Book review published

The latest edition of the academic journal Australian Journalism Review includes a book review I wrote. The book, titled American Deadline, is the result of an experiment in how to do local journalism differently. It is a compliation of dispatches from four experienced journalists living in towns across America where the local newspaper has either closed or is a skeleton of its former self. Jason Togyer writes from McKeesport in Pennsylvania; Sandra Sanchez writes from McAllen in Texas; Greg Glassner writes from Bowling Green in Virginia; Charles Richardson writes from Macon in Georgia. 

The four journalists were recruited to produce reports ‘written as if they were writing a letter to a friend’. The aim was to free them from the constraints of form and journalistic norms and help them rediscover a singular voice. Their dispatches were to capture what they considered essential about their towns and how they were experiencing, what would surely be, a tumultuous 2020. 

2020, of cause, did turn out to be a doozy - the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe and, in America, there was a presidential election that outsted Donald Trump.

Despite its slightly awkward structure, American Deadline is a book that shows how local journalism can be done well if given time, space, resources and, importantly, care and local knowledge. 

Access my full book review here: https://search.informit.org/toc/ajre/45/2