Newsroom confidential Lessons (and worries) from an ink-stained life

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sullivan, a columnist for the Washington Post and a former New York Times public editor, recounts in this sincere if befuddled work her hard-won career in journalism. From her internship at the "tiny" Niagara Gazette in the 1970s to her desk at the Times, Sullivan surveys the travails and triumphs of being a woman in the industry, detailing the difficulties of being an editor for one of the nation's most read papers--including "physical proximity to the journalists whose work I was criticizing"--and her challenging transition into the role of Style writer at the Washington Post, where she regularly faces misogynistic vitriol online. She also frankly contends with her own mistakes--including her team's coverage of a 2010 mass shooting in Buffalo where she included criminal profiles of the Black victims--and tracks her improvement when she wrote with "more empathy and insight" on the death of George Floyd in 2020. It's this use of her writing about real-life devastation as a metric for personal improvement, however, that undermines Sullivan's claim to a high ethical standard; and her criticisms--including her thoughts on Times journalist Dean Baquet's "mishandling" of one journalist's resignation after using the n-word--often fall flat. The insider's view into American journalism is engrossing, but Sullivan's blind spots, when it comes to her own blunders, are large. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the author's role in the coverage of a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., and the death of George Floyd.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Over her four-decade career, Sullivan moved from intern to editor in chief at the Buffalo News, became the first woman appointed public editor at the New York Times, and now serves as the Washington Post's media columnist. An insider's view of U.S. news reporting urging the restoration of public faith in the press. With a 125,000-copy first printing.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A veteran journalist recounts her life in the newsroom while prescribing cures for the media's current woes. "If one side claims it's raining outside, and the other side claims the sun is shining, it's not journalists' job to quote both equally; it's their job to walk outside, look at the sky, and report the truth." So writes Sullivan, the media columnist for the Washington Post, who has been covering various beats since being lured into journalism by the glamour portrayed in the film version of All the President's Men. The author found little glamour in her work at the Buffalo News, where she wrote about poverty, pollution, and political malfeasance and learned a lesson or two about how to overcome White privilege in a largely Black city. She joined the New York Times in the role of public editor, in which she acted as a post facto umpire on published pieces. The job, of short tenure by design so that the editor didn't become part of the establishment, was full of fights. One obituary celebrated the domestic attributes of a subject in its lede before revealing that she was a distinguished scientist; concludes Sullivan, to the anger of the obituary writer, "the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote." Small potatoes next to the biggest challenge she would face, though, when she moved to the Post and began covering Donald Trump's countless distortions and lies, by which, thanks to his vengeful supporters, she "continually felt…irrational anger like an unending blast of liquid poison from an industrial-strength hose." The author, whose liberal perspective is occasionally heavy-handed, acknowledges that Trump helped change journalism: It need not be adversarial, she holds, but it will necessarily be that way if it tells the truth about liars, and objectivity is a less-desirable standard than truth in the face of endless mendacity. A welcome memoir of time in the reportorial trenches. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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