Undead Journalism: A Summer Book List

The semester’s over, so now it’s time for the professor to hit the books…

OK, so perhaps I’ll also find time to tune up the banjo, guitar and ukulele, restring the old autoharp I bought a little while ago, and track down the old songbooks with “Newspapermen Meet Such Interesting People” and maybe “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.”

But my reading list is already growing like mad, with everything from Appalachian murder ballads to a zombie apocalypse.

What do they all have in common?

Newspapers and journalism, of course. By August I’ll have expanded my list of possible readings (Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo) for students enrolled in my fall course, “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.”

I’ve already had interlibrary loan get me a microfilm copy of a rare “boy’s book” about a teenage news photographer, by Mildred Wirt Benson, creator of the Nancy Drew series. I’ve already read a couple of her Penny Parker books about a teenage girl reporter (Benson, a reporter, liked Penny better than Nancy), and I’m curious to see why the photographer series didn’t, er, develop.

The more adult items on my own summer reading list right now are Alchemy of Murder, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, Anna Zenger and maybe Mira Grant’s “Newsflesh” series, although I’m not sure I want to be tempted into a zombie trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Countdown) — even one with that bloody RSS-feed icon on the right as one of its book covers. Come to think of it, I lost a chunk of last summer to a trilogy-plus-one that featured Nellie Bly and Sherlock Holmes on a trail of bloody murders with echoes of Dracula and Jack the Ripper.

For a dose of reality and inspiration, I’ve  ordered real-life newspaper hero Philip Meyer’s autobiography, Paper Route.

I’m also intrigued by The Daily Edge pages and videos promoting Richard Hine’s Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch, but I’d rather read about reporters solving crimes or chasing zombies than try to find a barrel of laughs over Dilbert-style business-consultant nitwits and clueless publishers destroying the newspaper business. (Actually, what alerted me to the book was when Hine followed me @bobstep on Twitter, and I noticed his profile line “I wrote a novel about zombie newspapers in the age of vampire social media.”)

That’s enough for now. I’m keeping the list on its own page at JHeroes.com, which in the fall may double as a discussion page for the course. Visitors welcome!

Fictional journalists behaving badly on old time radio

I’ve been doing more posting at Newspaper Heroes on the Air (jheroes.com) than here lately, so a cross-reference seems in order. If you haven’t visited that site, please do.

On the weekends, I’ve been commenting on an “Adventures of Superman” storyline that includes some disturbing behavior by Clark Kent. Maybe in the first year or two of the series the writers hadn’t quite faced the moral or ethical issues of being a super-powerful being — or of writing about one for an audience of children.

In the last few episodes, we’ve heard Kent (as Superman) terrorize an admittedly annoying lawyer to get the names of the alternate beneficiaries in a will — because Kent suspects one of them is sabotaging the primary beneficiary, Metropolis University. The university needs the money to fund polio research, which seems to justify any sort of behavior to Kent. Without even switching to his costume, he also tailed and knocked-out a man he suspected of being part of the plot. While the man was unconscious, Kent became Superman to whisk him back to the city, only to be told the kidnapped man was completely innocent. At least Kent admitted his mistake.

At midweek, I’ve been commenting on a more adult serial — a soap opera called “Betty & Bob,” about a married couple who publish a crusading newspaper while also facing all the usual soap-opera issues of love, marriage, family, evil conspiracies, mental and physical illness. (Actually, “Betty & Bob” helped establish those soap-opera standards, being one of the first series by the soap-opera industry’s most prolific producers and writer, all of whom were former newspaper reporters. See my more general essay on the subject.)

Betty and Bob have also faced a troubling ethical decision: Just as they began investigating a new city manager, his daughter was arrested for drunken driving. They suppressed the story, which they saw as giving the new city manager a fair chance — but it also helped them get closer to the man. Then the troubled daughter was arrested again — this time after injuring a child.

In between the soap opera and Superman episodes, I’ve added JHeroes items for both St. Patrick’s Day and women’s history month, and updated my page about “newspaper movies” that were adapted for radio. In the fall I plan to make some use of those pages in a course on the Portrayal of Journalists in Popular Culture — including novels, films and radio.

Wrapping up Women’s History Month in Radio Dramas

Over at JHeroes.com, I’ve had a fun month tipping my hat to Women’s History Month, exploring the audio biographies of famous women editors, publishers and reporters — partly because “women reporters” is a major theme my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture” students are exploring this semester.

This week is registration for fall semester (already!) and I’ve been trying to spread the word about that course,  a “special topics” offering that isn’t in the catalog. In the process of doing the JHeroes blog and preparing that course, I’ve discovered quite a few films and novels I didn’t know about.

For example, I wouldn’t have known that the head of the Associate Press wrote a novel, “Anna Zenger, Mother of Freedom,” fictionalizing America’s first landmark libel trial. Luckily, the DuPont radio series, Cavalcade of America, turned Kent Cooper’s novel into a radio play — one they liked so much they did it twice, with different casts.

And I wouldn’t have known that America’s first woman foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller, was also the the editor of The Dial — hobnobbing with Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, and maybe inspiring some of Hawthorne’s women characters.

I also didn’t know how many times daredevil reporter Nellie Bly had found episodes from her life dramatized — or entirely fictionalized, including  one series of novels that has her hanging out with Sherlock Holmes.

Take a look… After visiting radio appearances by 18th and 19th century women, I’m finishing up the month with some who are more contemporary.