What happens when journalism is made superfluous? Combining ethnography, media analysis, moral and political theory this book examines the unravelling of professional journalism in Russia over the past twenty-five years, and its effects on society. It argues that, contrary to widespread assumptions, late Soviet-era journalists shared a cultural contract with their audiences, which ensured that their work was guided by a truth-telling ethic. Post-communist economic and political upheaval led not so much to greater press freedom as to the de-professionalization of journalism, as journalists found themselves having to monetize their truth-seeking skills. This has culminated in a perception of journalists as political prostitutes, or members of the 'second oldest profession', as they are commonly termed in Russia. Roudakova argues that this cultural shift has fundamentally eroded the value of truth-seeking and telling in Russian society.

The story of the spectacular unravelling of journalism as a profession in Russia in the last thirty years.

Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in promoting the ideas and values of the Cold War. As they brought the foreign world to their Soviet and American readers, these journalists projected their own ideologies onto their reporting. In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly influenced the ways that policy makers, pundits, and ordinary people came to understand the American or the Soviet "other." In Cold War Correspondents, Dina Fainberg examines how Soviet and American journalists covered the rival superpower and how two distinctive sets of truth systems, professional practices, and political cultures shaped international reporting. Fainberg explores private and public interactions among multiple groups that shaped coverage of the Cold War adversary, including journalists and their sources, editors, news media executives, government officials, diplomats, American pundits, Soviet censors, and audiences on both sides. Foreign correspondents, Fainberg argues, were keen analytical observers who aspired to understand their host country and probe its depths. At the same time, they were fundamentally shaped by their cultural and institutional backgrounds—to the point that their views of the rival superpower were refracted through values of their own culture. International reporting grounded and personalized the differences between the two nations, describing the other side in readily recognizable, self-referential terms. Fundamentally, Fainberg demonstrates, Americans and Soviets during the Cold War came to understand themselves through the creation of images of each other. Drawing on interviews with veteran journalists and Soviet dissidents, Cold War Correspondents also uses previously unexamined Soviet and US government records, newspaper and news agency archives, rare Soviet cartoons, and individual correspondents' personal papers, letters, diaries, books, and articles. Striking black-and-white photos depict foreign correspondents in action. Taken together, these sources illuminate a rich history of private and professional lives at the heart of the superpower conflict.

Dead People is a book of eulogies, written for an eclectic assortment of famous and interesting people who died in recent years. The essays were written by Stefany Anne Golberg and 2013 Whiting Award winner Morgan Meis. The book covers twenty-eight dead people in all, including intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawn; musicians like Sun Ra, MCA (Beastie Boys) and Kurt Cobain; writers like David Foster Wallace, John Updike and Tom Clancy; artists like Thomas Kinkade and Robert Rauschenberg; and controversial political figures like Osama bin Laden and Mikhail Kalashnikov.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in history to leave the Earth's atmosphere and venture into space. His flight aboard a Russian Vostok rocket lasted only 108 minutes, but at the end of it he had become the most famous man in the world. Back on the ground, his smiling face captured the hearts of millions around the globe. Film stars, politicians and pop stars from Europe to Japan, India to the United States vied with each other to shake his hand. Despite this immense fame, almost nothing is known about Gagarin or the exceptional people behind his dramatic space flight. Starman tells for the first time Gagarin's personal odyssey from peasant to international icon, his subsequent decline as his personal life began to disintegrate under the pressures of fame, and his final disillusionment with the Russian state. President Kennedy's quest to put an American on the Moon was a direct reaction to Gagarin's achievement--yet before that successful moonshot occurred, Gagarin himself was dead, aged just thirty-four, killed in a mysterious air crash. Publicly the Soviet hierarchy mourned; privately their sighs of relief were almost audible, and the KGB report into his death remains secret. Entwined with Gagarin's history is that of the breathtaking and highly secretive Russian space program - its technological daring, its triumphs and disasters. In a gripping account, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony reveal the astonishing world behind the scenes of the first great space spectacular, and how Gagarin's flight came frighteningly close to destruction.

The public, James Carey famously wrote, is the god-term of journalism, the term without which the entire enterprise fails to make sense. In the last thirty years, scholars have made great progress in understanding just what this means. In this much-needed new book, leading scholar David Ryfe takes readers on a journey through the literature that explores this most important of relationships. He discusses how and why journalism first emerged in the United States, and why journalism everywhere shares a family resemblance but is nowhere practised in precisely the same way. He goes on to explain why journalists have such difficulty talking about the business aspects of their profession, and explores the boundaries of the fields collective imagination. Ryfe looks at the nature of change in journalism, providing sketches of its possible futures. Ultimately, he argues that the public is a keyword for journalism because it is impossible to understand the practice without it. This rich and insightful guide will prove indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the practice of journalism.

Linking neoliberalism with the Right’s global rise Bulgaria’s media-driven pivot to right-wing populism parallels political developments taking place around the world. Martin Marinos applies a critical political economy approach to place Bulgarian right-wing populism within the structural transformation of the country’s media institutions. As Marinos shows, media concentration under Western giants like Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and News Corporation have led to a neoliberal turn of commercialization, concentration, and tabloidization across media. The Right have used the anticommunism and racism bred by this environment to not only undermine traditional media but position their own outlets to boost new political entities like the nationalist party Ataka. Marinos’s ethnographic observations and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts add on-the-ground detail to his account. He also examines several related issues, including the performative appeal of populist media and the money behind it. A timely and innovative analysis, Free to Hate reveals where structural changes in media intersect with right-wing populism.