Journalism Memoir

In February 1943, a group of journalists - including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney - clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the 64 bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. "I think I’m going to say," mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell."

Charles E. Chapin, the notorious editor-tyrant of Joseph Pulitzer's New York Evening World during America's Gilded Age, made headlines himself after murdering his wife of 39 years. This extensively researched biography brings to life Chapin's tragic story, from his childhood to his days spent cultivating a beautiful rose garden in Sing Sing prison to the last moments of his life.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo (the song, not the battle) – a seminal moment in pop history which saw Swedish sensation ABBA burst on to the international music scene. How is it that half a century later this seventies Eurovision act is bigger than ever – reaching listeners of all ages and spinning off into musicals, museums and holograms? Giles Smith, writer and music fan, sets out to find out why.

This memorial anthology will weave together the pieces that defined her reputation as one of the most important and formidable investigative journalists of her generation. It showcases the expansive breadth of McKee's voice by bringing together unpublished material alongside both her celebrated and lesser-known articles.

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone magazine. Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a "real job". Instead, she was hired as a journalist. Brutally honest and bold, Robin Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys' club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stone magazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

Previously published as A Private War, Marie Brenner’s Richard Jewell tells a gripping true story of heroism and injustice. In the early morning hours of July 27, 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Hundreds more potential casualties were prevented by the vigilance and quick actions of security guard Richard Jewell, who uncovered the bombs and began evacuating the area. But no good deed goes unpunished. Investigators and journalists pursued Jewell as a potential suspect.

This House of Grief is a heartbreaking audiobook by one of Australia's most admired authors. Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ service members.

Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends, and, of course, the killers, to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath.

This audiobook looks at the career of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and how his version of reality compares to that of the mass media.

Growing up in the shadow of Nancy's fame, John Dickerson rarely saw his mother. This frank memoir - part remembrance, part discovery - describes a freewheeling childhood in which Nancy Dickerson was rarely around unless John was in trouble or she was throwing a party for the president and John was instructed to check the coats. By the time John was old enough to know what the news was, his mother was no longer in the national spotlight and he didn't see why she should be. He thought she was a liar and a phony. When he was 14, his parents divorced, and he moved in with his father.

Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money - as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers. But they experience something new, too: an industry forever changed by the massive financial collapse of 2008. And as they get their Wall Street educations, they face hard questions about morality, prestige, and the value of their work.

In this candid and revealing audiobook, Mike Wallace tells the behind-the-scenes stories from his remarkable 60-year career. Here are intimate anecdotes, off-camera antics, never-before-told tales, and, most important, Wallace's insights about some unforgettable characters.

A Day Like Today charts John’s journey from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at 15, to the summits of broadcasting. Humphrys was the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent, the first reporter at the catastrophe of Aberfan, an experience that marked him for ever; he was in the White House when Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign, in South Africa during the dying years of apartheid, and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present the Nine O’Clock News on television.

Is John McCain "for real?" That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when McCain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest".

During his years of reporting from the world's most savage and turbulent regions, Fergal Keane has witnessed the violence of the South African townships and the terror in Rwanda, the most extreme kinds of human behaviour, the horror of genocide, and the bravery of peacekeepers faced with overwhelming odds. As one of the BBC's leading correspondents, he recounts extraordinary encounters on the front lines.

Over her four decades of working in newsrooms big and small, Margaret Sullivan has become a trusted champion and critic of the American news media. In this bracing memoir, Sullivan traces her life in journalism and how trust in the mainstream press has steadily eroded.

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.