From a Harvard historian, this riveting portrait of four trailblazing American journalists highlights the power of the press in the interwar period. In the fragile peace following the Great War, a surprising number of restless young Americans abandoned their homes and set out impulsively to see the changing world. In Fighting Words, Nancy F. Cott follows four who pursued global news -- from contested Palestine to revolutionary China, from Stalin's Moscow to Hitler's Berlin. As foreign correspondents, they became players in international politics and shaped Americans' awareness of critical interwar crises, the spreading menace of European fascism, and the likelihood of a new war -- while living romantic and sexual lives as modern and as hazardous as their journalism. An indelible portrayal of a tumultuous era with resonance for our own, Fighting Words is essential reading on the power of the press and the growth of an American sense of international responsibility.

Sixty essays on American news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters, including Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Connie Chung, whose careers significantly advanced or symbolized major changes in journalism.

Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

An authoritative and detailed illustration of the state of journalistic practice in the United States today, The American Journalist in the 21st Century sheds light on the demographic and educational backgrounds, working conditions, and professional and ethical values of print, broadcast, and Internet journalists at the beginning of the 21st century. Providing results from telephone surveys of nearly 1,500 U.S. journalists working in a variety of media outlets, this volume updates the findings published in the earlier report, The American Journalist in the 1990s, and reflects the continued evolution of journalistic practice and professionalism. The scope of material included here is extensive and inclusive, representing numerous facets of journalistic practice and professionalism, and featuring separate analyses for women, minority, and online journalists. Many findings are set in context and compared with previous major studies of U.S. journalists conducted in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Serving as a detailed snapshot of current journalistic practice, The American Journalist in the 21st Century offers an intriguing and enlightening profile of professional journalists today, and it will be of great interest and value to working journalists, journalism educators, media managers, journalism students, and others seeking insights into the current state of the journalism profession.

More than a decade has passed since the last comprehensive survey of U.S. journalists was carried out in 2002 by scholars at Indiana University--and the news and the journalists who produce it have undergone dramatic changes and challenges. The American Journalist in the Digital Age is based on interviews with a national probability sample of nearly 1,100 U.S. journalists in the fall of 2013 to document the tremendous changes that have occurred in U.S. journalism in the past decade, many of them due to the rise of new communication technologies and social media. This survey of journalists updates the findings from previous studies and asks new questions about the impact of new technologies and social media in the newsroom, and it includes more nontraditional online journalists than the previous studies.

When war erupted in Europe in 1914, American journalists hurried across the Atlantic ready to cover it the same way they had covered so many other wars. However, very little about this war was like any other. Its scale, brutality, and duration forced journalists to write their own rules for reporting and keeping the American public informed. American Journalists in the Great War tells the dramatic stories of the journalists who covered World War I for the American public. Chris Dubbs draws on personal accounts from contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and books to convey the experiences of the journalists of World War I, from the western front to the Balkans to the Paris Peace Conference. Their accounts reveal the challenges of finding the war news, transmitting a story, and getting it past the censors. Over the course of the war, reporters found that getting their scoop increasingly meant breaking the rules or redefining the very meaning of war news. Dubbs shares the courageous, harrowing, and sometimes humorous stories of the American reporters who risked their lives in war zones to record their experiences and send the news to the people back home.