James Goodale at CUNY Law Nov. 6

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS CASE

CUNY School Of Law

November 6, 2017

5:00 PM — 7:00 PM

A conversation with James Goodale, the then chief counsel for The NY Times, who led the team advising reporters & editors on the publication of leaked national security documents exposing decades of government deception in the conduct of the Vietnam War. He’ll discuss, among other topics, his highly regarded book Fighting for the Press.

CJR has story on Illustrated Courtroom exhibition

Columbia Journalism Review has a story on the new exhibition including drawings from our book The Illustrated Courtroom, which recently opened to rave reviews in Washington. And that’s no surprise, since the book has won many awards and the admiration of artists, illustrators and lawyers (and judges) across the country. It’s a one-of-a-kind book.

https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/courtroom-sketch-artists-charles-manson-oj-simpson.php

Help Publish a New Book

Writer-teacher Katina Paron is the driving force behind a new comic-style journalism textbook for high school kids. We’re hoping to publish it next year — provided she can raise the money so she and her illustrator can finish it. We’ve seen some of the rough illustrations, and they’re great. The book promises to offer not only journalism but solid civics lessons for kids, supplemented by built-in quizzes and exercises. Help out if you can. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/107082341/a-newshounds-guide-to-student-journalism

You’re Invited: Panel Discussion on Writing Books from History

The Second Draft: From History to Narrative Nonfiction, Journalists on Reporting the Past

Date & Time:

From 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM on March 9, 2017
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Room 308

Much of today’s best long-form nonfiction — books, magazines, podcasts, documentaries and more — comes from the pages of history, from the recent to the long-ago past.

Joanna Hernandez, director of diversity initiatives at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will lead a panel discussion at the school in Midtown Manhattan this Thursday featuring experienced journalists and authors talking about the challenges, opportunities, and earning potential for writers. She will also discuss her own work on a book that combines memoir with a multigenerational cultural history of her Puerto Rican family’s immigration and struggles to assiminlate.

RSVP HERE

Other panelists include:

Paul Moses, a longtime New York City newspaper reporter who is now a Brooklyn College journalism professor, will talk about his award-winning books The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace (Doubleday 2009) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (NYU Press 2015). 

Eileen Markey, a freelance journalist, will discuss her new book is A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books 2016), about of the nuns murdered by US-backed militia in El Salvador in 1980. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, City Limits, The New York Daily News, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday and elsewhere.

Barbara Gray, formerly the chief editorial librarian at The New York Times and now head of the Research Center and research education for reporters at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will go over her research strategies and tools she using in her book-in-progress about America’s most notorious woman criminal in the late 19th century.

 Cara Bedick,  senior editor at Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, will speak to the editorial process with emphasis on narrative nonfiction, including Run the World: My 3,500-Mile Journey Through Running Cultures Around the Globe by Becky Wade (William Morrow 2016) and the upcoming Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome (William Morrow 2017).

Former New York Times editor combines journalism and teaching English in new book

Almost a decade ago, Diane Nottle made a career change: her employer, The New York Times,  was looking to reduce staff, and she took a buyout offer. She had already trained for a second career as a teacher of English to speakers of other languages, Now she has transformed her teaching career by using her journalism experience to specialize in teaching English for the media.

She has taught English and journalism in Poland, China and Canada, but her home base is the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where she coaches international students. In November, CUNY Journalism Press published her book “American English for World Media.” The CUNY Journalism Press (CJP) sat down to talk to Nottle about her experience teaching, what this unique book offers as a resource and how other journalists can transition into second careers.

CJP: If you see three things that your book does a better job of addressing than other resources out there, what would they be?

DN: Some other books meant to teach English to foreign journalists were too stuffy. It’s the old-fashioned English-teacher language. I try to be really reader-friendly and not to takes things too seriously when approaching students person to person. I like to work with people as if we were in a professional newsroom — which we practically are — and talk to them the way their editors would talk to them.

What I wanted to do in my blog (“English for Journalists,” taken from Nottle’s experience at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism coaching international students) was to explain these grammar points that people have trouble with without scaring them off. Because with writing – and I’ve had this experience myself — bad teachers, people who are too pompous and too prescriptive about things, really scare people off from writing by trying to overcorrect them. That’s one reason writers get blocked — and journalists can’t afford to be blocked because we have to do things quickly and on deadline. So one of the things I think this does better is, it takes a less serious, more friendly – I hope it’s friendly — approach to grammar and the English language.

Whenever I’m meeting with a new student, I say, “I’m trying not to take this too seriously. I hope we’re going to have fun, and I hope we’re going to laugh when we do this. I don’t want this to be scary.” When you’ve got an international student coming from another country to New York – which is a scary enough prospect — to do graduate school in a foreign language, first of all, it’s really brave. Second, it’s really scary. They’ve got enough to worry about.

When I explain the history of how the English language developed, and why that makes it such a difficult language, that’s storytelling. We also have chapters that are glossaries; we have chapters that are step by step. We have one chapter called “Working in English” that tells people things like how you set up an interview, how you write a pitch. People from some cultures aren’t used to working on very strict timetables like Americans. So there are chapters that give advice like that.

These are some of the things that make this book different. And of course 90 percent of it is based on what we do at CUNY. It’s based on my blog, which is based on student work. It’s based on my meetings with students. It’s based on how classes are conceived and taught at CUNY. So it’s not just my book; I feel very strongly it belongs to the whole school.

CJP: I love your blog. It’s great it helps me – I’m not an international student but I still feel there are things…

DN: And that’s a really important point. We feel that both the blog and the book should not be just for international students, international journalists. Both cover a lot of grammar points that journalists may or may not have been taught. (CUNY Journalism writing coach) Deb Stead and I are very old-school; when we were coming up in elementary school and high school, grammar and vocabulary were considered very important. English is not taught the same way these days. Teachers say, “Be creative. Express yourself.” And there’s something to be said for that; you know, English teachers who focus too much on what’s correct really stifle a lot of people and make them uncomfortable with writing and expressing themselves. We find that younger journalists and students weren’t taught the same way; therefore they don’t know these grammar points. In the book, I try to bring them up to speed on some of these grammar points. 

CJP: What are the top three common mistakes that you see?

DN: There’s a very long chapter on the 20 most common problems I see in writing – it’s Chapter 10. Those are the grammatical issues, really. Idiom is huge for international journalists because idiom is so much a part of the English, especially the American language. It’s important because you have to understand idioms when you’re doing an interview. If someone says something and you know all the words but have no idea what they mean together, that’s an example. If you’re going to use an idiom – as a speaker or a writer — you have to get it exactly right, or you’ll confuse the native speakers in your audience or make them laugh.

Register is also really important. That’s knowing when you need to use more formal verses less formal language. When, in your writing, it’s appropriate to use slang. When it may be appropriate to use curse words or obscenities – which even The New Yorker will publish now. Word choice is very important, and what that boils down to is building vocabulary. There’s a big chunk of the book on how to build vocabulary – partly by reading, by listening– but also I talk about building word families using and recognizing roots of words that can help you build up your vocabulary. As macro things, those are maybe three of the most important, and the chapter on the top 20 trouble spots is really more focused on very specific grammar points.

CJP: Do you see people using the book and the blog together?

DN: I hadn’t thought about that. Yes, I think they can because much of the book– though less than I expected — is based on the blog. I finished the book around this time last year, and since I was teaching in China then, I hadn’t written in the blog for a year. So parts of the blog that are in the book are two years old now. And since then I’ve been back to CUNY and I’m been blogging again. The blog always has new things that come out of the student writing.

 

When I’m going through a story with a student and something addresses a grammar point, I say “OK, I’m going to harvest that sentence,” and I put it aside in a special file for for when I’m ready to write about that. When I see students having the same problems, that’s when a blog post comes to mind on a particular subject. And also sometimes students will ask questions, and it’s a really good point that everybody should know about. One of our students from South America, Carlos Serrano, asked me a couple of questions this past semester that led to blog posts, and they were very good questions.

 

CJP: What do you hope it would accomplish, if you’re able to do everything you’re setting out? What is that you want international students or young journalists to get out of this?

DN: I want them to become more comfortable and confident when they need to work in English. And many of them, as they start and go on in their careers, will be working with the English language media. So you want them to be comfortable. It’s not that they’re not going to make mistakes; of course they’re going to make mistakes! That’s why there are editors. But I want to demystify the language for them. And especially the media terms. Every profession has its own jargon. We have our jargon; part of the fun of being a journalist is, you can throw words out and show you belong to this fraternity. I really want to help them make their English better.

Say you’re an editor of an English-language publication of any kind, and you’re getting queries from a new freelancer. And you think, ”You know, this is a good idea, but this pitch, I don’t know. The writing isn’t that good.” What it boils down to is, is this story and this reporter going to be more trouble to work with than the story is worth? If we can help reporters bring communication skills up to a good enough level that’s going to help them in the beginning – pursuing their careers, making contacts, really building working relationships with the media.

 

I know from my experience as an editor, if someone is too difficult to edit – for whatever reason, either attitude or writing — we tend not to use that person. Even with professional, native-speaker reporters, some people are really good reporters and not great writers. Some people are better using language than they are at reporting – I’m in the latter quality. I’m much more of an editor personality than a reporter personality. Even at, The New York Times, I could think of two veteran reporters people said weren’t great writers, but they were really good at cultivating sources and getting facts and we (the editors) could fix that (the writing). What I want to do with this book is reach these journalists all over the world who have ambition to work with English-language publications; and that contributes to the diversity of both viewpoint and coverage in our media. And bring them up to the level where our busy, overstressed editors feel that they can work productively with them. That’s the win-win.

CJP: What advice do you have for journalists looking to transition into teaching?

DN: I’d make a firm assessment of your skills and how they would translate. I would say get teacher training. One thing I learned from my experience: my training program was in teaching English, but you can use those same techniques to teach anything. I was assigned to teach a course in English-speaking cultures. It was about the US, UK, Canada and Australia. I thought, “I’ve lived there. I can do that.” As a career-changer, make the most of your professional background — and if you have a specialty, market yourself as a specialist in that. Also, especially for older people, if you’re a career-changer in your 40s or 50s, chances are you are not going to be offered a full-time teaching job in a school or university. Age discrimination does exist; even in a country where it’s illegal, of course it exists. You may have to create your own job, which is pretty much what I’ve done. It’s taken me a while. I left The Times nine years ago this spring. There were maybe two or three years when I just decompressed and didn’t throw myself into it all that seriously, and now I have. And the thing I always say when I’m asked to speak is, when I started my training in 2005, 2006, I could never have imagined the things I’m doing today. I didn’t see CUNY down the road. I didn’t see writing a book down the road. I did see traveling abroad. I didn’t see making a specialty out of English for the media; that all just kind of happened. But when it did happen, it was very natural.

CUNY J-Press Author, Andy Carvin, On Keynote Panel For Digital Media Conference

Reported.ly, a unique newswire that uses social media platforms for real-time news reporting, will be featured for the closing keynote at this year’s 2016 Online News Association Conference, a meet-up of the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists. As the newswire will close in August, the keynote panel will focus on its formation and next steps while it parts ways with First Look Media.

Reported.ly’s Editor-In-Chief Andy Carvin will speak on the panel along with other key members of reported.ly’s staff. Carvin made news when, as an NPR correspondent, he live tweeted the Arab Spring Revolution. He later wrote about his experience in the book Distant Witness, published by the CUNY Journalism Press. To order the book, click here. To read more about the conference and register, click here.

“Dying Words” Named One Of Best LGBTQ Nonfiction Books of 2016

The Bay Reporter named “Dying Words” one of its top 10 LGBTQ pieces of nonfiction for 2016. The nonfiction book, written by Samuel G. Freedman and Kerry Donahue, chronicles how New York Times journalist Jeff Schmalz helped the paper transform its LGBTQ and AIDS coverage.

Schmalz was closeted as he advanced as a journalist at the Times, but collapsed with an AIDS related seizure in 1990. He returned to the Times to cover AIDS and bring a national limelight to the epidemic and LGBTQ issues. The book was published by CUNY’s Journalism press. Get your copy here.

 

CUNY Journalism Professor Leads Fight Against Fake News

Copyright Eirik Solheim www.eirikso.com

Copyright Eirik Solheim www.eirikso.com

In the article “A Call For Cooperation Against Fake News” CUNY Graduate School for Journalism Professor Jeff Jarvis and Internet Startup Investor John Borthwick outline a list of strategies to stop the proliferation of fake news via popular social media platforms.

The two introduce strategies to better vet information on social media like tweaking the Facebook platform to make it easier for users to flag down fake news. They also suggest creating and expanding systems to verify sources and even send metadata to the social media platforms about fact checking and reporting.

But the strategies don’t stop at vetting fake news, Jarvis and Borthwick are also concerned about the need for citizens to receive diverse information, so their social media doesn’t turn into an echo chamber.

They suggest Facebook develop a system where users can opt into receiving information that differs from the political viewpoint. To add suggestions to how social media platforms can do a better job of verifying and curating information, click here.

‘American English’ Is On Sale Now

AmericanEnglish_CVF-2We’re pleased and proud to announce that our new book, American English for World Media, by Diane Nottle is now available for sale on our site, and will soon be available through other online booksellers, too. (Though we prefer that you buy it through us, which offers us more support for publishing our next books.)

Subtitled ‘The CUNY Journalism School Guide to Writing and Speaking for Professionals,’ the book is the result of Nottle’s long experience as a editor at The New York Times and elsewhere, and her side career as a coach for journalists who are working in English even though it is not their native language.Nottle, who coaches the international students at CUNY CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, also teaches regularly in Europe, China and elsewhere around the globe.

When word got out that Diane was doing ‘American English,’ a number of leading writing coaches, journalism professors and media executives around the world queued up to offer blurbs for the book, which we anticipate will be used not only by journalists but by other professionals as well — anyone for whom writing and speaking in English is important. (Even native speakers are telling us it is a really helpful language usage and grammar guide.)

Please check out the book and/or buy it here. If you want a desk copy for possible bulk purchase — we offer significant discounts — please contact press@journalism.cuny.edu

Upcoming Writers Panel Explores Reporting On The Past

journalisteventDo you have a passion for history and writing? Are you looking to combine the two? If so, check out the free panel “Second Draft: From History to Narrative Nonfiction, Journalists on Reporting the Past.” The event will be held from 6:30 pm-9 pm on November 17, 2016 at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, located in midtown at 219 W. 40th Street. It will feature experienced journalists and authors discussing the challenges and earning opportunities of writers reporting on history. If you’re interested in attending the event, RSVP here. The panel speakers featured are below:

 Paul Moses, a longtime New York City newspaper reporter who is now a Brooklyn College journalism professor, will talk about his award-winning books The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace(Doubleday 2009) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (NYU Press 2015).

Eileen Markey, a freelance journalist, will discuss her new book is A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books 2016), about of the nuns murdered by US-backed militia in El Salvador in 1980. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, City Limits, The New York Daily News, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday and elsewhere.

 Barbara Gray, formerly the chief editorial librarian at the New York Times and now head of the Research Center and research education for reporters at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will go over her research strategies and tools she using in her book-in-progress about America’s most notorious woman criminal in the late 19th century.

Cara Bedick, a senior editor at Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, will speak to the editorial process with emphasis on narrative nonfiction, including Run the World: My 3,500-Mile Journey Through Running Cultures Around the Globe by Becky Wade (William Morrow 2016) and the upcoming Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome (William Morrow 2017).

The moderator will be freelance writer, author and editor Tim Harper, who is a professor and writing coach at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and editor of the CUNY Journalism Press. His 12 books include Moscow Madness, about Americans doing business in Russia in the 1990s.

Interested in attending? RSVP here. 

After Facebook Censorship Controversy, Journalism Professor Suggests Facebook Get Editor-In-Chief

screen-shot-2016-09-11-at-10-25-56-am

Facebook briefly banned this iconic photo of the “Napalm Girl,” by Nick Ut, in 1972. The photo won the Pulitzer prize.

After initially censoring the iconic “Napalm Girl” photo from the Vietnam war, Facebook reversed itself and will allow users to post image.

The photo, by AP photographer Nick Ut, shows a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack.

Espen Egil Hansen, editor at a top Norwegian newspaper, recently posted the image and then received a demand from Facebook to remove it. The social media site said that the iconic image violated their standards of child pornography, but reversed the decision amid waves of criticism.

One of the leading critics, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Professor Jeff Jarvis, said the case illustrates the need for Facebook to instate an editor-in-chief to set editorial standards and policies. To read the article, click here.

Jarvis is a leader in journalism who has written several books about its changing business model, including Geeks Bearing Gifts, about the future of the news media. To order the book, click here.

Former New York Time’s Culture Editor Releasing English Learning Book For International Journalists

AmericanEnglish_CVF-2 Diane Nottle, formerly an editor on the culture news desk of The New York Times, says her new book American English for World Media is a natural marriage between her 20-plus years as a journalist and her time in Poland and China teaching English as a second language.

Nottle, now a writing coach for international students at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, saw serious gaps in the way that English was taught in textbooks – gaps that she has addressed in her own book. She said the book is specifically targeted towards international students who want to go into English speaking media. However, it’s not limited to them: more and more, she said, many native-born students lack basic grammar and structure skills addressed by the book.

American English for World Media, published by the CUNY Journalism Press, is set to be released in September. You can order it here. To check out her English learning blog for foreign journalists, click here.

Acclaimed Features Writer Gives Beginning Journalists a Few Summer Internship Tips

newmanFor many journalism students all around the world, their summer internships are their first foray into real world media outside of the classroom: A chance to see how the industry really ticks. But it can be a struggle for newbies struggling to create those career defining feature and enterprise pieces, when they’re stuck churning out daily news.

CUNY’s Journalism Press associate publisher Victoria Edwards, a graduate school student at CUNY’s journalism school, asked Barry Newman, a 43-year features journalist for the Wall Street Journal, who also wrote the CUNY Journalism Press book “News To Me,” for helpful tips on how interns can find and write features, while juggling their daily workload.

CUNYJP: How do you balance out your feature stories with having to write daily?

Newman: When I started out, I had definite stories. I divided up my day and would ask myself: What’s more important, the story due in two hours or my feature? I would say, I will work on my feature until 3 p.m. then turn around and get rid of my daily stuff. I divided up my time and set aside absolute time to work on my features.

CUNYJP: How do you find your stories for features? How do you know what to write about?

 Newman: My experience has been working over years and years and not knowing what I would write about all the time before I got to a place. I would find a neighborhood and ask questions and see if there’s something interesting. It’s a question of looking to see what stories have been covered and finding angles that have not been covered.

In New York, I know there are lots of stories I’m curious about. I’m asking myself why is this? Why is that? It could be the chewing gum on the sidewalks or a type of food I’ve never seen before. It might be something confusing about the sign. I want to know things that are not self-explanatory. I just wonder around the neighborhood until I find something that is off. For example, where do the mounted policemen park their horses during lunchtime? Or, is there anyone producing nonstick chewing gum?

CUNYJP: How do you know when the feature story is completed? How do you keep yourself from just writing and writing and never ending the thing?

Newman: I plan the building blocks for features: several scenes, and then I fill in the blanks by doing background research, asking 10 people the same question until you start hearing the same information. I know the shape of the story has to come as you’re reporting. You feel the story until it makes sense.

For the scenes, going to the place and event and seeing something happen – something that takes place – an accident, anything. It can be a rainstorm that allows you to build the story.

CUNYJP: Did you have any specific struggles as a young writer trying to put together these features?

 Newman: I struggled a lot until I started realizing there are two ways to do a story: You can know what you want and go directly to it, or you can let it wash over you while being very perceptive – waiting for something interesting to happen – walking on a sidewalk or being on a beach. Keep your eyes open until something happens. No one else will notice it but you – but it’s the spark that makes the story.

CUNYJP: Can you give me an example where you had to wait out a scene to put in your story?

Newman: I went to a comedy club where comediennes couldn’t curse. I had to wait for the moment when they cursed and someone told them to stop. But you can’t command that to happen. There are thousands of variations on that theme. If you want to write a story about the danger of kids getting hurt in football, you have to wait until you see it.

To brush up on your feature writing skills, order Newman’s book “News to Me,” here

 

 

 

 

The Illustrated Courtroom Racks Up Honors

The Illustrated Courtroom, the first (and we think best-ever) full-size, full-color collection of courtroom art, is one of the most-honored books published in America in recent years. If you haven’t checked it our for its art, journalism, law and behind-the-scenes analysis of some of the biggest court proceedings over the past half century, now is the time, with the price cut in half, from the original $60 to a mere $30. A great gift for lawyers, dads, artists, anyone.
Awards/Honors for the Illustrated Courtroom
2016 Eric Hoffer Book Award Best in Academic Press
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2014
 
Independent Book Publisher Awards ( IPPY)                         http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=2046#.Vw7Zi-GRYak.blogger
Bronze medal -Best Informational EBook
Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist http://www.indiebookawards.com/2016_winners_and_finalists.php
            Historical non fiction
            Specialty
            Non Fiction E Book
 
eLit Book Awards       http://elitawards.com/2015_results.php
            Gold Medal- Fine Art
            Gold Medal-True Crime
            Silver Medal- History
            Silver Medal- Graphic Drawn Documentary
            Gold Medal- Best illustration/non fiction

“The Illustrated Courtroom” racks up honors at the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Awards & Beyond

illustrated-courtroom-manson-299x299

Congratulations to the book “The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Year of Court Art,” for racking up honors at the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. The book, by Elizabeth Williams and Sue Russell, was a finalist in the following categories: Gift/Specialty/Novelty, Historical Non-Fiction and e-Book Nonfiction.

Illustrated Courtroom co-authors Sue Russell and Elizabeth Williams expressed their excitement at winning the award, and said in an email, “We are thrilled that the Illustrated Courtroom (IC) has been named a three time finalist in the Next Generation Book Awards and a bronze winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). We are gratified that this book, which has been a real labor of love and years in the making, has been given such a warm reception by readers and publishers. Prior to the announcement that the Illustrated Courtroom is a winner of these awards, it garnered the following accolades:

A Kirkus Best BoIPPBRonzeok of 2014IndieBookAward_Finalist
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, 2014
eLit awards:
-Gold Medal in True Crime and Art
– Silver Medal in Graphic Documentary and History
Global Book Awards
– Gold medal in Illustrated non-fiction
 – Winner of the The Eric Hoffer New Horizon award

We thank CUNY for having the vision to publish the book.”

The Illustrated Courtroom includes 140 iconic illustrations depicting memorable moments, and tells the stories behind the headlines, with the artists’ insider insights. The result is be an artists’ eye view of courtroom history in the making, allowing readers to savor the extraordinary work of those who go where cameras cannot. The book is a must-have for everyone passionate about true crime, legendary defendants, headline-making trials, big-time lawyers and courtroom drama. To order your copy, click here.

Illustrated Courtroom Artist’s Work Featured In Today’s NY Times Book Review

Taken from New York Times book review

From left: Najibullah Zazi, part of a Qaeda plot; Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “Underwear Bomber”; and Faisal Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square. Credit Sketches, from left: Elizabeth Williams/Associated Press; Brigitte Woosley/Associated Press; Kabrin/Reuters; Elizabeth Williams/Associated Press

In today’s page 11 The New York Times review of the book “United States of Jihad,” by Peter Bergen, two of the four images featured are by renowned Illustrated Courtroom artist Elizabeth Williams. The book, reviewed by Janet Napolitano, looks at various events from the Sandy Hook mass murder to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, to seek to understand why some Americans become jihadists. Williams sketches of jihadists Najibullah Zazi, who joined an Al Qaeda plot to blow up the new York subway system in 2009 and Faisal Shahzad, who parked a bomb loaded SUV in Times Square in 2010, are featured prominently, as two of the four pictures shown, on the top of page 11. To see the full New York Times book review, click here. 

For more of Williams artwork, check out the award-winning book Illustrated Courtroom. Order your copy here.

Journalists In The DRC Struggling With Self-Censorship and Threats

 

 Reporters in the DRC face threats and violence during the pre-election period. Credit: Internews


Reporters in the DRC face threats and violence during the pre-election period. Credit: Internew

Internews, an international nonprofit that works to empower local media to tell its communities stories, explores the politically hostile situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where threats of violence, during the pre-electoral period, are leading to self-censorship among local journalists because of a hostile political climate. Internews Chief of Party in the DRC Karim Bernard-Dende interviews a staff member from the Initiative Journalists in Danger (JED) to delve deeper into freedom of press issues in the DRC. To read the entire interview, click here.

Author David Hoffman, who wrote Citizen’s Rising, a book about the power of the media to empower oppressed communities against tyrannical dictatorships, founded Internews. His organization works directly to empower local media through training, education and advocacy. To get a copy of his book, click here.

International Non-Profit, Founded By CUNY J-Press Author, Accepting Grant Applications For Climate Change Related Journalism Projects


Hoffman Cover final 081413Internews
Journalism Network (EJN) is now requesting grant applications for journalism projects focused on climate change adaption and responses to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Organizations looking to focus on training and networking building projects are encouraged to apply for grants, which will be about $15,000 each. For more info, click here.

Author and journalist David Hoffman is both founder and President Emeritus of Internews, a global nonprofit that has pioneered media development. Internews has worked in more than 90 countries to train media professionals and citizens journalists to increase coverage of important local issues.

Hoffman is also author of Citizen’s Rising an exploration of how new and old media are changing the context of journalism today. Order your copy today, here. To see other CUNY J-Press’ books related to thought provoking issues in journalism, click here.

History Focused Public Radio & Podcast Features the Book “Illustrated Courtroom”

illustratedcourtroom_picBackstory with the American Guys, a public radio program and podcast bringing historical perspectives to contemporary events, recently interviewed Elizabeth Williams about her book “Illustrated Courtroom.” The book features some of the best work of five award winning artists as they offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at courtroom drama and history, as they document those who are in the midst of making it.

Williams’ book is nationally acclaimed and has won various awards including, but not limited to, the Gold Medal for Global eBooks and Best Illustration in a non-fiction category.

Backstory is broadcast weekly by 173 stations in 31 states and Washington D.C. (14 in top-50 markets). Backstory podcast downloads has exceeded 7.6 million – with the program averaging more than 389,000 online plays per month and rising as high as #10 among all iTunes podcasts, video and audio.

More information regarding the date and time Williams’ Backstory interview will be airing, will be available shortly. To order your copy of the book, “Illustrated Courtroom,” click here.