NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
Lisa Flanagan narrates journalist Margaret Sullivan’s memoir/manifesto authoritatively. Flanagan speaks in a direct, straightforward style and alters her timbre only when imitating male voices. She captures Sullivan’s spirited point of view—she’s enthralled with her calling and appalled at the state of the media—and gives this important audiobook the seriousness it merits. Sullivan is a journalist’s journalist. She was a longtime editor at the BUFFALO NEWS before becoming the first woman to serve as public editor at the NEW YORK TIMES. Following that she was the media critic at the WASHINGTON POST. Fearless at her craft, she has critiqued sacred cows like Bob Woodward and in her four years at the TIMES won a slew of fans for her candor. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
06/13/2022
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.
From the Publisher
“An opinionated but fair and accessible tour of the big debates roiling the “reality-based press,” as she calls mainstream newsrooms…. Sullivan remains the critic American journalism requires, a veteran practitioner with street cred, still in touch with the ‘unaccountable joy’ of reporting and writing that continues to draw talented young people to the field.”—Steve Coll, The New York Times Book Review
“If Sullivan started out intending to write a memoir, she ended up with a manifesto. This is a book about the role of the press in a democracy that’s in grave jeopardy.”—Kathy Kiely, The Washington Post
“Dogged, thoughtful, and unafraid”—The New Republic
“A beguiling memoir.”—Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
“Newsroom Confidential might have been just another journalist’s rehash of stories–literally old news–except that the story in front of Sullivan was the struggle of the U.S. press to save itself and, maybe along with it, American democracy.”—Karl Vick, Time
“The great newswoman takes a clear-eyed look at her own storied career and the troubled state of her much-loved profession.”—People
“It's rare that a respected critic writes a dishy, fun book that also packs an important message, but when she does, it's a must-read.”—Molly Jong-Fast, The Atlantic
“Margaret Sullivan's perspective on our increasingly cacophonous media ecosystem is invaluable. By detailing her personal and professional experiences in this wise and engaging memoir, she pulls the curtain back to reveal how journalism really works and the very human decisions behind it.”—Katie Couric
Library Journal
05/01/2022
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.
NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
Lisa Flanagan narrates journalist Margaret Sullivan’s memoir/manifesto authoritatively. Flanagan speaks in a direct, straightforward style and alters her timbre only when imitating male voices. She captures Sullivan’s spirited point of view—she’s enthralled with her calling and appalled at the state of the media—and gives this important audiobook the seriousness it merits. Sullivan is a journalist’s journalist. She was a longtime editor at the BUFFALO NEWS before becoming the first woman to serve as public editor at the NEW YORK TIMES. Following that she was the media critic at the WASHINGTON POST. Fearless at her craft, she has critiqued sacred cows like Bob Woodward and in her four years at the TIMES won a slew of fans for her candor. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2022-09-07
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.
