What has happened to the news? Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in newspaper coverage. Many newspaper executives, paring costs and badly misreading public appetites, have cut back dramatically on all types of public-affairs reporting. Fewer reporters than ever are assigned to the statehouse or the White House, to city hall or foreign capitals. Too often celebrity gossip and movie tips take the place of serious journalism instead of existing alongside it. Newspapers once operated under a mandate to provide the kinds of news that citizens need to function in a democratic society, but many corporations have changed that mandate. For more than two years, legendary editor Gene Roberts led a group of journalists in an unprecedented study of the newspaper industry for the American Journalism Review. This is the second volume of their findings. The first, Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering, documented the storm of buying, selling, and consolidation that is transforming the American press. This second volume explores the consequences of these changes for ordinary communities and for the nation, arguing that they place democracy itself in peril. Contributors include Peter Arnett, Mary Walton, Charles Layton, John Herbers, James McCartney, Carl Sessions Stepp, Lewis M. Simons, Chip Brown and Winnie Hu.

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

The American newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its entire three-hundred-year history. A generation of relentless "corporatization" has resulted in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidation of newspapers, accompanied by dramatic -- and drastic -- change in reporting and coverage of all kinds. Concerned that this phenomenon was going largely unreported, Gene Roberts, legendary reporter and editor, decided to undertake a huge, extended reportorial study of his own industry, what would become the Project on the State of the American Newspaper. Gathering more than two dozen distinguished journalists and writers, Roberts produced a long series of reports in the American Journalism Review, published by the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, asking the crucial question: Are American communities -- in the very middle of the so-called information explosion -- in danger of becoming less informed than ever?

During my time in health care (~47 years), I saw much in the way of suffering and adversity. In line with that, I often hear the question “why do Christians suffer?” When I or my family met with adversity, my resource was always God and the Bible. I have read several books on the subject and it just seemed to me “they” were leaving out much of what the Bible has to say about suffering and adversity. Through much prayer and after several years, I have a book which I believe will help answer the question of why Christians suffer and it is basically a step by step Biblical approach to help deal with suffering and adversity. It covers the subjects of “Who is God”, “Who is Jesus”, and why does it matter ... on to the subject of prayer and a need for an open, accepting heart.

New Mexico rancher and lawman Dee (Daniel R.) Harkey describes himself as having “been shot at more times than any man in the world not engaged in war.” Mean as Hell, originally published in 1948 when Harkey was 83, is his detailed, witty autobiography about his youth in San Saba County of west Texas, where in 1882 he learned from his brother Joe, the sheriff, to “be damned sure you don’t get killed, but don’t kill anybody unless you have to” and his adult life in Eddy County after moving to Karlsbad (then Eddy) in 1890. Harkey served as a New Mexico peace officer from 1893 until 1911. Among the many cattle rustlers, train robbers, and other outlaws he confronted were Jim Miller, whom Harkey fingers as Pat Garrett’s real killer, and the Dalton Gang. Harkey observes that, in 1948, “cattle stealing has gone out of fashion. We’ve gotten civilized. Instead..., we now have statesman who practice nepotism, pad the public payrolls and graft as much as they think they can get away with (in an honorable way, of course) just like the folks back east.” Readers interested in many aspects of the territorial and outlaw West will enjoy Dee Harkey’s lively stories.