New Books in Journalism

The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and free trade. The book’s author, Jonathan Swarts, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University North Central in northwestern Indiana, says he finds it fascinating how governments of all political stripes in the four Anglo-American democracies have adopted neoliberalism, which he calls a new “political-economic imaginary.” In this interview with the New Books Network, Professor Swarts discusses how political leaders in the four Anglo-American democracies brought about the neoliberal economic transformation using a combination of persuasion and coercion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Brooke Erin Duffy’s Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) traces the upheaval in the women’s magazine industry in an era of media convergence and audience media-making. Duffy, assistant professor at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication, is especially interested in the experience of writers, editors, and others who produce women’s magazines: How are they coping with new competition, more intense work routines, and the imperative to produce (and engage) across a range of non-print media platforms? Questions of identity thread through the book: What does it mean to be a magazine writer in the iPad era? What are the stakes for gender identity as this female-focused genre adapts to digital workflows? To get at these questions, Duffy conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, publishers, interns, and business-side workers, most of them at the big three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time, Inc. Remake, Remodel traces the history of women’s magazines, as well the history of scholarship on these magazines, but the bulk of the book explores different facets of workers’ coming-to-terms with the digital tsunami, including changes to the gendered makeup of the workforce, shifts in the industry’s attitude toward its audience, the complicated rivalry, dismissal, and embrace of fashion bloggers, and the tension between medium-specific traditions and the push to spread the magazine–now reimagined as a brand–across a range of platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Brooke Erin Duffy's Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013) traces the upheaval in the women's magazine industry in an era of media convergence and audience media-making. Duffy, assistant professor at Temple University's School of Media and Communication, is especially interested in the experience of writers, editors, and others who produce women's magazines: How are they coping with new competition, more intense work routines, and the imperative to produce (and engage) across a range of non-print media platforms? Questions of identity thread through the book: What does it mean to be a magazine writer in the iPad era? What are the stakes for gender identity as this female-focused genre adapts to digital workflows? To get at these questions, Duffy conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, publishers, interns, and business-side workers, most of them at the big three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast, and Time, Inc. Remake, Remodel traces the history of women's magazines, as well the history of scholarship on these magazines, but the bulk of the book explores different facets of workers' coming-to-terms with the digital tsunami, including changes to the gendered makeup of the workforce, shifts in the industry's attitude toward its audience, the complicated rivalry, dismissal, and embrace of fashion bloggers, and the tension between medium-specific traditions and the push to spread the magazine--now reimagined as a brand--across a range of platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and richest countries on Earth. In the spirit of optimism that prevailed in the year after the country celebrated its 100th anniversary, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for the founding of a just society in which every Canadian would enjoy fundamental rights.. But according to a recently published book, the country is retreating from Macdonald’s vision of one great country and from Trudeau’s call for a just society. In Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuous and Troubled History of a Great Canadian Idea (Formac, 2014), authorRichard Starr argues that Canada is losing its commitment to equal opportunity and sharing the country’s wealth. He traces the long history of Canada’s slow evolution toward a more equal society and its gradual retreat from that ideal. He shows that Canadians in richer provinces including Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia, now enjoy higher levels of government services, such as better health care and education, than those who live in poorer provinces such as Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. More than 30 years ago, Canada’s politicians enshrined their commitment to equal opportunity and public services in the Canadian constitution, but Starr writes that those commitments have been forgotten. As a result, citizens in poorer provinces are paying higher taxes for lower levels of public services. In this interview with the New Books Network, Richard Starr says he hopes his book will spark more discussion and debate about inequality in Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a protective shoal or bar offshore. When it’s less stressed, it takes sand and gravel from offshore and stores it back on the beach and in the dunes.” “You talk as though the damn thing were alive,” Cameron said. “I think of it that way,” said Taylor. At the time, Silver Donald Cameron thought of it as a vivid metaphor. But, in his newly revised version of The Living Beach, he argues that it’s true: the beach is alive with the right to be protected. His book explores all aspects of beaches including the plants and animals that live there, the sciences of biology, oceanography and geology that help us understand them, the politics of flood control, and beaches in stories, poetry and song. In 2009, The Living Beach was voted one of Atlantic Canada’s 100 best books. In 2014, Red Deer Press published a new revised edition. In this interview for the New Books Network, Silver Donald Cameron visits a beach at Parrsboro, Nova Scotia on the shores of the Minas Basin, home of the world’s highest tides. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area. This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014). In it, he takes on the “Southeast Side” and all its meanings. “Southeast Side” has become a coded term by local press to describe an area of Iowa City it associates with crime and unruliness, sometimes even using the term when the actual crime does not occur on the Southeast Side. “Home to a mixture of white townies and new, black arrivals from Chicago, St. Louis, and other metro regions in the Upper Midwest,” Gutsche writes, “the Southeast Side is known–mythically–as a bastion of affordable housing, black families, and stories of devious behavior.” Through original interviews and research, Gutsche, a former reporter, shows just how wrong the press has it about Iowa City’s Southeast Side. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Last weekend was the NFL Draft, the annual event when teams select college players who have shown the talent to advance to the professional ranks. Staged at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on two cable networks, and surrounded by ceaseless media attention and analysis, the Draft is the spring anchor-point of the NFL as a year-round attraction. Decades ago, the Draft was nothing more than a business meeting. Yet even then the NFL was taking steps to establish itself as a year-round sports league. This came not on cable television, but in church basements and community meeting halls. The menfolk would gather after banquets or father-son dinners and watch films of football–real films, supplied in metal cans and spooled into projectors. They might watch highlights of the last Super Bowl or their local team’s season, a documentary about the great players of the recent past, or a compilation of on-field blunders by players, coaches, and referees. Even though it was the dead of winter, the audience would come away from the screening eager for football. These were the productions of NFL Films. Captured by motion picture cameras, set to orchestral scores, and narrated by the dulcet baritone of John Facenda, these films presented football as high art: a contest of mythic heroes and the embodiment of American virtue.Travis Vogan gained full access to the NFL Archives for his study of the filmmaking arm of the National Football League: Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (University of Illinois Press, 2014). Starting as a father-and-son operation, NFL Films became an integral part of the rise of professional football in the US. Even more than that, Travis argues, its productions have shaped the way that all sports are broadcast and promoted. As a side note: Travis will be one of the writers for the new online journalThe Allrounder, along with several scholars and journalists you’ve heard on past episodes of the podcast.The Allrounderhas the same aim as New Books in Sports, to get people thinking in new ways about the sports they follow by making available in-depth research and thoughtful writing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Erika G. King learned a lot during research for her book, Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan (Ashgate, 2014), but one item surprised her a bit more than most. “One might have thought, but one would be wrong. . . that media organizations might just come together and say, ‘Yes, Iraq was a difficult war, but we accomplished something, and now it’s over and things can be seen in a slightly positive light,’ ” King said. “But I found it very interesting that journalists for these national media organizations used Obama’s moment in the sun to present some very negative outlooks about what Iraq had represented to talk about–how many of them felt culpable in their early interpretations and support of the Iraq war.” Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan is a qualitative look at narratives and shifting rhetoric. King’s research reveals the interplay between the Obama administration and the media during this crucial and recent period of American history. Scholars and consumers of journalism and political science research will find this book to be an invaluable addition to their collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

Matthew Cecil brought many questions into his latest historical work, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Questions included, “Why were some members of the press so willing to serve as J. Edgar Hoover’s pawns, even when it was clear they were being used?” And, “How did Hoover’s interactions with the press resemble his leadership at the FBI?” Cecil, director of Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication, said he has long had research interests into Hoover’s FBI. This is a book that will draw interest far beyond the Academy. Those interested in politics, media, criminal justice and one of America’s most storied and divisive figures, Hoover, would do well to pick up this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism

“When we criticize the news, who are we really criticizing?” This is the final question asked by Professor Joseph Uscinski in his book, The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism(NYU Press, 2014). The answer, Uscinski says in his interview, is us–the consumer. News producers, he writes, are merely responding to the demands of consumers, adjusting news content based on ratings, polls and audience demographics. The People’s News views news through the lens of news as a commodity beholden to market forces, not as a type of media. Combining the academic disciplines of media effects and political economy, The People’s News is a well-researched and well-reported look at what happens when the concepts of free press and democracy collide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/journalism