E-book titled Justice in Plain Sight: How a Small-Town Newspaper and Its Unlikely Lawyer Opened America's Courtrooms (2019) - synopsis: Justice in Plain Sight is the story of a hometown newspaper in Riverside, California, that set out to do its job: tell readers about shocking crimes in their own backyard. But when judges slammed the courtroom door on the public, including the press, it became impossible to tell the whole story. Pinning its hopes on business lawyer Jim Ward, the newspaper took two cases to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s. The newspaper won both cases and established First Amendment rights that significantly broadened public access to the judicial system. Justice in Plain Sight is a unique story that, for the first time, details two improbable journeys to the Supreme Court in which the stakes were as high as they could possibly be (and still are): the public’s trust in its own government.
E-book titled Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women's Business (2016) - synopsis: Working against critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers. They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets, and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space within a male-dominated workplace. As the periodical market burgeoned, these pioneering, courageous women exemplified how narrative sympathy opened female space within the “hard news” city room of America’s largest newspapers.