New Books in Journalism

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a journalist, Zygar has interviewed President Zelensky and had access to many of the major players--from politicians to oligarchs. As an expert on Putin's moods and behavior, he has spent years studying the Kremlin's plan regarding Ukraine, and here, in clear, chronological order he explains how we got here.

In 1996 to 2004, Ukraine became an independent post-Soviet country where everyone was connected to the former empire at all levels, financially, culturally, psychologically. However, the elite anticipated that the empire would be back and punish them. From 2004 to 2018, there were many states inside one state, each with its own rulers/oligarchs and its own interests--some of them directly connected with Russia. In 2018, a new generation of Ukrainians arrive, and having grown in an independent country, they do not consider themselves to be part of Russia--and that was the moment when the war began, as Putin could not tolerate losing Ukraine forever.

Authoritative, timely, and vitally important, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Scribner, 2023) is an unique overview of the war that continues to threaten the future of the entire world as we know it.

Mikhail Zygar, a journalist, filmmaker, and public historian, was founding editor-in-chief in 2010 of Russia’s only independent news TV channel, Dozhd (TVRain), which provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled state television and gave a platform to opposition voices. He was also the founder and editor-in-chief of Project 1917, a website revisiting the Russian Revolution through myriad eye-witness perspectives. The New York Times has described Zygar as “one of Russia’s smartest and best-sourced young journalists.” Winner of the International Press Freedom Award in 2014, Zygar is the author of All the Kremlin’s Men (2016), the #1 bestseller in Russia that has been translated into over twenty languages, and The Empire Must Die (2017), a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Zygar openly protested against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and then left Russia. He reported on the atrocities committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha in 2022 and was charged with “distributing false information about Russia’s military.” In 2023 he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. He has written for based Der Spiegel in Germany and The New York Times in the USA and writes a substack newsletter, “The Last Pioneer.” 

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Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring.

Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society.

In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media.

These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination.

In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together.

Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its inception. In 2006, she returned to Manila and the Asia Pacific region, reporting from the frontlines of armed conflict and climate change as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera.

She is the editor of I, Migrant, an online platform which showcases writing from the diaspora, advocating a universal humanity beneath people’s differences.

Follow Marga on Twitter and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of God’s Ashes. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed.

Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Eric Hoyt tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features.

Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust synoptic history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story. This periodization will allow scholars to compare the commercialization of documentary film with other genres. Drawing on archival documents, industry trade journals and popular press, and interviews with filmmakers and film distributors, Stone illuminates how documentary features have become more plentiful, popular, and profitable than ever before.

Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories.

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In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership.

Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power.

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Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about:

…and much more!

About the book

“In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!

Guest Biography

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies.

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Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling.

This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them.

Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Melville Jacoby was a U.S. war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from Chongqing, Hanoi, and Manila.

He was also a relative of Bill Lascher, a journalist–specifically, the cousin of Bill’s grandmother. Bill has now collected Mel’s work in a book: A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books: 2024), with photos detailing Mel’s early days as an exchange student in China, then his later work as journalist…and propagandist for Chiang Kai-shek in wartime Chongqing, then as a correspondent for Time and Life in the Philippines right as the Japanese invade.

Bill is also the author of the 2016 book Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two World War II Correspondents and their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (William Morrow: 2016), also about Mel Jacoby and his wife Annalee Jacoby. He is also a freelance journalist.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Danger Shared. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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