New Books in Journalism

Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convince governments to take notice, strident headlines or bold claims seem necessary to give complex, nuanced information some wow factor. But hype has a dark side, too. It can mislead. It can distract. It can blinker us from seeing what is actually going on.From AI, quantum computing and brain implants, to cancer drugs, future foods and fusion energy, science and technology journalist Gemma Milne reveals hype to be responsible for fundamentally misdirecting or even derailing crucial progress. Hype can be combated and discounted, though, if you're able to see exactly where, how and why it is being deployed. Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It (Robinson, 2021) is your guide to doing just that.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said.Interviewer: "When a submission lands on your desk, or better said, you call it up on your screen, what are you pleased to see, what makes your work easier?"Elisa De Ranieri: "Yeah, well, I guess what makes the job easier for an editor is to receive a paper that is well-written and well-constructed and where the authors are so experienced that they know how to pitch their story. It's nice because it, obviously, spares the editor the trouble of having to unpick what's being said. You know, there are papers where––I'm not saying that they're badly written––but they are so dense because it's not a story, it's a dump of facts, so that you have to start unpicking the facts until you've made your own version of the story that the authors are trying to tell, and only then can you assess that story based on your criteria."Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball.Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous--except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years. In that time, as she juggled a successful career as a corporate executive and single parenthood of five children, she missed only a handful of home games. The Garden was her second home--and the place where an extraordinary friendship between fan and sportswriter was forged.That relationship soon grew into something much bigger than basketball, with Michelle serving as a cherished mentor and friend to Harvey as he weathered life's inevitable storms: illness, aging, and professional challenges and transitions. During the 2017-18 NBA season, as Michelle faces serious illness that prevents her from attending more than a few Knicks games, Harvey finally has the chance to give back to Michelle everything she has given him: reminders of all she's accomplished, the blessings she's enjoyed, and the devoted friend she has been to him.Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “fake news” production is growing rapidly, and national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but often only exacerbate the situation of state control.In this episode, Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell discuss their new book, From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020), with Dr Thushara Dibley, and explore some of the more recent controversies surrounding social media use in Southeast Asia.Aim Sinpeng is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. Her research interests centre on the relationships between digital media, political participation and political regimes in Southeast Asia. Aim is particularly interested in the role of social media in shaping state-society relations and inducing political and social change. Aim received Facebook research grants to study hate speech in the Asia Pacific (with Fiona Martin) and the effectiveness of countering misinformation strategies (with Denis Stukal). Her other scholarly works examine popular movements against democracy in democratising states. She is co-editor of From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). She is the author of a forthcoming book, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: the Yellow Shirts in Thailand (University of Michigan Press). You can follow Aim on Twitter: @aimsinpeng.Ross Tapsell is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, specialising in Southeast Asian media. He is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (ISEAS Publishing, 2017) and From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region. Ross is currently Director of the ANU's Malaysia Institute, and is involved in the ANU's Indonesia Project and the academic blog New Mandala. You can follow Ross on Twitter: @RossTapsell.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor that bring celebrity images and stories into being on the pages of celebrity magazines. Grounded in media workers’ perspectives and everyday life, this book carefully situates Latino paparazzi and women reporters in relationship to the particular vulnerabilities that they face. For example, Díaz traces a shift in the demographic of the paparazzi from white men to Latino men, and with it a significant shift in the tone of insults levied against them. Women reporters remain vulnerable to sexual harassment and other dangers in carrying out their work. Hollywood presents itself to its audience through its carefully crafted films, images, and stories. Díaz’s work troubles this facade by centering the work and challenges of the everyday laborers who produce it.Vanessa Díaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Surfers are the ultimate bad boys, living the counter-culture life of decadence and hedonism as they travel the world in search of the perfect wave, partying hard along the way. So, it’s not surprising that these social misfits and dropouts created a sub-culture tied to drugs. While most might associate surfing Jeff Spicoli with smoking marijuana in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or hippies dropping acid in late 1960s Hawai’i, Chas Smith argues that cocaine and surfing are much more intertwined. Actually, it’s not so much surfing as the “surf industry”, the fashion industry’s big money marketing of the surfing lifestyle. In this exploration of the commodification of counter-culture, Chas Smith illustrates the lines from The Clash song: “They think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money”. But like a coke binge, the surf industry has come crashing down and once massive international corporations have gone bankrupt. More gonzo journalism than academic history, Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair (Rare Bird, 2018) is a wild thrill ride through several decades of surfing’s love affair with addiction.Irreverent, cynical, and surprisingly erudite, Chas Smith tells us time and time again that he hates being a surf journalist and despise the surfing industry. “I was supposed to have waved goodbye to this shallow end of the swimming pool years ago. I was supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter by now, spilling valuable words on the plight of Syrian refugees while dodging bullets. Or maybe in the White House briefing room being shouted down by the press secretary for speaking truth to power. Or front row at the Fendi show in Paris, across from Anna Wintour … anywhere but here.” But there he is. Bopping about Southern California’s heart of the surfing industry. Driving from surf industry event to surf industry event, surrounded by increasingly desperate surf industry figures grinding their jaws and trying to get into the bathroom to snort a few lines. All the while, he sardonically observes the surfing industry’s free fall as he gulps down yet another vodka cocktail. Doing his best to find meaning in perhaps the shallowest subculture we could imagine. He is a detached and disgusted observer of the surf industry’s apocalypse who delivers his dispatches in insightful and often hilarious prose. Even if you don't know which side on the surfboard to wax, you’ll find it hard not to be drawn into Chas Smith’s history of surfing.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Michael Stamm’s book Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) begins with the simple but thought-provoking premise that, not too long ago, newspapers were almost exclusively physical objects made out of paper. This meant that producing a newspaper implied industrial production, mills, and a distribution system that could deliver daily-produced issues to individual consumers. But most of all, it meant trees. Lots and lots of trees. Newspapers acquired timber lands, chopped down trees, and managed international supply chains. A simple premise then opens up an entire world of industrial processes that might appear distant from us denizens of the digital age.In this highly innovative work of media history, Stamm, a Professor of history at Michigan State University, pulls readers into that world, guiding them through newspaper boardrooms in big American cities, lumber camps and company towns across Canada, and laboratories that were experimenting with newsprint waste so as to synthesize new products and squeeze ever more revenue out of the process (who knew that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune was one of the largest manufacturers of synthetic vanilla in the 1950s?). The book will interest communications scholars, media historians, historical scholars of political economy, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

"Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press." So begins Chapter One of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020).The book by Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication makes it clear, however, that mainstream American news media are not really free at all, but have been pressed into service over more than a century to generate profits for a few rich owners bent on selling eyeballs and ears to advertisers.Dr. Pickard points out that this system of "toxic commercialism” is in crisis as advertisers flee to cheaper social media outfits like Facebook. In this NBN interview, he says the old TV news adage, "If it bleeds it leads," has been supplemented by a new one, "If it's outrageous, it's contagious" as internet platforms profit from misinformation and even outright lies that engage (and enrage) their readers and keep them coming back for more.Democracy Without Journalism? argues that the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election is symptomatic of three core failures that are baked into the structure of American news media: the excessive commercialism that made giving billions of dollars of free publicity to Trump "damn good for CBS"; the tidal waves of misinformation circulating so profitably on social media and, the sharp decline in the number of working journalists. The book points out, for example, that in the last 20 years, print newsrooms have shed more than half of their workers and that local news “deserts” have spread into more and more American communities.Victor Pickard argues that journalism is as essential to democracy as other social goods such as education, libraries and national healthcare. He writes therefore, that journalism should receive substantial public funding just as it does in other western democracies.Dr. Pickard contends that the current crisis in American journalism is an opportunity that "allows us to reimagine what journalism could be."Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick. Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina. He was an outspoken editor and a staunch social justice advocate who championed Black voter’s rights, school desegregation, and economic equality for nearly fifty years. Gershenhorn utilizes the phrase “long black freedom struggle” instead of the customary “long civil rights movement” in his narrative noting that in the 1930s and 1940s many of the customary characteristics of the Civil Rights Movement had not matured at this time in North Carolina and that during this time “mass direct action was the exception not the norm” (3).This text contains an “Introduction” section, seven concise chapters, and an “Epilogue.” In his “Introduction,” Gershenhorn makes the case that Austin supported and engaged in the type of activism that ultimately came to define the Civil Rights Era, including embracing the sit-ins and school desegregation, unlike several other Black newspapermen in the South who were more accommodationist in their approaches. The first few Chapters trace Austin’s formative years as “the grandson of slaves” who grew up in a home that emphasized Black respectability and dignity. These Chapters also highlight the emergence of Austin as an “advocacy journalist” in North Carolina. Louis Austin and the Carolina Times is a critical text in helping us to understand the history of the Black freedom struggle in the South, Black journalism, and the integral role of the Black press in advancing racial equality for African Americans.Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. She has published book chapters, essays, and edited/authored five books. Her latest publications include Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger, 2017) and, with Dr. G. Reginald Daniel, professor of historical sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union (University Press of Mississippi 2014). Follow me on twitter: @DrHettie2017 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual in journal publishing because in an issue of Nature, research stands side by side with editorials, news and feature reporting, and opinion articles. In fact, over two-thirds of the pieces Nature publishes are journalism and opinion content. This is the remit of Helen Pearson.Helen Pearson is Chief Magazine Editor of Nature. After her PhD, Helen wanted a "broader view" of science, and so she chose science journalism. Helen has written award-winning journalism, and she is the author of The Life Project, voted 2016's best science book by The Observer and a best book of the year by The Economist. Today, Helen can look back on a distinguished career at Nature, where she continues to make a significant contribution to conversations around and in the scientific communities Nature aims to reach.Scholarly Communications is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communications adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism