reporter memoirs

Some reporters write non-fiction books in addition to articles, with mixed success. Memoirs or how-I-got-the-scoop are best approached with skepticism. Being only human, journalists tend to make themselves heroes of their own lives. The worst such autobiographies are reminiscences about meeting celebrities. Brief encounters with the famous get squeezed for faux insights into events and personalities. To give a dated example, Arthur Ford’s As the World Wags On (1950) is an otherwise charming memoir from a respected Canadian newspaperman, but Ford drops far too many names. I would have preferred a gritty look at the unsung denizens of newsrooms.

Other journalist memoirs, though, are terrific, especially those that chronicle the mechanics of chasing a story over weeks and months. They’re almost like how-to manuals. Here are my favourites from the last five years:

Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf 2018). Hersh is a legendary investigative journalist who made his mark by reporting on the 1968 My Lai murders of villagers in Vietnam by U.S. troops. He had enormous trouble getting the mega-scoop published, settling in the end for small news agency. Chapter 9 “Finding Calley” is by itself worth the price of the book, outlining how Hersh cleverly tracked down the soldier at the centre of the massacre.

John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Knopf 2018). Carreyrou was a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter (1999-2019) who broke stories about Theranos, a sham company that promoted its unproven blood-testing technology to gullible investors. Carreyrou turned the reporting into this book, and in the last section details how he kept on breaking news, even while under legal and other threats.

Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement (Penguin 2019). Investigative journalists for the New York Times, Kantor and Twoey did gutsy, original reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s long-hidden sexual assaults and harassments. As the subtitle indicates, the book is about their struggles as journalists to get the story out while threatened by powerful and rich adversaries.

Lindsey Hilsum, In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2018). Colvin was a daring war correspondent whose luck ran out in 2012, when she died in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, at age 56. Colleague Hilsum tells her life story with sympathy and honesty. Colvin was a deeply troubled, unhappy woman who became energized when reporting from the battlefield. The sensitive account of her character helps explain why some reporters repeatedly put themselves in harm’s way.

Alan Rusbridger, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (Farrar, Straus and Grioux). Rusbridger was the longtime editor of The Guardian newspaper, and provides behind-the-scenes detail on how the paper’s big investigative projects unfolded. That would be more than enough for a book, but Rusbridger also chronicles The Guardian’s largely successful struggle to navigate into the digital and online world.

Jan. 20, 2022