Fresh Ink: Behind the Scenes of a Major Metropolitan Newspaper

Futurists have called newspapers the last of the great smokestack industries—decrepit, dated, and destined to die. Fresh Ink offers proof that this need not be true. Newspapers are still a mass medium, able to gather a set of facts and create a sense of community each day—if they will.

Fresh Ink tells how Robert Decherd and Burl Osborne transformed a flawed paper with a checkered history into the leading newspaper in the southwest, winning seven Pulitzer Prizes along the way, one of them for graphics—the only newspaper to ever do so. The focus is on a week in the life of The Dallas Morning News, the death a month later of the competing Dallas Times Herald, and how the News has conducted itself since.

By offering an inside look at what is arguably the most successful newspaper in the country, this book makes an important contribution to the history of journalism.

David Gelsanliter served as a diplomat in South America, West Africa and Washington, D.C. After eleven years with Knight-Ridder newspapers in Charlotte, Miami, and Philadelphia, he became general manager of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News . Now a writer living in New Mexico, his previous book was Jump Start: Japan Comes to the Heartland.