Letters to a Young Journalist (Art of Mentoring) - Hardcover

Samuel G. Freedman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465024556 ISBN 13: 9780465024551

Publisher: Basic Books, 2006

Synopsis

Over the course of a thirty-year career, Samuel Freedman has excelled both at doing journalism and teaching it, and he passionately engages both of these endeavors in the pages of this book. As an author and journalist, Freedman has produced award-winning books, investigative series, opinion columns, and feature stories and has become a specialist in a wide variety of fields. As a teacher, he has shared his expertise and experience with hundreds of students, who have gone on to succeed in both print and broadcast media. In Letters to a Young Journalist, Freedman conducts an extended conversation with young journalists-from kids on the high school paper to graduates starting their first jobs. Whether he's talking about radio documentaries or TV news shows, Internet blogs, or backwater beats, shoeleather research or elegant prose, his goal is to explore the habits of mind that make an excellent journalist. It is no secret that journalism's mission is seriously imperiled these days, and Freedman's provocative ideas and fascinating stories offer students and journalists at all levels of experience wise guidance and professional inspiration.

About this title

About the Author:

Samuel G. Freedman has been working as a journalist or teaching the craft for over thirty years. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the National Book Award, and winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University's School of Journalism and a columnist for the New York Times. He lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Former New York Times reporter Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; you'd expect this to be a book of practical tips and advice for students of the craft. It is not. Instead, Freedman has much to say about journalistic integrity, plain language and honest legwork, castigating recent malefactors like Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Dan Rather, and even scolding Janet Malcolm for her famous indictment of the journalist as "confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." The book is partly a memoir, looking back on the author's career, partly a lament over the state of today's journalism, a bastion of "chic misanthropy" or sheeplike conformism; and partly a heads-up to youth—he despises undergraduate journalism classes, counseling wannabes to choose almost any other major in favor of practical experience on the school newspaper. Not until halfway along or so does Freedman offer specific advice. Not a journalism primer, this could be an inspirational tract alongside one. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0465024556
• ISBN 13: 9780465024551
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192