Appendix C: Journalism: A Guide to Recent Literature - Section 5. News Categories

A. General News Content

See also Section 6-B for surveys of media coverage of politics, and 8-H for critiques of journalism.

Beaubien, Michael P., and John S. Wyeth, Jr., eds. Views on the News: The Media and Public Opinion. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Contains the Chet Huntley (a former NBC anchorman) memorial lectures from 1979 through 1990 by a host of luminaries addressing different aspects of news reporting, some historically, others critically.

Clayman, Steven, and John Heritage. The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Academic study of the modern broadcast interview, using “conversation analysis”—a kind of linguistic content analysis—to dissect transcripts of some 250 news interviews conducted in the United States and Britain over a 20-year span. While style and format of interviews vary for different broadcast programs and among different questioners in England and America, authors conclude that interviewing conventions are nonetheless remarkably similar in both countries.

Cook, Philip, et al. The Future of News: Television, Newspapers, Wires, Newsmagazines. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Fifteen papers from a 1989 Wilson Center conference range widely but focus on news content (and how it is changing, often for the worse) in different media, ending with a case study of coverage of the 1989 Yellowstone Park fires.

Hamilton, James T. All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Analyzes economic factors that shape news content. Discusses economic theories of news, and prescribes policies to ensure that news media serve the public good: reforms to influence news market (among them reducing cost of information about how government operates); an expanded role for nonprofits in funding journalism; development of norms that stress hard-news reporting; and less-stringent copyright protection to encourage flow of political news.

Newseum. Today's Front Pages. http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flASH. Outline maps allows one to locate the newspaper front page for many local daily papers on that day from the United States and elsewhere—some 400 of them (and there is an archive of past front pages). Useful for seeing how major news stories “play” in different parts of the country and world.

Winch, Samuel P. Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism: How Journalists Distinguish News from Entertainment. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Many argue that this division is ignored these days—giving us “infotainment”—but the author [Page 2189]reviews how both were then defined and who (at least then) enforced the division.

B. Wars and the Military

In addition to foreign correspondence (see Sections 6-G and 7-C), war reporting is probably the most romantic—and dangerous—of journalism specializations.

B-1: Survey Histories

These titles tend to range over long periods and multiple wars.

Andersen, Robin. A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. How military or war stories change and morph from the original reporting done onsite to what is printed or aired in New York and elsewhere, from World War I and the birth of war propaganda to the failed Vietnam War and smaller wars since. Anderson also focuses on the role of CNN and its 24/7 coverage of war, as well as coverage of terrorism.

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