MUST SEE, MUST READ
RED BLOOD AND BLACK INK: JOURNALISM IN THE OLD WEST
(1998, by David Dary): Western Writers Hall of Fame inductee Dary, known for his books about frontier cowboys, prostitutes and doctors, tackles newspapers, from tramp printers to printing presses to editors who weren’t afraid to call their competition “crane-necked, blobber-lipped, squeaky-voiced, emptyheaded, snaggletoothed, filthy-mouthed, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, red-footed…”
Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power (2010, by James McGrath Morris): A rich account of Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungary-born immigrant who got his start in journalism as a reporter for a German-language newspaper in St. Louis, then took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to national prominence before moving to New York and launching the era of modern mass communication.
They Carried the Torch: The Story of Oklahoma’s Pioneer Newspapers (1937, by Mrs. Tom B. Ferguson): “We want a story every morning that will justify someone waking us up before noon with a gun and the promise of sudden death,” an editor told a reporter in Oklahoma City in 1893. A solid account by the newspaperwoman who became Edna Ferber’s model for Cimarron’s Sabra Cravat.
The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism (2017, by Mitchell Stephens): Thomas is best remembered as a broadcaster—“So long until tomorrow” was his catchphrase—but he got his start in a Colorado mining camp, working his way from newsboy to newsman for the Victor Record, Victor Times, Denver Times and Rocky Mountain News.
The Times of Wichita (1992, by Bruce H. Thorstad): A well-crafted novel about two brothers who settle in Wichita, Kan., in 1871 to start The Times of Wichita—which doesn’t make them popular with the man who runs the town and a competing newspaper. Thorstad’s eye for detail, from printing presses to buffalo hunts, is impeccable.
MOVIES
(1962, on DVD and Blu-ray): “When the legend becomes founder, publisher and editor Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien). What else can be said about John Ford’s classic, somber, elegiac ode to the end of the West? Except … no newspaper journalist would ever give up the scoop of the century!
