An in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the modern newsroom, this book explores how large corporations dominate today's media and uncovers how investigative and informative reports are being replaced by demands for high-profit, 'reader-friendly' journalism. Includes a new preface to the paperback edition.

When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today's Media

Politics & Social Sciences

Underwood, Doug

Social Sciences

Columbia University Press

An in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the modern newsroom, this book explores how large corporations dominate today's media and uncovers how investigative and informative reports are being replaced by demands for high-profit, 'reader-friendly' journalism. Includes a new preface to the paperback edition.

When MBAs Rule the Newsroom

Business & Money

Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo! provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in the typical newsroom by delving into the largely unexamined parallels between religious and journalistic developments from the "media" of antiquity to the electronic idolatry of the Internet. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States has been entwined with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood makes the case that American journalists are rooted in the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in certain important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues. Journalists believe they are serving a cause higher than the commercial goals of their news organizations, Underwood contends. He traces the influence on the press of the biblical prophets' complaints about moral corruption, the calls for reform arising out of the Protestant Reformation, and the principles that drove the muckraker and Social Gospel campaigns of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Underwood argues that one must see the profession of journalism in terms of its religious character to understand the tensions at work in today's media. He explores the forces that have pushed journalists away from identifying themselves with religion, yet notes the reverential way in which they approach such secular topics as science, technology, and psychology. His wide-ranging discussion includes the press's formulaic coverage of spiritual experience, its failure adequately to cover new and non-Christian religions in America, and the complicity of the mainstream media in launching the religious broadcasting movement.

From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press (The History of Media and Communication)

History

World

University of Illinois Press

To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today.
Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work.
The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.

Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss (The History of Media and Communication)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This wide-ranging study--hailed by American Journalism as one of the year's best books--provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in the typical newsroom by delving into the largely unexamined parallels between religion and journalism, from the "media" of antiquity to the electronic idolatry of the Internet. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States has been entwined with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood argues that American journalists are rooted in the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues.

Literary journalism is a rich field of study that has played an important role in the creation of the English and American literary canons. In this original and engaging study, Doug Underwood focuses on the many notable journalists-turned-novelists found at the margins of fact and fiction since the early eighteenth century, when the novel and the commercial periodical began to emerge as powerful cultural forces. Writers from both sides of the Atlantic are discussed, from Daniel Defoe to Charles Dickens, and from Mark Twain to Joan Didion. Underwood shows how many literary reputations are built on journalistic foundations of research and reporting, and how this impacts on questions of realism and authenticity throughout the work of many canonical authors. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of British and American literature.

Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

United States

During Doug Underwood's life, he worked at the Nashville banner, the Columbia Daily Herald, WLAC-TV and WSM-TV. He also worked for Bill Brock, Nat Winson and Winfield Dunn. He started his own weekly community newspaper, The Westview, in the Bellevue area of Nashville in 1978. After joining a local writer's group, he started writing the stories I had grown up hearing about. They were stories about his early days working as a news photographer and reporter. He wrote about covering the burning of the Maxwell House Hotel and helping police catch an illegal abortionist. He also wrote about covering a tragic, well-publicized murder as well as other more humorous incidents during his career.

Doug Underwood: Boy Reporter

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Westview Pub Inc

The debate surrounding "fake news" versus "real" news is nothing new. From Jonathan Swift's work as an acerbic, anonymous journal editor-turned-novelist to reporter Mark Twain's hoax stories to Mary Ann Evans' literary reviews written under her pseudonym, George Eliot, famous journalists and literary figures have always mixed fact, imagination and critical commentary to produce memorable works.  Contrasting the rival yet complementary traditions of "literary" or "new" journalism in Britain and the U.S., this study explores the credibility of some of the "great" works of English literature.

Literary Journalism in British and American Prose: An Historical Overview

McFarland

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Underwood, Doug. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Underwood, Doug

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Underwood, Doug. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today's Media

When MBAs Rule the Newsroom

From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press (The History of Media and Communication)

Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss (The History of Media and Communication)

From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press (The History of Media and Communication)

Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000

Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000

Doug Underwood: Boy Reporter

Literary Journalism in British and American Prose: An Historical Overview