New Books in Journalism

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture” and a wonderfully rich historical source. Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015) uses the Funu shibao as a lens into early Republican China (1911-1917) and its commercial print culture, paying careful attention to the interplay of texts, visual elements, and advertisements on its pages. Among the many fascinating figures we learn about are the journal’s activist editor, Bao Tianxiao; the cosmopolitan and public-oriented “Republican Ladies” who constituted a significant part of the journal’s targeted readership and pool of authors; and the flying women who help bring the book to its conclusion. A must-read for historians of print culture and gender in modern China, Republican Lens also explores issues of interest to historians of health and biomedicine, education, sexuality, and aviation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memorialization is a ritual of bereavement, the creation of a place, permanent or not, that facilitates the persistence of memory. This space allows for the restructuring of the social network between the living, those who create the memorial, and the dead, those for which the memorial is created. Memorialization happens in both the analog and digital contexts. In fact, some now decline to recognize a distinction between the on- and offline worlds. In his new book, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Peter J. Gloviczki, an assistant professor at Coker College, conceptualizes online memorials as networked remembrance spaces. These social media posts and groups are “immediate, interactive and public and they function across a great distance.” Online memorials are both user-driven – the users drive the conversations and are responsible for keeping up the sites – and story-driven – the sites are places where users tell stories related to the subject(s) of the memorial. Thorough, fact-based journalism plays an important role in the maintenance of online memorials. According to Gloviczki, news reports provide the foundation for the discussion of events, as well as being central to making sense of those events. So significant is journalism for online memorials that, in some cases, a memorial will cease once coverage of that event ends. But many online memorials continue long after media interests concludes. The persistence of these sites demonstrates how online memorials “disrupt the notion of a finite end.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape and influence public engagement around the issue. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) looks carefully at the discourses and practices of five collectives within and through which climate change becomes meaningful: Arctic indigenous representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, corporate social responsibility activists in Boston, American evangelical Christians, science journalists, and science policy experts. Callison explores meaning-making in these contexts in a series of beautifully written chapters that collectively narrate the forms of expertise and translation through which climate change comes to matter. The book pays special attention to the ways that these case studies can inform efforts to mobilize greater collaboration across multiple epistemologies, ethical imperatives, vernaculars, and social norms. It’s an insightful, compelling, and enjoyable read! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine turned 150 this year, a striking achievement for a publication that is firmly on the left of the political spectrum. It was founded in 1865 just months after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. To celebrate a century and a half in print, the magazine has published a book on its history written by D. D. Guttenplan, a Nation correspondent based in London. The Nation: A Biography (The Nation Co., 2015) traces the tumultuous history of America’s oldest weekly from the causes and controversies that shaped it to the rebels, mavericks and visionaries who edited and wrote for it. Along the way, The Nation has featured the work of such notable people as Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Molly Ivins, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, Martin Luther King Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson. In this New Books Network interview, Guttenplan talks about how The Nation veered sharply right in its early years to become the voice of the eastern establishment and then, how it gradually regained its radical roots. He says though that The Nation has always been consistent on one great theme: its opposition to the growth of American Empire from conquests in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines in its early decades to the War in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq in its later ones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2015) is organized in two major parts. The first part (Ch. 1-5) look closely at writing done by journalists and intellectuals during the war, focusing especially on those who were associated with the National Salvation Movement. Here we find a fascinating account of Chinese journals, newspapers, and war reporters that pays special attention to the political and ideological motivations behind wartime writers’ choices of what to report and how to report it. The distinctions here between rural and urban experiences and knowledge of the war are especially striking. The second part (Ch. 6-7) looks at the “re-remembering” of the war, including the consequences of communist rule for Salvation Movement writers in the immediate aftermath of the war, the disappearance of their legacy from public memory, and the refiguring of their work in the context of post-Mao “new remembering” of the war. Coble also considers the consequences of an increasing emphasis on nationalism in China for the re-remembering of the war in academic and popular media. Collectively, the chapters of China’s War Reporters argue that the particular way that the war has been remembered in China has distorted and constrained historical scholarship. It’s an exceptionally clear and well-written history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll. That’s the stereotypical view of the 1960s. But in her memoir, Ithaca Diaries, Coming of Age in the 1960s (Cambridge Common Press, 2014), journalist and writer Anita M. Harris tells a more nuanced story about her tumultuous undergraduate years at Cornell University.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Helen Keller, Franz Kafka and Silent Cal Coolidge appear in this week’s Almanac, a blog to celebrate the 150thanniversary of The Nation, America’s oldest magazine. Nation archivist Richard Kreitner is featuring an event from every day of the year and how The Nation covered it.In this New Books Network interview, he discusses events from May 31 to June 6 including Watergate, political assassinations and the D-Day invasion of France.As you listen, you’ll hear the voices of Richard M. Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy and an excerpt from one of Kafka’s most famous stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

When Star Wars opened in 1977, Robert Hatch, film reviewer for The Nation magazine, wrote that it “belongs in the sub-basement, or interstellar comic-strip school of science fiction, Terry and the Pirates with astro-drive.” Hatch concluded that all in all, Star Wars “is an outrageously successful…compilation of nonsense.” The Nation‘s archivist, Richard Kreitner chose Robert Hatch’s review for the May twenty-fifth entry on his daily blog The Almanac which the magazine is publishing to celebrate 150 years of publishing. In this New Books Network journalism podcast, Richard Kreitner discusses events that happened in the last week of May and how The Nation covered them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine, a beacon of the cultural and political left, is celebrating 150 years of publishing. As part of its celebration, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac that looks at events on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network journalism podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner, the magazine’s archivist, discuss how The Nation covered the struggle for civil rights including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling against segregated public schools in 1954; the life and work of the slain African-American leader Malcolm X and poet Langston Hughes’s essay on black culture that The Nation published in 1926. You’ll also hear the voices of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Langston Hughes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The Nation magazine is one of America’s most distinguished journalistic enterprises featuring the writing and work of such notable people as Calvin Trillin, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Mitford, James Baldwin and Naomi Klein. The Nation was founded 150 years ago this July. It’s America’s oldest weekly magazine. To mark its 150th anniversary, it’s publishing a daily blog called The Almanac compiled by the magazine’s archivist, Richard Kreitner. The Almanac looks at significant historical events that took place on each day of the year and how The Nation covered them. In this New Books Network podcast, you’ll hear Richard Kreitner talk about The Nation’s coverage of events from May 10 to May 16. Everything from The Nation’s strong backing for Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 to the prowess of boxer Joe Louis and the death of Bob Marley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism