In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am finished reading:
Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America by Dorothy Butler Gilliam- Most of my week consisted of finishing this wonderful biography of the first Black woman writer at The Washington Post in order to do a profile of Ms. Butler Gilliam for Black Kos, Tuesday’s Chile.
Leaving aside the wonderful inspiring nature of the biography, itself, there are four appendices that provide timelines and lists of Black newspapers and the first Black columnists that worked with more “mainstream” newspapers; in short, Trailblazer is also an invaluable valuable resource for my Black Kos project on Black journalism and Black journalists.
Though I loved my years at The Washington Post, I recognized its flaws. It was a difficult place to work because of its size, its heroic reputation after the Watergate disclosures, creative tension, and the inherent nature of news gathering— things move quickly. Not everyone had the personality to react quickly...Black reporters were held to a double standard— needing to be “twice as good to go half as far.” They often felt the media expected them to become white reporters with a black face, and they didn’t want to do that. Blacks wanted to work among white reporters as themselves.
I am reading:
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1955 by Patricia Highsmith and Anna von Planta- I am still trying to make up my mind about the major editorial decision with this project: the “diaries” and “notebooks” were written separately and Highsmith probably intended for them to be published separately and standing alone from one another; I think that I am beginning to see why.
But...publishing them as a single volume (for now, more volumes to come, of course) is also defensible, even though the “diaries” don’t have all that much to do with the “notebooks”...to this point, anyway.
8/23/41
A very small number of people are conscious of their individuality and live always to develop it and excel. The vast majority try desperately hard to show, in everyway, that they are exactly like everyone else. This gives them a kind of security and self-assurance and contentment.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 by William L. Shirer
Hangman’s Holiday by Dorothy Sayers