Media Studies

Guerrilla News by Adam L. Penenberg

Negotiating 9/11 by Laura C. Robinson

Guerrilla News: How to Succeed as a Journalist Now That the Old Rules Don't Apply

Adam Penenberg

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Many journalists and editors are pessimistic for the future of journalist with the rise of the Internet, but there is great opportunity. In Guerrilla News, Adam Penenberg discusses his experience as a journalist and gives how-to hints and guidelines on how to succeed as a journalist in today's world. He offers suggestions and solutions for web viedo, blogs, and investigative reporting. In addition, Penenberg examines in detail how to come up with story ideas for magazines, websites, and newspapers, including a section on pitching to editors and spinning to publicists. Furthermore, the book looks at the ethics and law of online and guerrilla journalism today.

Guerrilla News concludes with a look at the future of the book, from hardcover and paperback to electronic. Penenberg examines the e-Book, print on demand, and other potential business models for book publishing.

Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University and assistant director of the Business & Economic Reporting Program. In 1998, while a staff editor at Forbes.com, he garnered national attention for unmasking Stephen Glass as a fabulist, as portrayed in the 2003 film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg). His first book, Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America (Perseus Books, 2000), was excerpted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and his second, Tragic Indifference: One Man’s Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs (HarperBusiness, 2003), was optioned for the movies by Michael Douglas. A former columnist for Slate and Wired News, Adam is currently a contributing writer for Fast Company magazine.

Fall 2008

Negotiating 9/11

Laura C. Robinson

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

September 11, 2001 marks a pivotal moment in world geopolitics. Just as its reverberations continue to reshape the imperatives of policymaking and statecraft, it also has changed the ways in which ordinary individuals around the world understand themselves as individuals and as members of larger collectivities. In the days after 9/11, individuals all over the world temporarily shift their attention away from issues close to home to the moral and political implications of attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.

The events act as a catalyst in two ways, provoking immediate and strongly worded reactions from the public. First, the terrorist attacks act as a stimulus that pushes people to participate in online discussion spaces in unprecedented numbers. Second, September 11th acts as a stimulus that makes people explicitly state latent beliefs about the social world, their place in it, and their understanding of the United States’ role on the global stage.

In the U.S., expressions of grief and shock are mixed with calls to arms and proclamations of national unity. Outside the U.S., however, the voices of those condemning the terrorist attacks are resisted by those who blame the United States for the events of 9/11. In many countries across Europe and South America, denunciations of the U.S. and American foreign policy overshadow denunciations of the attacks and their perpetrators. No matter the thematic focus of their comments, the individuals who offer their opinions make explicit rarely articulated assumptions about states, societies, and politics in the multipolar world of the 21st century.

Negotiating 9/11 examines pro- and anti-American views in Brazil, France, and America since September 11th. Robinson addresses several core problematics in global studies of media, culture, and identity, namely: How do local social, political, and cultural environments influence the ways in which individuals and groups use new media in culturally specific ways? In so doing, how do individuals and groups craft national and transnational, as well as context-dependent identities? The work addresses these interrelated questions by examining three discourse fora devoted to the same topic: the meaning and implications of September 11th.

Laura C. Robinson is currently conducting research on digital inequality at the University of Southern California, where she received a two-year postdoctoral fellowship.

Fall 2008