Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life

by Margaret Sullivan

Overview

"Sullivan remains the critic American journalism requires, a veteran practitioner with street cred, still in touch with the ‘unaccountable joy’ of reporting and writing that continues to draw talented young people to the field.” —Steve Coll, The New York Times Book Review

Margaret Sullivan began her career at the Buffalo News, where she rose from summer intern to editor in chief. In Newsroom Confidential she chronicles her years in the trenches battling sexism and throwing elbows in a highly competitive newsroom. In 2012, Sullivan was appointed the public editor of The New York Times, the first woman to hold that important role. She was in the unique position of acting on behalf of readers to weigh the actions and reporting of the paper's staff, parsing potential lapses in judgment, unethical practices, and thorny journalistic issues. Sullivan recounts how she navigated the paper’s controversies, from Hillary Clinton's emails to Elon Musk's accusations of unfairness to the need for greater diversity in the newsroom. In 2016, having served the longest tenure of any public editor, Sullivan left for the Washington Post, where she had a front-row seat to the rise of Donald Trump in American media and politics.

With her celebrated mixture of charm, sharp-eyed observation, and nuanced criticism, Sullivan takes us behind the scenes of the nation's most influential news outlets to explore how Americans lost trust in the news and what it will take to regain it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250906007
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/05/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,073,144
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

MARGARET SULLIVAN is an award-winning media critic and a groundbreaking journalist. She was the first woman appointed as public editor of the New York Times and went on to the Washington Post as media columnist. She started her career as a summer intern at her hometown Buffalo News and rose to be that paper's first woman editor-in-chief. Find her on Twitter!

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Prologue 1

1 The Long Arm of Watergate 7

2 Little Miss Lifestyles Breaks Out 23

3 Pulling Up Roots 44

4 "Welcome to the Fishbowl" 56

5 But Her Emails … 76

6 Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet 98

7 Small Victories 118

8 Moving On 132

9 The Joys of Style 143

10 "Venomous Serpent" 159

11 "Fake News," You Say? 176

12 Objectivity Wars and the "Woke" Newsroom 196

13 How to Clean Up the Mess We're In 226

14 About Those Lessons 245

15 Sweeney (and Other Legends), Reconsidered 253

Acknowledgments 271

Editorial Reviews

“An opinionated but fair and accessible tour of the big debates roiling the “reality-based press,” as she calls mainstream newsrooms…. Sullivan remains the critic American journalism requires, a veteran practitioner with street cred, still in touch with the ‘unaccountable joy’ of reporting and writing that continues to draw talented young people to the field.”—Steve Coll, The New York Times Book Review

“If Sullivan started out intending to write a memoir, she ended up with a manifesto. This is a book about the role of the press in a democracy that’s in grave jeopardy.”—Kathy Kiely, The Washington Post

“Dogged, thoughtful, and unafraid”—The New Republic

“A beguiling memoir.”—Charles Kaiser, The Guardian

“Newsroom Confidential might have been just another journalist’s rehash of stories–literally old news–except that the story in front of Sullivan was the struggle of the U.S. press to save itself and, maybe along with it, American democracy.”—Karl Vick, Time

“The great newswoman takes a clear-eyed look at her own storied career and the troubled state of her much-loved profession.”—People

“It's rare that a respected critic writes a dishy, fun book that also packs an important message, but when she does, it's a must-read.”—Molly Jong-Fast, The Atlantic

“Margaret Sullivan's perspective on our increasingly cacophonous media ecosystem is invaluable. By detailing her personal and professional experiences in this wise and engaging memoir, she pulls the curtain back to reveal how journalism really works and the very human decisions behind it.”—Katie Couric

From the Publisher

06/13/2022

Sullivan, a columnist for the Washington Post and a former New York Times public editor, recounts in this sincere if befuddled work her hard-won career in journalism. From her internship at the “tiny” Niagara Gazette in the 1970s to her desk at the Times, Sullivan surveys the travails and triumphs of being a woman in the industry, detailing the difficulties of being an editor for one of the nation’s most read papers—including “physical proximity to the journalists whose work I was criticizing”—and her challenging transition into the role of Style writer at the Washington Post, where she regularly faces misogynistic vitriol online. She also frankly contends with her own mistakes—including her team's coverage of a 2010 mass shooting in Buffalo where she included criminal profiles of the Black victims—and tracks her improvement when she wrote with “more empathy and insight” on the death of George Floyd in 2020. It’s this use of her writing about real-life devastation as a metric for personal improvement, however, that undermines Sullivan’s claim to a high ethical standard; and her criticisms—including her thoughts on Times journalist Dean Baquet’s “mishandling” of one journalist’s resignation after using the n-word—often fall flat. The insider’s view into American journalism is engrossing, but Sullivan’s blind spots, when it comes to her own blunders, are large. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the author's role in the coverage of a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., and the death of George Floyd.

Publishers Weekly

05/01/2022

Over her four-decade career, Sullivan moved from intern to editor in chief at the Buffalo News, became the first woman appointed public editor at the New York Times, and now serves as the Washington Post's media columnist. An insider's view of U.S. news reporting urging the restoration of public faith in the press. With a 125,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

Lisa Flanagan narrates journalist Margaret Sullivan’s memoir/manifesto authoritatively. Flanagan speaks in a direct, straightforward style and alters her timbre only when imitating male voices. She captures Sullivan’s spirited point of view—she’s enthralled with her calling and appalled at the state of the media—and gives this important audiobook the seriousness it merits. Sullivan is a journalist’s journalist. She was a longtime editor at the BUFFALO NEWS before becoming the first woman to serve as public editor at the NEW YORK TIMES. Following that she was the media critic at the WASHINGTON POST. Fearless at her craft, she has critiqued sacred cows like Bob Woodward and in her four years at the TIMES won a slew of fans for her candor. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

Lisa Flanagan narrates journalist Margaret Sullivan’s memoir/manifesto authoritatively. Flanagan speaks in a direct, straightforward style and alters her timbre only when imitating male voices. She captures Sullivan’s spirited point of view—she’s enthralled with her calling and appalled at the state of the media—and gives this important audiobook the seriousness it merits. Sullivan is a journalist’s journalist. She was a longtime editor at the BUFFALO NEWS before becoming the first woman to serve as public editor at the NEW YORK TIMES. Following that she was the media critic at the WASHINGTON POST. Fearless at her craft, she has critiqued sacred cows like Bob Woodward and in her four years at the TIMES won a slew of fans for her candor. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2022 - AudioFile

2022-09-07
A veteran journalist recounts her life in the newsroom while prescribing cures for the media’s current woes.

“If one side claims it’s raining outside, and the other side claims the sun is shining, it’s not journalists’ job to quote both equally; it’s their job to walk outside, look at the sky, and report the truth.” So writes Sullivan, the media columnist for the Washington Post, who has been covering various beats since being lured into journalism by the glamour portrayed in the film version of All the President’s Men. The author found little glamour in her work at the Buffalo News, where she wrote about poverty, pollution, and political malfeasance and learned a lesson or two about how to overcome White privilege in a largely Black city. She joined the New York Times in the role of public editor, in which she acted as a post facto umpire on published pieces. The job, of short tenure by design so that the editor didn’t become part of the establishment, was full of fights. One obituary celebrated the domestic attributes of a subject in its lede before revealing that she was a distinguished scientist; concludes Sullivan, to the anger of the obituary writer, “the glories of her beef stroganoff should have been little more than a footnote.” Small potatoes next to the biggest challenge she would face, though, when she moved to the Post and began covering Donald Trump’s countless distortions and lies, by which, thanks to his vengeful supporters, she “continually felt…irrational anger like an unending blast of liquid poison from an industrial-strength hose.” The author, whose liberal perspective is occasionally heavy-handed, acknowledges that Trump helped change journalism: It need not be adversarial, she holds, but it will necessarily be that way if it tells the truth about liars, and objectivity is a less-desirable standard than truth in the face of endless mendacity.

A welcome memoir of time in the reportorial trenches.

Kirkus Reviews