Just as the real-life Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were displaced to a degree by their film counterparts, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, in All the President’s Men, so the real Sydney Schanberg has been overshadowed by Sam Waterston’s depiction in The Killing Fields. This collection helps to bring the real Sydney Schanberg back to the fore. Its centerpiece is the 1980 article from The New York Times Magazine about Schanberg’s loss and recovery of his steadfast Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran, an account even more wrenching than the film version. But the book contains much more: stories and analyses from the decade when, as the author recalls, his life “turned into a war assignment” in Laos, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and, of course, Cambodia. He confesses that he still hears the siren call of war, and not only for the adrenaline rush it produces in the correspondent. Writes Schanberg: “The people should be told and shown—even if they wish to turn their eyes away—what is being waged in their name.”
Review
03:48 PM - May 3, 2010
Brief Encounters
Short reviews of books about misreported stories, the Killing Fields, and the press vs. secrets
#Realtalk: This isn’t another ‘golden age’ for print - But it is one for media
Social media in smaller markets - How three social media managers deal with smaller markets and more local coverage.
A rally for laid-off Sun-Times photogs - A protest Thursday morning drew about 150 picketers to the newspaper’s headquarters
Reporting, or illegal hacking - Scripps reporters are accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Exchange Watch: California Dreaming - Low healthcare premiums on the West Coast were trumpeted as a big, good-news Obamacare story. But: “Compared to what?”
One of the great reporters of his generation died Tuesday at 33. The stories he wrote, and the ones he didn’t live to write
Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies
Hastings was fearless and shook things up - especially with his McChrystal expose. The haters in the media couldn’t forgive him
Journalism is about finding flaws and magnifying them, and surely someone who would spill massive loads of state secrets must contain a few broken parts, right?
Call it the Politico rhetorical crutch
The inside-the-beltway publication’s go-to phrase
Rachel Maddow’s tribute to Michael Hastings
“Michael was angry … he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting.”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
