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!

J-Heroes: Not Bogart, but still Deadline USA

This is the 52-minute Hollywood Radio Theater version of the often quoted, but hard to find, newspaper movie, Deadline USA. In the movie version, you had Humphrey Bogart, but Dan Dailey is a strong lead as the crusading editor in this 1953 radio broadcast about a newspaper fighting for its life against both the mob and the paper’s own board of directors.

Click the player below to hear the entire program, stored in archive.org’s collection of old-time radio shows.

(“Hollywood Radio Theater” was Lux Radio Theater minus the soap commercials, for re-broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Service, which was the source of this set of broadcasts from 1953 stored at Archive.org, including the one my player launches.)

I’m posting this as a test of the audio player, the archive.org hosting site, and to see if WordPress includes the audio link in its RSS feed for this blog — which would make the feed a very low-budget “podcast.” In fact, it does appear to work. I was able to subscribe to this feed in iTunes using the “Subscribe to Podcast” item on its its “Advanced” menu.

I may start a regular “J-Heroes” podcast of old-time radio shows this way, once I check the Archive.org terms-of-service pages to make sure I wouldn’t be breaking any rules there. (If anyone reading this has experience in that area, please drop me a line at stepno.com or add a comment here.)

J-Heroes: Sing a song of freedom of the press?

Yes, it’s a song about freedom of the press, I guess. But probably not one the Newspaper Guild ever used as a marching song. And not one that will get today’s students marching off to journalism careers, but still an intriguing artifact — sung by Nelson Eddy.

I haven’t seen the whole film, but IMDB’s plot summary explains that the hero of “Knickerbocker Holiday” is a journalist-printer cranking out broadsides attacking the government of Peter Stuyvesant in 17th century New Amsterdam.

This song isn’t from the original Broadway play, which had more songs by Kurt Weill, including the famous “September Song.” (Weill did not write this “Sing Out!”) The play featured as narrator the author Washington Irving, who actually had been a newspaper correspondent early in his career. However, journalism wasn’t a theme of the story. Instead, Irving was composing a history of New Amsterdam and describing the characters he would create to tell the tale.

That older version of “Knickerbocker Holiday” is available as a 1945 Theater Guild on the Air broadcast — available here as a 13.4MB MP3 from the series collection at Archive.org. The original 1938 yarn apparently had an anti-Roosevelt moral, continued gently in the radio broadcast: “Let’s keep the government small, and funny.”

The movie musical dropped Irving as the writer/narrator character and made his creation Brom Broeck a pamphleteer/journalist troublemaker. In the original, he was just a troublemaking prototypical American — a man who couldn’t take orders.

As a result of the rewrite, we get this freedom of the press singalong, as the printer escapes the stocks to pass out his pamphlets to the crowd.

“Sing out! Say your say! … A man’s no man who never can sing out… It’s your right!… Make your vow. The time is now. Sing out!…
(spoken) Read those pamphlets…”

In any case, he sure gets those Quakers singing along… and in the end, he gets the girl, even if the older man gets the bigger hit song (and, for a doubly happy ending — at least in the radio version — the old gent does get another girl, or two).