In his massive, marvelous new paean to the greats of foreign correspondents, Journalism’s Roving Eye (Louisiana State University Press, 487 pp), John Maxwell Hamilton, Dean of the J-school at LSU, gallops to the precipice of What Now? (more...)

the aughts Just as great men stand on the shoulders of giants, so too is history built on what came before. This now-elapsing decade — The Aughts, or whatever you want to call them — has been a decade of change not only compared to the decades before it, but because of them. That said, historian Paul Starr notes an important distinction: “We are seeing a whole series of events in which journalists became important actors themselves. You can’t tell the story of what happened without them. You can write about any other period in history and you don’t have to mention journalists at all. You can’t do that for this period, because journalists were critical actors in those changes.” Perhaps that's why now, more than ever, it's important to remember how we got here. (more...)

What a relief to get the odious Lou Dobbs out of the news business, at least for a while. Of all the degraders of the trade, he has been, well, to borrow the title from Keith Olbermann, the worst. Unlike the other, often inept, purveyors of political hysteria, he possessed the gravitas, voice of authority, expression of earnest concern, that could convey conviction to the point of persuasion to the uninformed, all the while providing emotional reassurance to his Know-Nothing core. Birthers. Immigrants as conveyors of leprosy. Xenophobia. Much more damaging to the lingering public regard for the news business than the obvious chicanery and food-fights among his putative competitors. (more...)

Glenn Beck sure gives me the yips. But so have many others over my sixty-plus years in this profession. Some as columnists, like Hearst’s nasty Westbrook Pegler, or rumor-monger Walter Winchell; some as voices for the frustrated afflicted, self-defined or truly hurting; to mobilize and deploy political enmities, like Huey Long, George Wallace or Joe McCarthy.

But this guy is different. (more...)

“The clear formula for magazine success now: Target America’s stupidest readers” a wise guy from Gawker suggested the other day, in commentary on the list of the eleven magazines that showed profit and growth for the first six months of 2009. Smug, perhaps. But not to be dismissed. For people who are trying desperately to think of any ways possible to cope, survive, even prosper in the erupting, exploding, futuristic new world of journalism, the idea of salvation among the stupid might be worth some consideration. (more...)

Mediaite was born at around 2 a.m. on Sunday, July 6th. Then the server crashed. Welcome to the fun-filled world of a start-up! For the past four weeks, we've taken to comparing the site to a baby: Don't leave it alone, don't expect much sleep, you never know what it'll burp up. (Wordpress! How you bedevil us!). Though it's certainly forced us to stretch in ways we weren't expecting, we've enjoyed the past month — enough to look forward to sticking around for a while (sorry, Brain Trust). (more...)

Historians generally agree that Watergate was a great, shining moment for the press - and for the Washington Post, which published the scoops of that would eventually take down a president. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have made careers out of it; Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman added it to theirs, as have countless authors and scholars. But the July 17th issue of the Economist points to a more unorthodox take: That the Washington Post was selfish, irresponsible, and directly responsible for thwarting the World Peace that Richard Nixon would certainly have won. (more...)

In the ruthless quest for cutting costs every which way, the practice of pooling — the assignment of a single crew to cover a routine event for  several local TV stations — is  taking hold  in newsrooms all across the country. In some cases, it makes a lot of sense.  Who needs a fleet of helicopters to cover a car chase?  Or major capital investment in your own weather radar, when all the basic information comes out of the U.S. weather service? In most cases, carefully handled, pooling can cover  routine events adequately, with no  loss in basic news service, and put the saved manpower to work on original, fresh stories.  But at the same time it can make redundant — read: fireable — each station's crew that would otherwise be on that job.  Good stations will naturally try to make creative use of those freed-up teams, but these days the opportunity to cut costs can be irresistible. (more...)

While the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment has never been successfully challenged politically, it is now being challenged economically:  as a practical matter, the press is not so free.

In the hard new priorities of news management, dwindling resources struggle to keep coverage alive on essential routine beats, while the public-interest side of the business — investigative journalism,  the very heart and soul of journalism — is being unforgivably squeezed in the face of fiscal realities. (more...)

My name is Bill Rappleye. I'm 85. I started as a copy boy right after the war - that war, WWII - and have spent my life in journalism in the sixty-plus years since. I started at Time magazine in 1947, and worked my way up to a couple of dream assignments-- Southwest: Bureau Chief and National Economic Correspondent. From then on, I was lucky to have a career made up of great jobs: in finance and the financial media at important-sounding names like American Banker, Financial World, First National Bank of Chicago, and Financier, the Journal of Private Sector Policy, with important-sounding titles, like Columnist, Founding Editor, Publisher. (more...)