Backstory: Inside the Business of News

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Backstory: Inside the Business of News
		Backstory: Inside the Business of News

基本信息·出版社：Penguin Books
·页码：296 页
·出版日期：2004年11月
·ISBN：1594200009
·条形码：9781594200007
·版本：第1版
·装帧：精装
·开本：20开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：商业新闻的背后

内容简介 Book Description
From Howell Raines and the New York Times to Roger Ailes and Fox News, America's most celebrated media journalist dissects the people and institutions shaping media, for good and for ill, in a time of profound change.

It is said that journalism is a vital public service as well as a business, but more and more it is also said that big media consolidation; noisy, instant opinions on cable and the Internet; and political "bias" are making a mockery of such high-minded ideals. In Backstory, Ken Auletta explores why one of America's most important industries is also among its most troubled. He travels from the proud New York Times, the last outpost of old-school family ownership, whose own personnel problems make headline news, into the depths of New York City's brutal tabloid wars and out across the country to journalism's new wave, chains like the Chicago Tribune's, where 'synergy' is ever more a mantra. He probes the moral ambiguity of "media personalities" — journalists who become celebrities themselves, padding their incomes by schmoozing with Imus and rounding the lucrative corporate lecture circuit. He reckons with the legacy of journalism's past and the different prospects for its future, from fallen stars of new media such as Inside.com to the rising star of cable news, Roger Ailes's Fox News.

The product of more than ten years covering the news media for the New Yorker, Backstory is Journalism 101 by the course's master teacher.

From Publishers Weekly
Like Auletta's earlier The Highwaymen, this is a collection of the author's work as media correspondent for the New Yorker, but the focus has shifted away from the individual toward the institutional. The book starts with a 2002 profile of then New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, depicting his attempts to redefine the paper's approach to journalism and foreshadowing his departure in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal. Because of Raines's notoriety, it's an obvious choice to lead off with, but that decision affects the meta-narrative running through the book's first half. A string of articles dealing with newspapers around the country (including a look at New York's battling tabloids that didn't make it into the New Yorker because it wasn't "colorful" enough) examines the tension between editorial and business concerns, culminating in a 1993 look at the Times with open speculation about who would succeed the person who held the job before Raines and what it might mean for the newsroom. Alas, the moving profile of former Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips, who abandoned a promising career in journalism to devote himself to Christian evangelism, seems out of place amid the corporate chronicles. Yet its significance becomes clearer as subsequent pieces emphasize the growing lack of humility among contemporary journalists. Two final stories look at media startups that failed (Inside.com) and succeeded (Fox News), the latter bringing us up-to-date with the network's coverage of the war in Iraq. By putting these articles together, Auletta provides a valuable perspective on how the pressures of business have affected how we read and watch the news.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Auletta, whose previous books include Greed and Glory on Wall Street and World War 3.0, is concerned about how the publishing industry affects the practice of journalism, in theory not beholden to profits and losses. Most critics agree that Backstory is a provocative if uneven collection that shows a serious understanding of the trade. Auletta's best pieces examine controversial figures such as Raines and Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. His less successful ones delve into the grisly (and possibly soporific) details of the business and meander off into unrelated topics. (One interesting but irrelevant article features a reporter who abandoned journalism for religion.) Still, this is Journalism 101 straight from the horse's mouth, with a small (very small) silver lining: if you become a journalist, you might also become famous.

About Author
Ken Auletta has written the "Annals of Communications" column and profiles for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of eight books, including Three Blind Mice, Greed and Glory on Wall Street, and World War 3.0. In naming him America's premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review said, "No other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta."

Book Dimension
Height (cm) 23.6　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Width (cm) 16.2
媒体推荐 Charlie LeDuff is a worthy successor to the great line of memorialists of the New York streets. -- Luc Sante, author of Low Life
专业书评 At least partially drawn from LeDuff's former "Bending Elbows" column in the New York Times's Sunday City section (available only in the five boroughs), the pieces collected here sketch various habitues of city saloons, mostly working men. Clearly in the grip of some potent nostalgia for John O'Hara, LeDuff is, to his credit, pretty respectful of his subjects-bartenders and lounge singers, bankrupt dot-commers and prison inmates, lighthouse keepers and firemen, homeless freaks and transsexual hustlers-basically anyone who fits into his particular concept of poignant, grubby, overlooked humanity. His carefully dry, clipped style honors their experiences and habits, but with the notable exception of one sequence on immigrant laborers in a Long Island suburb, he does little to advance the interests of his subjects. And while LeDuff does provide a handful of familiar female types-a faded chorus girl, a stricken widow, a runaway teenager, a pair of 50-ish spinsters looking for "Mr. Dreamy" and a few old mamas-the city's female workers evidently don't rate as worthy of the name. LeDuff, who now covers L.A. life and lifestyles for the Times, won a Pulitzer in 2001 for a series on race, and produces some nice counterpoints of prejudices, sentiments, pearls of wisdom, and non sequiturs. "When the cocktail set tells me they enjoy the cast of losers... I smile and drink their liquor. They don't know what work is." That may be true, but it's equally clear, with myriad descriptions like "a Laura Ashley girl gone wrong," that LeDuff is writing for them.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
目录
Introduction
The Howell Doctrine
Demolition Man
Synergy City
New York's Tabloid Wars
The New York Times's Outward Bound Adventure
……

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