The craft of finding out what is happening and telling people about it — from the muckrakers to the bloggers, from the Weekly to the blog.
American investigative journalist who went where the documents were and where the bodies were. His Red Mafiya (2000) exposed the Russian organised crime networks that had penetrated American business and politics. He investigated Rabbi Meir Kahane, Israeli settler violence, and sexual slavery in Bombay. A Village Voice contributing editor who spent his career on stories too dangerous for most publications. He died at fifty-one from a disease contracted in the slums of Bombay while investigating human trafficking.
Can help you study: Investigative journalism, organised crime reporting, source protection, working dangerous stories, human rights journalism, and the craft of following the money.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Seymour Hersh — the American investigative journalist who broke the My Lai massacre (1969, Pulitzer Prize 1970) and Abu Ghraib (2004). AP, the New York Times, then the New Yorker for decades. His method: find the person who was in the room, persuade them to talk, and verify everything independently. He has never relied on official sources and never will.
Can help you study: Investigative journalism, military and intelligence reporting, source development, the methodology of breaking stories that governments want buried, and the argument that the story is never what they tell you it is.
American journalist who published I.F. Stone’s Weekly (1953–1971) — a one-man newsletter that held the US government to account during the Cold War by the simple method of reading its own documents more carefully than anyone else did. He read the Congressional Record, the Federal Register, and the footnotes of official reports. He had no sources, no access, no connections. He had a library card. He proved that all governments lie.
Can help you study: Independent journalism, document-based reporting, government accountability, the method of reading official publications against themselves, and why you should always read the footnotes.
Czech-born American journalist and New Yorker staff writer whose The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) opened with the most famous sentence in journalism studies: every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible. She spent her career examining the confidence trick at the heart of the journalist-subject relationship — the seduction, the betrayal, the inevitable falling-out.
Can help you study: Literary journalism, the ethics of the journalist-subject relationship, close reading, psychoanalytic method applied to nonfiction, and the uncomfortable question of what journalism actually does to its subjects.
English journalist, essayist, and novelist whose “Politics and the English Language” (1946) is the most important essay on writing in the twentieth century. He argued that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and that clear prose is the first defence against tyranny. The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four. He appears in both Literature and Journalism because his fiction is inseparable from his reporting.
Can help you study: Political writing, the essay, clarity of prose, propaganda and its mechanics, the relationship between language and truth, and why every line of serious work is a political act.
New Yorker staff writer for twenty-eight years and the greatest press critic America has produced. His “Wayward Press” column (1945–1963) held newspapers to account with wit, erudition, and an unfailing ear for cant. He also wrote the finest boxing journalism ever published (The Sweet Science, 1956, voted the greatest sports book of all time) and the finest food writing (Between Meals, 1962). He said freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
Can help you study: Press criticism, media analysis, war reporting, the New Yorker tradition, boxing writing, food writing, and the principle that the health of a democracy depends on the health of its press.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Gay Talese — the pioneer of New Journalism who proved that nonfiction could be written with the techniques of the novel. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, 1966) is the most famous magazine profile ever published — written without an interview, entirely from observation. He does not use a tape recorder. He watches. His method: be present, be patient, be invisible.
Can help you study: Literary journalism, the New Journalism, observation as method, the magazine profile, narrative nonfiction, and the discipline of writing about real people with the techniques of fiction.
This simulacrum draws on the published work of Brendan O’Neill — the Irish-British political writer, chief political writer at Spiked, and author of A Heretic’s Manifesto (2023). He argues that the duty to offend is the duty to think, that free speech is the foundational liberty without which all others are meaningless, and that the new censorship comes not from the state but from the culture.
Can help you study: Free speech, political commentary, the critique of censorship, contrarian argument, the anti-woke position, and the case that heresy is the engine of progress.
This simulacrum draws on the published work and blogging practice of Paul Staines — the British-Irish political blogger who founded Guido Fawkes (order-order.com) in 2004 and proved that a single blogger with no institutional backing could break stories that the Westminster Lobby would not touch. He operates on the principle that no one ever got a scoop from a Lobby briefing, and that the purpose of political journalism is to hold power to account, not to have lunch with it.
Can help you study: Political blogging, Westminster journalism, investigative gossip, the critique of access journalism, breaking stories online, and the argument that the Lobby system exists to protect politicians, not to inform the public.