What Is a Ghost Writer?
A man who pens books for famous people is the focus of a recent film directed by Roman Polanski. A publishing-world veteran explains what the job is like in real life. More »
Advertisement
Has the U.S. Passed Peak Car?
Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books. More
A man who pens books for famous people is the focus of a recent film directed by Roman Polanski. A publishing-world veteran explains what the job is like in real life. More »
The network is slashing 25 percent of its news staff. How would the legendary anchor react if he were alive today? More »
In its heyday, the International Herald Tribune combined Parisian romanticism and American industriousness More »
Of all the films so far about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or their impact, The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, has emerged as the stand-out. It has been nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture. On its Web site, there is a listing of multiple major prizes to date in every category. Roger Ebert, Newsweek, and the Washington Post named it one of the ten best films of the decade. What is striking about all the acclaim is that the movie,… More »
John Sargent is the CEO of Macmillan, the U.S. companies of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a venerable enterprise based in Stuttgart, Germany. The American imprints include Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Henry Holt, and St. Martin's Press, among others. Sargent is what in another age might be called a scion of a publishing family. His father ran Doubleday and Company in the 1960s and 1970s, its glory days. What makes Sargent notable now is that… More »
All across America this winter, there are news-gathering start-ups with an array of business models reflecting the energy of an industry in reinvention rather than the dying newspaper trade that has become--while worse-off than anyone would like--an exaggerated cliché. Nonetheless, my back of the envelope calculation of the total investment in this national transformation of the news business is still a fraction of the bonuses Wall Street is paying itself… More »
It is fascinating and encouraging to see the titans of technology competing to distribute digital books. The new Apple reader will feature multi-media applications that have proved to be hugely popular on the iPhone. Amazon's Kindle, among other devices, already has validated the e-book experience for significant audiences. Recognizing the importance--the potential and the risks--of this digital transformation, the publishing world, from industry behemoths… More »
In case you haven't heard, James Cameron's Avatar is a huge success. By now, global revenues have surpassed $1.5 billion, with its backers projected to earn a $1 billion or more over time. The film's technical artistry has dazzled critics (the script and acting much less so, despite taking top honors at the Golden Globes). But the most significant lasting impact of the film is the anointing of 3-D as the next big thing in movies and television. More »
An unexpected highlight of the recent holiday interregnum was a discovery in a random file of old family letters and clippings. It was an immaculate copy of the first issue of Esquire from autumn 1933, probably saved by my wife's grandfather who was an advertising executive with Chicago connections, which is where Esquire was edited, a surprise to me. I had parochially assumed its sensibility was New York-based. What an elegant creation this Esquire was and… More »
A fierce battle ensued at the beginning of 2010 over News Corporation's demands that Time-Warner Cable increase fees for the right to distribute the Fox Broadcasting network. Media behemoths fighting over money? Predictable, but nonetheless significant. The issue is who pays how much for the right to distribute content in all the ways it reaches consumers. Cable television (programming), Amazon's Kindle (books), iTunes (music), and Google (news) are all part… More »
Vernon Jordan has seen it all in American politics since he graduated from Howard University Law School fifty years ago next June. He led the Urban League in the great days of civil rights turmoil, broke racial barriers as a director of major American corporations, reached the pinnacle of law and banking in Washington and New York, and for decades has a been a powerbroker among Democrats. "How's Obama doing?" I asked Jordan recently. He paused, smiled,… More »
Earlier this fall, Foreign Affairs asked me to write a review essay for the January-February issue about Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. The book is an expansive, colorful portrait of foreign correspondents down through the ages. If this is a subject of interest to you or someone you know, it would make an… More »
Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life is a smash. It sold more than a million copies in the first two weeks and heads into the Christmas peak with enough momentum to anoint it as probably the best selling nonfiction book of the season. Considering that the contenders include the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Mitch Albom and Jon Krakauer, two multi-million copy masters of narrative writing, and Fox News' Glenn Beck, the current superstar of rabid… More »
Andy Rooney turns 91 on January 14, 2010. For 31 of those years he has delivered the closing essay on CBS's 60 Minutes. These pieces are the main reason Rooney is so famous. Walk (actually shamble) through an airport with him, and everyone who is not a foreigner offers a smile, a nod, or a friendly comment. But celebrity is not Andy's own measure of his professional worth; writing is. He has published sixteen books, and for the past two decades, I have been… More »
"The Future of Journalism" has been the subject these many months of conferences and confabs from coast to coast. Some experts and pundits seem to be omnipresent. The problems under discussion are certainly acute. The prescriptions focus on a mix of entrepreneurial and nonprofit models. Contemplation has its place. But the real tests will be in what actually gets done as journalism under force majeure is reinvented. I have just been reading the spring 2010… More »
A couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, I asked Adam Michnik, one of Poland's leading dissidents who had founded a major new newspaper, how he thought the country was doing. "Terribly," he said, describing factional squabbles among the emerging political parties and his growing disdain for Lech Wałęsa, who had become Poland's president. He called him "Piłsudski without a horse," invoking the country's strongman of the 1920s and 1930s, a… More »
In 1985, Ken Auletta published Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a national bestseller. This was a colorful account of the battle for control of Lehman Brothers and was the first book that turned the machinations of previously discrete bankers into a topic for public fascination. In 1991, Auletta wrote Three Blind Mice, as the three great broadcast networks "lost their way," in the words of the book's subtitle. Then in 2001 came World War 3.0: Microsoft and… More »
For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81,… More »
Chicago was the quintessential twentieth-century newspaper town. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play Front Page, which premiered in 1928, captured the city's zest for breaking news. Tribune Tower, a monument to Colonel Robert McCormick's vision of his daily as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," was also a buttressed symbol of power. In its pre-World War II heyday, the Chicago Daily News had the premiere cadre of foreign correspondents in the country. In… More »
Journalism's Great Depression has meant the loss of many thousands of jobs: 16,000 in 2008 alone, according to estimates cited by the Columbia Journalism Review. These departures are characterized and paid for on a scale that goes from lucrative buy-outs to firings with virtually no severance. Overwhelmingly, the cuts represent a break from expected career patterns with resulting personal and family upheaval. Not surprisingly, a fin de siècle gloom tends to… More »
