Social Science Journalism

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of fifteen activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities - using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates.

The Democratic Party left rural America behind. This urgent rallying cry shows how Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right—and why long-term progressive political power depends on it.

War, persecution, natural disasters, and climate change continue to drive millions around the world from their homes. In this “tender, intimate, and important book—a carefully reported rebuttal to the xenophobic narratives that define so much of modern American politics” (Sarah Stillman, staff writer, The New Yorker), journalist Susan Hartman follows 3 refugees over 8 years and tells the story of how they built new lives in the old manufacturing town of Utica, New York.

Steffens was the towering figure in journalism of the early 20th century. This is a series of articles he wrote uncovering the graft and corruption at the highest levels of municipal governments across the country: the "Boodlers" stealing money from public piggy banks through a wide variety of schemes and plans made in smoke-filled rooms; trading power for profit; selling rights and property that belonged to the public and putting the money in their own pockets. This is the birth of investigative journalism. It made a difference.

In 2019, the ABC aired an explosive investigative documentary, How to Sell a Massacre, revealing how One Nation solicited donations of up to $20 million from the NRA, promising in return to use the balance of power to soften gun laws in Australia. Masterminded by veteran Australian journalist Peter Charley, the elaborate sting saw Australian businessman Rodger Muller go undercover as the head of a fake Australian pro-gun advocacy group. In How to Sell a Massacre, Peter Charley gives an inside account of the sting.

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.

Long 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.

Writer and journo-tech pioneer Christine Marie Nielsen didn't think she'd be returning to her native city of Milwaukee (oft called the most segregated city in the US in terms of socio-economic and racial lines), but because of family income constraints and a resulting need to help her parents, she does. While there, she looks into systemic problems and what makes the city tick, but she also finds herself being pulled back into a cycle of poverty.