James Boylan : Author Archive : CJR

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Author Archive

Articles by James Boylan | Email the Author

Review

Brief Encounters
April 9, 2012 06:00 AM
Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South | By Brooks Blevins | University of Illinois Press | 304 pages, $29.95 The “quirky crime” story was an inescapable aspect of newspaper culture in the 1920s. Publications hundreds... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
February 1, 2012 06:00 AM
Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar: Stories of Food During Wartime by the World’s Leading Correspondents Edited by Matt McAllester | California Studies in Food and Culture, No. 31 | University of California Press | 214 pages | $27.50 Nearly... Continue reading
Fiftieth Anniversary

Birmingham: newspapers in a crisis
November 18, 2011 04:51 PM
In our Summer 1963 issue, James Boylan, CJR’s founding editor, examined how local newspapers covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Birmingham campaign, a non-violent effort to integrate Alabama's largest city. It was not, to say the least, an attractive record.... Continue reading
Reports

Pulitzer’s Magazine?
November 9, 2011 09:00 AM
Here is the best and here is the worst story of the day. . . . Here is the wrong of the day; here is the injustice that needs to be righted; here is the best editorial; here is a brilliant paragraph; here is... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
August 27, 2011 05:04 PM
The Magnificent Medills: The McCormick-Patterson Dynasty: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor By Megan McKinney | Harper | 464 pages | $27.99 Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
July 5, 2011 07:38 PM
The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Steve Wick | Palgrave Macmillan | 288 pages, $27 In 1941, William L. Shirer, one of Edward R. Murrow’s team of CBS correspondents... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
May 1, 2011 08:00 AM
Roi Ottley’s World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist | Edited with an introduction by Mark A. Huddle | University Press of Kansas | 199 pages, $29.95 On July 1, 1944, the troop-ship SS Scythia... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
February 23, 2011 04:38 PM
This Is NPR: The First Forty Years by Cokie Roberts and others | Chronicle Books | 271 pages, $29.95 This glossy heavyweight volume commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the arrival of National Public Radio, which went on... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
January 8, 2011 07:08 PM
Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer | By Garry Wills | Viking | 195 pages, $25.95 This is a curiously brief patchwork of memoirs by the most prolific and versatile journalist-historian-philosopher of our era. Garry Wills has written... Continue reading
Behind the News

Al Balk, 1969—1973
December 2, 2010 04:19 PM
Alfred Balk, the second editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, died in November at the age of eighty. Al, like me a native of Iowa, was my successor as editor, serving from 1969 to 1973. He arrived with strong credentials... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
December 1, 2010 04:33 PM
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership | By Lewis Hyde | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 306 pages, $26 The U.S. Constitution includes a clause authorizing Congress to give to authors and scientists exclusive rights to the uses... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
September 30, 2010 05:08 PM
Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century | Edited by Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank, Afterword by David Halberstam | University Press of Florida | 278 pages, $44.95 Two historians—Kenneth... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
July 6, 2010 12:27 PM
A Modern Instance | By William Dean Howells | J. R. Osgood and Company | 514 pages, available online for free More than 125 years after his creation, Bartley Hubbard is still with us in spirit. The self-regarding, unprincipled protagonist... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
May 3, 2010 03:48 PM
Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism | By W. Joseph Campbell | University of California Press | 284 pages, $60, $24.95 paper As W. Joseph Campbell shows, there are many ways to misreport. Sometimes... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
February 25, 2010 03:20 PM
The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols Nation Books 334 pages, $26.95 Observing the quickening deterioration of journalism as... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
January 12, 2010 06:53 PM
Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America By Kati Marton Simon & Schuster 272 pages, $26 For Kati Marton’s parents, living well seemed the best defense—while it lasted. Both of Jewish descent, the Martons... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
December 9, 2009 05:20 PM
Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting By John Maxwell Hamilton Louisiana State University Press 655 pages, $45 This tome has the heft of a doorstop and contains more than 200,000 words... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
October 6, 2009 09:19 PM
The News From Ireland: Foreign Correspondents and The Irish Revolution By Maurice Walsh I.B. Tauris 258 pages, £20 At the end of World War I, the victorious Allies brought self-determination to Europe, forging whole new nations... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
July 14, 2009 12:38 PM
Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press By Eric Boehlert Free Press 280 pages, $26 in his classic The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse showed how a cluster of bigfoot reporters... Continue reading
Review

Brief Encounters
May 16, 2009 04:05 PM
The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst | By Kenneth Whyte | Counterpoint | 546 pages, $30 It’s a story told and retold. Dynamic young Willie Hearst came out of the West, challenged the newspaper titans of... Continue reading

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