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PODCAST

New Books in Journalism

Interview with Scholars of Journalism about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

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All Episodes

87:27

Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/11/09

How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions

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34:27

AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/11/03

How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China’s media landscape—while drawing comparisons with the US and EU.Dr. Joanne Kuai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and holds a PhD from Karlstad University in Sweden. Her research focuses

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60:44

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality:...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/11/01

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false. In Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (Columbia UP, 2025), Dr. Martin Moore and Dr. Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news

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23:27

Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/10/31

When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to

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45:42

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/10/23

Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued by the image of Indian royals in cramped conditions. Then, her family was granted use of a rundown 14th-century hunting lodge in Delhi; none were seen in public

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58:48

Colleen Dulle, "Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/10/06

Vatican journalist Colleen Dulle discusses her new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, a memoir of the last seven years. In 2018, she started for the Jesuit Review, America Magazine, and that was when all of the terrible revelations of sexual abuse scandals, lies and coverups, about [former cardinal, later defrocked] Theodore McCarrick became the main story, then [former nuncio, later excommunicated] Carlo Maria Viganò’s schismatic campaign, then Jean Vanier,

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51:34

Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/22

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations.Now, Tim Weiner has published a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. His new book is called The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, 2025). It is a gripping and

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62:52

Hadi Abdullah, "Critical Conditions: My Diary of the...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/17

Hadi Abdullah's Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution (DoppelHouse Press, 2025), translated by Alessandro Columbu, is no ordinary diary. It’s a testimony written in the heat of events (demonstrations in Daraa and Homs, the bombardments of Aleppo, sieges, and funerals). Through Hadi’s words, we glimpse the Syrian revolution not through statistics, but through the eyes of someone who was there, who risked his life to record what others tried to silence. Alessandro’s translation

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42:07

Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/13

Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical framework, the book draws on a range of interviews with radio workers, revealing how stories are chosen and supported, expertise and perspectives are

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68:59

J. Siguru Wahut, "In the Shadow of the Global North:...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/09

In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (Cambridge UP, 2025) unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields.Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa, J. Siguru Wahutu turns

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43:55

Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/07

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique literary voice. Following a biographical introduction, Hayes examines the different roles Thompson played throughout his literary career, resulting in a

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61:03

Karen Bartlett, "Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/09/05

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to

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50:55

Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/31

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access

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42:50

Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/27

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America.His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the

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50:01

Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/26

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor that

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57:03

Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/23

Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her fortune, and the HBO series adaptation now in development.As an investigative journalist, Bill Dedman has built his career writing stories that change the way we see the world. It was that reporter’s instinct—paired with relentless curiosity—that led him to one of the most extraordinary tales of

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56:41

"Assignment Moscow" with author James Rodgers

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/20

Is it possible to do independent journalism in today’s Russia? “The short answer is no,” James Rodgers tells me in our conversation about his insightful and scrupulously researched book Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Rodgers is a former BBC correspondent in Moscow. We first talk about Western coverage of the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union, when many foreign correspondents, famously John Reed, openly identified with

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64:04

Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/17

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy.Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and

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34:47

David de Boer, "The Early Modern Dutch Press in an...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/15

David de Boer returns to the podcast to talk to Jana Byars about his first book, The Early Modern Dutch Press in the Age of Religious Persecution (Oxford UP, 2023). This book is available open source here. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat

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30:29

Matthew Facciani, "Misguided: Where Misinformation...

New Books in Journalism ·

2025/08/14

Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It (Columbia UP, 2025) is a wide-ranging and comprehensive book that shines a light on how false beliefs take root and spread, exploring the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that make us all susceptible to misinformation. Challenging approaches that focus solely on education and media literacy, Matthew Facciani emphasizes the important role identities and social

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392 results

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