Author Archive

Articles by James Boylan | Email the Author

 

1. Critical Eye

   Brief Encounters

   November 1, 2012 12:00 AM

   Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis | By Celia Viggo Wexler | McFarland & Company | 195 pages | $40 paperbound Celia Viggo Wexler left newspaper journalism in the 1980s for an unfashionable reason,... Continue reading

2. Review

   Brief Encounters

   September 26, 2012 11:18 AM

   Anonymous in Their Own Names: Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant | By Susan Henry | Vanderbilt University Press | 294 pages | $35 What did Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant have in... Continue reading

3. Review

   Brief Encounters

   August 14, 2012 10:49 AM

   Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space | By Alice Fahs | University of North Carolina Press | 360 pages, $37.50 Frank Luther Mott’s once-standard history, American Journalism (1962 edition), covered in two... Continue reading

4. Review

   Brief Encounters

   May 28, 2012 06:50 AM

   Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power | By Andrew Nagorski | Simon & Schuster | 385 pages, $28 As Adolf Hitler trans-formed himself from a failed regional politician to the most feared tyrant of the 20th century,... Continue reading

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

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