Times Union editor-at-large Harry Rosenfeld has won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award, or IPPY, for his book, "From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman."
It is the latest in a recent string of honors for Rosenfeld, 84, of Albany, the son of a Polish-born Jewish furrier. Rosenfeld grew up in Berlin and escaped Nazi Germany as a young boy along with his parents and older sister, and emigrated to America in 1939.
The book details Rosenfeld's formative years in the Bronx as a German refugee, his drive to learn English and landing his first job in newspapers as a teenaged shipping clerk at the New York Herald Tribune, where he eventually rose up the editing ranks.
Rosenfeld also describes in depth his role as Metro Editor of the Washington Post during its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal led by the dogged work of Rosenfeld's reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
More from Paul Grondahl in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Newspaperman-s-memoir-wins-award-5504423.php
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Harry Rosenfeld's Memoir Wins Award
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Looking back, and ahead, at journalism
Paul Grondahl talks about Bill Kennedy's appearance at the 40th anniversary celebration of UAlbany Journalism Program founder Bill Rowley last week:
Bill Kennedy was talking last week about his late, great friend Bill Rowley founding the University at Albany journalism program in 1973 — he was Rowley's first hire — and as the newspaperman-turned-novelist assessed the current state of journalism, his mood turned dark.
"Newsweek is gone. Time magazine is just a tattered print unit of Time Warner Cable," he said. "All the TV networks seem to have slid into the swamp of celebrity. The Times seems to be surviving, but I don't know how small papers can survive."
His talk was the centerpiece of what was billed as a 40th anniversary celebration, but as a truth-teller addressing an auditorium of professional skeptics and aspiring cynics, his forecast was stormy with a chance of extinction.
Kennedy quoted the prophecy of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, new owner of the Washington Post, who once said that newspapers as we know them will be gone in 20 years. "That does not seem unreasonable to me," Kennedy added.
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Looking-back-and-ahead-at-journalism-4898618.php
Picture: UAlbany undergraduate intern Michelle Checchi, a junior journalism major at UAlbany.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Tweeting Lagos Nigeria
Inventing a new form of poetry, Teju Cole, who visits 2/10, continues to tweet his own versions of breaking headlines from Nigerian newspapers:
"The Lagos State Secretariat in Alausa is full of filthy creatures gorging themselves. But also, it has been invaded by rats."
"Angry at Olumide, of Igando, for not becoming a pastor, the Holy Spirit cursed him with kleptomania, with a sub-specialty in cars."
"While he was fetching firewood in Bauchi, persons unknown removed from Umar’s face both his eyes. He is understandably upset"
More tweets.
Picture: Lagos, Nigeria.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Margaret Fuller Has Her Own Facebook Page
Feminist firebrand Margaret Fuller, who drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850, has her own Facebook fan page.
John Matteson, who visits the Institute 3/22, has been featured prominently on the page in recent weeks with the publication of his new biography, The Lives of Margaret Fuller.
Also featured are quotes from Fuller's correspondence and her newspaper columns in the New York Daily Tribune, such as this 1845 assessment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (known locally for his evocation of the Normanskill valley in his poem, "Hiawatha"):
"We must confess a coolness toward Mr. Longfellow, in consequence of the exaggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows..."
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Headline Haiku
Teju Cole, who visits Friday, 2/10, has taken to tweeting headlines and stories from the Nigerian newspapers, reformulated as a kind of poetry. Another tweeter-blogger, based in Monrovia, Liberia, has categorized them as "totally brilliant and unique" Haiku remixes:
"In Calabar South, Inyang, refilling a kerosene lantern while its wick was lit, sent himself and two others into final darkness."
"The man whom the concerned citizens of Port Harcourt nearly lynched for turning a boy into a goat is now being interrogated by police."
“'Dr Collins Okafor,' not a doctor at all, worked at the General Hospital in Calabar for only a year before he was found out."
More on the Moved to Monrovia blog.