New Books in Journalism
392 episodes - English - Latest episode: 27 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterview with Scholars of Journalism about their New Books
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Episodes
Erin Keane, "Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me" (Belt Publishing, 2022)
October 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrom Erin Keane, editor in chief at Salon, comes Runaway: Notes in the Myths that Made Me (Belt Publishing, 2022), a touching memoir about the search for truths in the stories families tell. In 1970, Erin Keane's mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. Over the next several years, and under two assumed identities, she hitchhiked her way across America, experiencing freedom, hardship, and tragedy. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He ...
Ewa Stańczyk, "Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
October 11, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesComics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland (Ohio State UP, 2022) offers a fresh perspective on the role of popular culture in the one-hundred-year history of the Polish state, from its foundation in 1918 to the present. Drawing on dozens of press articles, interviews, and readers' letters, Ewa Stańczyk discusses how journalists, artists, and audiences used comics to probe the boundaries of national culture and scrutinize the established notions of Polishness...
On John Hersey's "Hiroshima"
October 07, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesIn August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John Hersey traveled to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors of the bombing. The subsequent article was published by The New Yorker in 1946. Hiroshima was published as a book two months later. MIT Professor Christopher Capozzola discusses why he thinks every American should read Hiroshima. Christopher Capozzola is a professor of History at MIT....
Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022))
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesSteve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the...
Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert, "Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman" (Seal Press, 2022)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesTogether, bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert have written Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), the first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you've never heard of. At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a ...
Lewis Raven Wallace, “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” (U Chicago Press, 2019)
September 22, 2022 19:00 - 45 minutesFrom the New York Times to NPR, many major news organizations have strict policies about how reporters can conduct themselves in relation to the stories they cover. Journalists are discouraged from going to political events, advocating for causes related to the topics they cover, and publicly supporting candidates — all in the name of impartiality and presenting the news as an unbiased observer. Journalist Lewis Raven Wallace argues that this thinking is flawed, and even dangerous to democrac...
Michael R. Gordon, "Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump" (FSG, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump (FSG, 2022), Wall Street Journal national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon reveals the strategy debates, diplomatic gambits, and military operations that shaped the struggle against the Islamic State. With extraordinary access to top U.S. officials and military commanders and to the forces on the battlefield, Gordon offers a riveting narrative that ferrets out some of the w...
Elizabeth Andrews Bond, "The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France" (Cornell UP, 2021)
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourInspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2021) is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond diligently scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years ...
E. James West, "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr." (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
August 30, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesJournalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers. This critical biog...
Don’t Look Left: A Discussion with David Sirota, writer of "Don't Look Up"
August 15, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesWhy does the democratic establishment always avoid turning left, even when it might mean a political win? Gordon asks David Sirota. Sirota is behind the smash-hit Netflix movie Don’t Look Up! Even if you weren’t a fan of that movie this is worth a listen, because David is more than just a screenwriter. He’s a journalist who doesn’t limit his journalism to one kind of storytelling. David has written for The Guardian and for Jacobin, but he is also host and co-writer of investigative podcast se...
On Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion"
August 10, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesWhat is the role of the press in a democracy? For nearly a century, scholars, media critics, and politicians have debated this question—in a large part thanks to Walter Lippmann. Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion, changed the conversation about how to educate voters and who should be able to vote at all. In this episode, University of British Columbia professor Heidi Tworek discusses the timeless questions and the man who asked them. Heidi Tworek is assistant professor of international his...
Covering Higher Ed: A Chat with Sara Custer of Times Higher Education
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesA special opportunity to hear from Sara Custer, editor of The Campus (Times Higher Education), about the role of journalism and reporting in higher education. Avi and Sara cover topics ranging from the role of media in increasing cross-institution collaboration and sharing during the pandemic to how universities can do a better job supporting their junior scholars. Also, don't miss out on the opportunity to learn how you can publish in Times Higher Education yourself! Avi Staiman is the found...
Matt Reingold, "Reenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis" (Lexington, 2022)
July 11, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesReenvisioning Israel Through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018-2021 Electoral Crisis (Lexington Books, 2022) by Matt Reingold, published by Lexington Books as part of its Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature series, offers an incisive—and prescient, given the recent dissolution of the incumbent government—consideration of how political cartoonists in Israel broaden the conversation about the various challenges faced by the country. Organized thematically around issues th...
Edwin Amenta and Neal Caren, "Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News" (Princeton UP, 2022)
June 21, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesRough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a new view of U.S. social movement history across the twentieth century by examining how movement organizations were covered in major national newspapers. The book analyzes U.S. social movements--ranging from temperance to women's suffrage to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street--in a broad comparative fashion. Drawing on the full set of digitized newspapers from the twentieth-century (a task that...
Andie Tucher, "Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History" (Columbia UP, 2022)
June 13, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesLong before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep di...
Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins, "Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence" (Scribe, 2022)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesHello media fans - The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster, for TV, digital and radio. Think BBC and CBC and NPR. Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence (Scribe, 2022) by Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins (Scribe 2022), charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage o...
Ryan Watson, "Radical Documentary and Global Crises: Militant Evidence in the Digital Age" (Indiana UP, 2021)
June 06, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesWhen independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence." In Radical Documentary and Global Crises: Militant Evidence in the Digital Age (Indiana UP, 2021), Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and ch...
Christopher J. Gilbert, "Caricature and National Character: The United States at War" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesDr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character and culture through the works of caricature and comic representations. Gilbert specifically focuses on this kind of work that is produced during moments of crisis, particularly during wartime. Wartime often prompts self-understanding for a nation, since there is a demand that the reason for war is made clear, and the role of the nation is...
Sally Hayden, "My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route" (Melville House, 2022)
May 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourLate one night, journalist Sally Hayden received an urgent message on Facebook: “Sally, we need your help.” It was from a group of Eritrean refugees who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months. Now, Tripoli was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and the refugees remained stuck, defenseless, with only one hope: contacting her. With that begins Hayden’s staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa: from brutal, vindictive Libyan guards to unexpected...
Donald A. Barclay, "Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
May 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDoes the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help yo...
Eve Ng, "Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
May 11, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesEve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer cultu...
Mónica Guzmán, "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times" (BenBella Books, 2022)
May 09, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJournalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationshi...
Robert E. Gutsche Jr., "The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump" (Routledge, 2022)
May 03, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. examines the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly. The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideolo...
William F. Eadie, "When Communication Became a Discipline" (Lexington, 2021)
May 02, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesWhen Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Be...
Kris Ruijgrok, "Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and Other Authoritarian Regimes" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
April 15, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesInternet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer an...
Jennifer Petersen, "How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech" (Duke UP, 2022)
April 14, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesIn How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverb...
Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 36 minutesJacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restric...
The Future of Rational Decision Making: A Discussion with Olivier Sibony
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more im...
Jerry Ceppos, "Covering Politics in the Age of Trump" (LSU Press, 2021)
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesAs the United States moves on from the Trump era — and perhaps begins to contemplate what a second one might look like — conversations about journalism's relationship to Trump and his ideas are cropping up all over the place. Books like News After Trump address these questions through a scholarly lens, but Covering Politics in the Age of Trump (LSU Press, 2021) looks at coverage of Trump from the perspective of journalists who cover national politics. Edited by Jerry Ceppos, the book takes a...
E. James West, "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (U of Illinois Press, 2020)
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEbony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century. Far from dismissing Ebony as a consumer magazine with limited political or educational importance, E. James West highlights the value editors, readers, and advertisers placed upon Ebony's role as a "history book." ...
Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza, "A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 15, 2022 04:00 - 1 hourIn A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (Oxford UP, 2021), Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginn...
Julian Stallabrass, "Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
March 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pre...
Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, "Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesWhite publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (U Illinois Press, 2021) centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. In this interv...
Stanislav Aseyev, "In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas" (HURI, 2022)
February 22, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesStanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (i...
Christopher Chávez, "The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public" (U Arizona Press, 2021)
February 15, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesHow is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (U Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chávez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez arg...
In Science We Trust?: An insider Conversation with Health Policy Reporter, Fran Kritz
February 15, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesAmericans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths. What is going on? Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built...
Paula Lynn Ellis et al., "News for US: Citizen-Centered Journalism" (Cognella, 2021)
February 07, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesIn the midst of the disruptions and distrust that have plagued traditional media in recent years, and a degree of polarization rarely seen in American history, a new style of journalism is emerging. Dozens of news organizations, from corporate powerhouses to home-office startups, are reviving a classic role of American journalism: inspiring and enabling Americans to do the difficult, authentic, and ultimately rewarding work of citizenship in a democratic society. News for US: Citizen-Centere...
Lisa Jane Disch, "Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
February 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the interests and preferences of actors, this raises the specters of manipulation, voter incompetence, ...
Matt Carlson et al., "News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021)
January 19, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesPolitical scientists have argued that Donald Trump exacerbated long-simmering changes in polarization, populism, and other aspects of politics. In their book News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, and Sue Robinson, argue that Trump's candidacy and presidency did the same in journalism. The question now is, how do news organizations move forward and continue to deliver informational value to th...
Marshall Poe: The Founder and Editor of the New Books Network
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThis interview was recorded and first published in early 2020 when the NBN had about a million downloads a month. Since then the downloads have increased more than four-fold to just below 5 million monthly downloads at the end of 2021 and the number of hosts has increased greatly as well. On the New Books Network authors to talk about their books with a specialist host. Founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, formerly a Russian history professor from the US. The NBN has grown to be the most download...
Lynn Stephen, "Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas" (Duke UP, 2021)
December 29, 2021 09:00 - 34 minutesElena Poniatowska is a legendary Mexican journalist who has chronicled popular celebrities, politicians as well as important social movements in Mexico since the 1968 Tlatelolco students massacre. Today I talked to Lynn Stephen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon who has described in her book Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke UP, 2021) how Poniatowska’s personal and political trajectory intertwined with Mexico’s growing critical ...
Eric Berkowitz, "Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News" (Beacon Press, 2021)
November 29, 2021 09:00 - 35 minutesEric Berkowitz has written a short history of a censorship, a large topic that has been a phenomenon since the advent of recorded history. In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2021), Berkowitz reviews the motives and methods of governments, religious authorities, and private citizens to quell freedom of thought and expression. One theme Berkowitz reveals is how ineffective many censorship efforts have been. For example, af...
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
November 26, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourHow do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the re...
Elizaveta Friesem, "Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)
October 27, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesMedia is usually seen as a feature of the modern world enabled by the latest technologies. Scholars, educators, parents, and politicians often talk about media as something people should be wary of due to its potential negative impact on their lives. But do we really understand what media is? In Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Elizaveta Friesem argues that instead of being worried about media or blaming it for what’s going wrong...
Emily Mokros, "The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China: State News and Political Authority" (U Washington Press, 2021)
October 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing st...
Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, "Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath" (NewSouth, 2021)
October 19, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourMatthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath (NewSouth, 2021) reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there t...
Will Mari, "The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960" (U Missouri Press, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 37 minutesThe story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (University of Missouri Press, 2021), Will Mari documents a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in "news factories" by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. While...
Denis McQuail, “Perspectives on Mass Communication” (Open Agenda, 2021)
October 05, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourPerspectives on Mass Communication is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Denis McQuail (1935-2017), who was Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the history of mass communication studies. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into how examining the media, and in particular mass media, necessarily involve...
Mark Baker, "Time of Changes" (Albatros Books, 2021)
September 24, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesMark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. Čas Proměn (Time of Changes) is hi...
Covering Donald Trump: A Conversation with Allen Salkin
September 14, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhat's it like to cover Donald Trump? In this episode, veteran American journalist Allen Salkin explains. For over three decades, Salkin has written about many things for many high-profile publications, including The New York Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and others. He is also the author of a number of well-received books: Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2008); From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (2014); and most recently The M...