Journalists
Adventures in Journalism: The Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition
These days I’m deep in the history of American journalism, particularly America’s foreign correspondents and war correspondents. (FYI, not all foreign correspondents were war correspondents, and vice-versa.) It is a fascinating world of colorful characters, competition, camaraderie, and occasional back-stabbing. Newspaper owners, particularly those who maintained reporters overseas, were engaged in a constant balancing act…
Read More
Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds and the History of Radio Broadcasting
You’ve probably heard this story before: On October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old theatrical boy-wonder named Orson Welles caused panic among radio listeners with the Halloween episode of his Mercury Theatre on the Air (1): an adaptation of H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds.(2) Actors played the roles of correspondents who broke into an on-going…
Read More
The Invention of News
These days I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the news: how it is shaped, who controls the story, how we receive it.* These questions are not only an important part of the political dialogue today, but an important part of the book I’m working on. In search of a dimly remembered idea, I…
Read More