Rewriting the Newspaper

Reviews / Votes

"Offers a detailed, rich, and fascinating account of the narrative journalism movement from the Washington Post to the St. Petersburg Times to the Oregonian and beyond. No one else has done this and Thomas Schmidt has done it with deep research and strong writing himself."-Michael Schudson, Columbia University, author of The Sociology of News and Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers "Thanks to Thomas Schmidt, scholars will now have a substantive, institutional sense of how, starting in the 1970s, newspaper editors, reporters, and trade leaders-and soon, in-house writing coaches-developed a community of practice around the turn to long-form storytelling. Grounded in fresh archival research, sifting through often-overlooked trade commentary, and incorporating over two dozen interviews with key players, Schmidt's deftly nuanced "cultural-institutional" approach complements and challenges stand-alone histories of the "New Journalism," as well as studies that either overlook the storytelling turn or would reduce it to economic factors. Rewriting the Newspaper is itself a book with a very important story to tell, and one that is still with us."-Christopher P. Wilson, Boston College, author of Reading Narrative Journalism: An Introduction for Students "In Rewriting the Newspaper, author Thomas Schmidt gets it right. This is the story of a generation of creative reporters, editors, and teachers, journalists who understood that while reports were central to their craft, they were incapable of fully communicating the truths behind the facts."-Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, author of Writing Tools