or traveling abroad, Schmalz has lived and worked his entire life in California. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with

If information is power, then so too is gossip. In Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian Christopher Elias shows how three men who sat at the center of the mid-century surveillance state—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the bellicose anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy, and the gold-collar lawyer from New York, Roy Cohn—understood that power and used it to their advantage, elevating themselves and intimidating others. The trio investigated the private lives of their enemies, and mastered the tools of implication, sensationalism, photographic manipulation. By putting “the politics of insinuation” at the center of American culture, Elias, an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, provides an innovative and entertaining reading of celebrity, and masculinity, and the mid-century surveillance state. More than anything, Gossip Men illustrates that many seemingly disparate historical processes in the middle decades of the

David Freedlander is a veteran New York City-based journalist. He writes long-form features about politics and the arts, people and ideas, and has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, ArtNews, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and a host of other publications. In this episode, we are talking about his coverage of New York Politics – the resignation of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and likely next mayor of the NYC, Eric Adams. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputat

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? In Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers UP, 2020), Megan Goodwin argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

In considering how legislation moves forward in the American political system, we often think about elected representatives sitting in committee hearings or Senators speaking from the floor of the Senate to make a particular point. Woven into all of these ideas, which are not misguided, is the role (often behind the scenes) that congressional leaders play in trying to wrangle their caucuses to vote for or against legislation.  In The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail (U Michigan Press, 2021), Political Scientist John Lovett leads us into these processes and assumptions and unpacks the ways that congressional leaders are far less able to exert control over their caucuses because of the ways that individual members are able to pursue attention through the changing media landscape. While Lovett provides a coda at the end of the book indicating that social media, especially Twitter, has an outsized role in the ways that individual members can capture attention, the focus of the book is to

Throughout her career, spanning more than two decades, Jessica Hopper, a revered and pioneering music critic, has examined women recording and producing music, in all genres, through an intersectional feminist lens. The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (MCD x Fsg Originals, 2021) features oral histories of bands like Hole and Sleater Kinney, interviews with the women editors of 1970s-era Rolling Stone, and intimate conversations with iconic musicians such as Björk, Robyn, and Lido Pimienta. Hopper journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence; decamps to Gary, Indiana, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death; explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love; and examines the rise of emo. The collection also includes profiles and reviews of some of the most-loved, and most-loathed, women artists making music today: Fiona Apple, Kacey Musgraves, M.I.A., Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduat

The Value of Voice is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. This wide-ranging conversation explores how the media can be used as a filter to examine power structures, political movements, economic interests, democracy and our evolving notion of culture, the importance of voice and the challenge posed by media institutions that order the social, political, cultural, economic, and ethical dimensions of our lives. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father. This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intru

Today we are talking to a New Yorker staff writer Carrie Battan about her piece from March of this year "How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community" – about how a quote unquote “nice website about yarn” got involved in radical politics. Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018. She has contributed to the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, and the Web site Pitchfork, where she worked as a staff writer from 2011 to 2014. She lives in Brooklyn. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Frank Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these photographers operated, including the crucial roles performed by often female office staff, by picture editors and corporate clients. She sets out to show that right from the outset, Magnum was also a business operation, one that pioneered modern ideas of branding borrowed from advertising agencies and commercial partners. Drawing on extensive archival work and including numerous images of photo page spreads, The Decisive Network presents Magnum in a novel and distinctive light, as the framer of new global imaginaries t

In First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (Pegasus Books, 2021), Ken Ellingwood takes readers back to the first true test of the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press through the story of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The story unfolds during the 1830s, a period known for legal efforts to silence the abolitionist movement by states across the South and violent mobs who picked up that charge when the government could not. Lovejoy pushed back against both of those forces and ultimately succumbed to them, becoming a martyr for the abolitionist movement and a wakeup call about how essential a free press was to a free country and a thriving democracy in America. Lovejoy's story is worth revisiting now at time when attacks against journalists are again on the rise and the press is considered by some to be the "enemy of the people." Ellingwood does a wonderful job of capturing it in this book and bringing this important time in Americ

Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be conce

Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández's book Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities' vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression,

The connection between local news and political polarization is a hot topic that scholars in political science, journalism, and other fields have explored from multiple angles. It's not often that a real-world experiment presents itself, but that's exactly what happened when a Google alert landed in the inboxes of Joshua P. Darr., Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna Dunaway. During the month of July 2019, the Palm Springs Desert Sun  dropped national politics from its opinion page and instead filled the space with columns from local writers and letters to the editor about local issues.  In Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (Cambridge UP, 2021), the authors use a show that after this quasi-experiment in Palm Springs, politically engaged people did not feel as far apart from members of the opposing party, compared to those in a similar community whose newspaper did not change. While it may not cure all of the imbalances and inequities in opinion journalism, an opinion page that ignores nat

In early twentieth century British India, prior to the arrival of digital medias and after the rise of nationalist political movements, a small-town paper from the margins of society became a key player in Urdu journalism. Published in the isolated market town of Bijnor, Madinah grew to hold influence across North India and the Punjab while navigating complex issues of religious and political identity.  In Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2020), Megan Robb uses the previously unexamined perspective of the Madinah to consider Urdu print publics and urban life in South Asia. Through a discursive and material analysis of Madinah, the book explores how Muslims who had settled in ancestral qasbahs, or small towns, used newspapers to facilitate a new public consciousness. The book demonstrates how Madinah connected the Urdu newspaper conversation both explicitly and implicitly with Muslim identity and delineated the boundaries of a Muslim public conversati

What’s the greatest crisis facing America today? — Racism and hate crimes, exploding government debt, climate change, or the mess at the border? It may be none of these. America and many other countries are trapped in high conflict. Both sides are paralyzed by fear and anger as they demonize the other. The national narrative of "us versus them" is a threat to democracy and stops us from working together to build a better world. Best-selling author and investigative journalist, Amanda Ripley, is our guest. She is well-known for her writing in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Amanda argues that good conflict involves nuance and complexity. It can teach us to be better people, who are capable of solutions as they move past misunderstandings. Many are trapped in high conflict, which is threatening to tear us apart, creating an even deeper crisis than we have now. We discuss "conflict ent

The future of local news and the connection between local news and democracy are two of the hottest topics in philanthropy, education, and media these days. Nikki Usher addresses both head-on in her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2021).  In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it.  Drawing on more than a decade of field research in newsrooms across the United States, Usher illuminates how news organizations strategize about the future and offers ideas for how they can meet community information needs in an inclusive, equitable way. Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois . Jenna Spinelle is a

On Heels in the Middle East (Pardes Publishing, 2020) is the first book of Ksenia Svetlova, an Israeli journalist of Russian origin who covered the Middle East extensively during the last two decades. Svetlova takes us on a journey to Hizbullah dominated parts of Beirut, refugee camps in Gaza, Qaddafi's Libya and the revolutionary squares of the Arab Spring. She describes the fateful events that had changed the face of the Middle East such as the US invasion to Iraq or the second Palestinian Intifada and disengagement from Gaza from a unique point of view of female reporter, and explains the processes that culminated in revolutions, armed conflicts or peace agreements. "On heels in the Middle East" ties together first-hand impressions, rare interviews with key figures such as Yassir Arafat and Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas and expert analysis of developments in the Middle East. Ksenia Svetlova is an Israeli journalist, researcher of the Middle East and writer. She was born in Moscow and grew up in

Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry — including profound financial instability and public distrust — is for journalists to improve connections to their audiences. Conversations about the proper relationship between the media and the public go back to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey and through the public journalism movement of the 1990s to today and what's come to be known as engaged journalism.  In Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford UP, 2021), Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before. Beyond the arguments in Imagined Audiences, Nelson talks with New Books in Journalism host Jenna Spinelle about how journalism researchers and practitioner