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Practically every week brings new stories about the terminal condition of the newspaper industry. Last month brought especially bad news for ink-stained wretches, as some of the nation's biggest dailies announced hundreds of newsroom job cuts. Bob discusses the causes of the industry's ills and its prognosis with financial analyst John Morton.
After September 11th, The New York Times created "Portraits of Grief," biographical sketches containing personal anecdotes supplied by the victim's family. The full accounting of casualties from Hurricane Katrina will likely be months away, but for writers of the New Orleans Times-Picayune the process of reckoning with the dead has already begun. Editor Jim Amoss talks with Brooke about how to portray the lives lost.
According to Working Today, the national freelancers' union, there are an estimated 50 million independent, self-employed workers across the country. But writer Ben Yagoda is no longer among them. Why is he leaving the ranks of freelancers? Unanswered query letters, undignified treatment by editors and an outdated pay scale, and that's just for starters. Bob talks to Yagoda about the travails of his former biz.
Among the evacuees from the flood on Tuesday was much of the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Huddled in the back of newspaper delivery trucks they quickly relocated to a temporary newsroom in Baton Rouge. Brooke speaks with Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss about how exiled reporters are covering their hometown from afar.
It might have seemed like a straightforward business proposition, triggered by demographics - a new broadsheet targeted at the sizeable black community of east Gainesville, Florida. But when news got out that the New York Times was the parent company behind the Gainesville Guardian, accusations started flying that the Times was taking money out of the pockets black publishers. Bob talks to one critic, National Newspaper Publishers Association editor-in-chief George Curry. He also hears from the Guardian's publisher, Jim Doughton.
New York Times reporter William L. Laurence witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb, flying with American troops over Nagasaki while the bomb was dropped. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories he subsequently published, many of which included details about the development and production of the bomb that he had kept secret until after the first atomic bomb was dropped. It turns out, however, that this wasn't the only secret Laurence was keeping. Bob speaks with author David Goodman about Laurence's allegiances.
This week, the L.A. Times ran a five part series, telling the story of a young boxer as she fights the odds to victory. The series looks to narrative non-fiction for its structure, reading like a novel and placing the he-said, she-said of attributions in footnotes at the end. Bob talks to reporter Kurt Streeter, the series' author, about defying readers' expectations.
If our major broadsheets seem to reflect a disproportionately affluent America, it may be because reporters and editors resemble their readership - a well-heeled demographic favored by newspaper advertisers. It's not surprising that these papers rarely take on the issue of class divisions. But over the past nine months, the L.A. Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have done exactly that. Brooke analyzes the papers' series on class with journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich.
