Science Journalism

In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he's one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays. The eight essays assembled here go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world's most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. Researched for months and even years on end, they explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning.

This book exposes how the media racializes and genderizes news coverage to fit the its far left "progressive" agenda-with bias baked into every aspect of news organizations these days. This work sets the record straight.

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the "muckraking" press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that gave power away to the Democrats.

In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.

This dramatic story of two men's efforts to save a small Wisconsin daily from obliteration at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain brings together startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett and unsparing insights into the newspaper industry.

Whether you are flogging tobacco, dealing in oil, pushing pharmaceuticals, denying climate change, or exploiting workers, The Playbook is here to help you obfuscate your way to what you want.

Reporting on news-impoverished areas in the US and around the world, America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage but also surveys some new efforts to keep local news alive - from nonprofit digital sites to an effort modeled on the Peace Corps. No nostalgic paean to the roar of rumbling presses, Ghosting the News instead sounds a loud alarm, alerting citizens to the growing crisis in local news that has already done serious damage.

How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law? Capturing News, Capturing Democracy puts these events in historical and international context-and develops a new analytical framework for understanding government capture and its connection to broader processes of democratic backsliding.

Where do journalists find the guts to keep telling the truth in places where truth-telling will get them murdered? Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières bring us the death toll from around the world, and that number is truly daunting: since 1992 more than 730 journalists have been killed - nearly three-quarters of them targeted and murdered. Over 85% of the fallen have been local journalists trying to unveil violence and corruption in their own back yards. Worse, 95% of the people who ordered their murder remain unpunished.

When Wisconsin became the first state in the nation in 1959 to let public employees bargain with their employers, the legislation catalyzed changes to labor laws across the country. In March 2011, when newly elected governor Scott Walker repealed most of that labor law and subsequent ones - and then became the first governor in the nation to survive a recall election fifteen months later - it sent a different message. Both times, Wisconsin took the lead, first empowering public unions and then weakening them.

In this holistic history, Will Mari traces American journalism from the 1920s through the 1960s, a time of great change and controversy in the field; one in which journalism was produced in “news factories”, by workers with dozens of different roles, using the latest technology, and setting the stage for the emergence of the information economy. Told from an empathetic, omnivorous, ground-up point of view, The American Newsroom uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.

On May 7, 1945, journalist Edward Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial.

William L. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb.

¿Quién manda en España? ¿Por qué mandan los que ocupan puestos de poder en los ministerios, secretarías de Estado, direcciones generales? ¿Qué redes de intereses les unen entre sí? Más allá de las "puertas giratorias", unos grupos pequeños de altos funcionarios, personas vinculadas al poder real, sobre todo al económico, toman las decisiones y lo hacen sin responder ante los ciudadanos ni escucharles. Porque las élites de poder no se presentan a las elecciones ni defienden un programa electoral.

In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market.

In Democracy Lives in Darkness, Emily Van Duyn discovers and follows a secret political organization of progressive women in a conservative community in rural Texas. Its members met in secret to protect themselves from retaliation by their conservative neighbors, friends, and family. They discussed immigrant rights, women's reproductive rights, racism, and intolerance of those of different racial/ethnic and cultural backgrounds in their community. Democracy Lives in Darkness is about this group: their daily lives, their choices, and ultimately, their incubation.

Local news is essential to democracy. Meaningful participation in civic life is impossible without it. However, local news is in crisis. According to one widely cited study, some 2,500 newspapers have closed over the last generation. And it is often marginalized communities of color who have been left without the day-to-day journalism they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

In The Inconvenient Journalist, Dusko Doder, writing with his spouse and journalistic partner Louise Branson, describes how one February night crystalized the values and personal risks that shaped his life. The frigid Moscow night in question was in 1984, and Washington Post correspondent Doder reported signs that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had died.

From the best-selling author of Cardinal comes a searing examination of the power imbalance in our legal system—where exposing the truth is never guaranteed and, for victims, justice is often elusive. A masterful and deeply troubling expose, Witness is the culmination of five years' research for award-winning investigative journalist Louise Milligan.

The constant threat of terrorism has left London under round-the-clock surveillance and in the tightening grip of privatised security firms. Journalist Antonia Conti suspects one such organisation—GRM—not only of being behind several women’s disappearances, but of financing the widespread violence it claims to fight. When a gang of hitmen use rampant state surveillance to track Antonia down, she narrowly escapes with her life. But then one of them turns up dead—covered in her DNA—and Antonia finds herself the prime suspect in his murder.