The Mind of a Journalist: How Reporters View Themselves, Their World, and Their Craft

Written by veteran journalist and noted professor Jim Willis, with an epilogue by Marilyn Thomsen, this book introduces journalistic decision-making into the classroom, alongside discussion of reporting and writing techniques. Students peer inside the minds of a cross-section of print, broadcast, and online journalists by way of exclusive interviews and additional research that provide a deep, broad glimpse into how they perceive themselves, their world, and their craft. Ultimately, this provocative text provides added insights into how journalists think and why they do what they do.

Features and Benefits

• Original interviews with contemporary journalists at varying career stages. Offers a rarely seen, inside look at the world of journalists from media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, CNN, the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, KUSA Television in Denver, and The Oklahoman.
• Anecdotes involving how journalists work. Translates abstract thinking into the reality of everyday journalism.
• Interviews with several war reporters. Portrays the impact of covering war on those reporting from the field.
• An example of how different journalists approach traumatic stories such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Hurricane Katrina. Illuminates different orientations to conveying truth and dealing with ethical dilemmas involved in such disaster coverage.

Seasoned journalists examine the following areas

• Factors that lure young people into journalism as a career
• The stance journalists take toward the world they are assigned to cover
• Ethical dilemmas
• How close to get to a story or how far to distance themselves from it
• The socialization of journalists and the role their own personal ideologies may play in their work as reporters and editors
• How one′s faith might influence the coverage of a story
• The mixing of news and entertainment

The Mind of a Journalist is an appropriate and innovative supplement for a variety of media studies courses, including Introduction to Journalism, News Writing and Reporting, Advanced Reporting, Journalism and Society, and Ethics, among many others.

Jim Willis is a veteran journalist for The Oklahoman and The Dallas Morning News and is now Chair and Professor of Communication Studies at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. His reporting assignments have included the Oklahoma City bombing, the F5 tornado that struck Oklahoma City, and the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has taught at the universities of Missouri, Oklahoma, and Memphis, and chaired the Communication Department at Boston College. He has authored ten books on journalists and the media, and he lectures widely in Europe on the American news media. He holds the Ph.D. in Journalism from the University of Missouri and the B.A. from the University of Oklahoma. He is married and has two sons and three stepdaughters.