There is now a new ranking from the university’s Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism that examines the past decade, from 2010 to 2019, and aims to “honor some really great work that has already stood the test of time. time, ”according to project organizer, journalism professor Mitchell Stephens.
It is “the most valuable type of journalism,” he said, “because it changes the way we think and see the world”. The group looked at non-fictional books, daily reports, documentaries, podcasts and more.
So here is the ranking list, which will be officially announced tonight in an online celebration for authors:
Judges, 14 external judges and 24 NYU faculty members, called it “the most powerful essay of its time.” Published in 2014, “it has so influenced the public conversation that it has become an essential subject of the presidential debate.” (Coates is a writer in residence at NYU; he did not participate in the judgment.)
The judges called this 2010 book “a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers and hard-working journalists.” . . . essential reading to understand America.
Based on the duo’s groundbreaking #MeToo report for the New York Times in 2017, it’s a “perfect primer on how to take a last-minute hot button-hunting story and study it with the best and most honorable journalist. practices.”
The New York writer’s moving portrait of a place and its people, published in 2012, is “incredibly well written and well reported,” a judge said.
The 2010 book by the civil rights lawyer, now a columnist for the New York Times, “shows how the war on drugs, and its resulting policies and incarceration processes, operate against people of color.” One judge called it “crucial as a transformative engine of crime in our ‘justice’ system.”
The veteran journalist “essentially took over a cold case,” the judges note, and without her dogged reporting, Epstein’s crimes and prosecutors’ dereliction could have escaped. A judge astutely observed that Brown did this “in the midst of the economic collapse of a major regional newspaper.”
This narrative medical journalism, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, written by a New York Times correspondent who is also a doctor, is “compelling, compassionate and disturbing.” The 2013 book expands on its reporting in The Times based on the 2005 New Orleans disaster.
These essays, published in 2019, together sparked a cultural war in America, as they explore the beginning of American slavery. The project, the judges said, “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The Judges: “By contacting hundreds of charities – interactions recorded on what has become a well-known legal stamp – Fahrenthold [in 2016] proved that Trump had never given what he claimed to have given or much at all, despite, in one case, sitting on the stage as if he had.
The judges called it “the definitive journalistic exploration and documentation of the fatal police shootings in America.” In the wake of the infamous police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, this ambitious effort “set a new standard for real-time data journalism and was a vital resource during the ‘a national debate that still rages on.
For those who might want to challenge those rankings – in the great tradition of music fans outraged by Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 best albums of all time – they can find fodder in the biggest list of over 120. nominees. . (“What ?! Where is Jane Mayer’s presentation on Fox News in the New Yorker? What about” Into the Dark, “the investigative podcast that helped free a formerly detained Mississippi man in the death row? “) Or maybe they have other ideas.
Whether you agree with the list, it might cause you to stop and think about some of the essential reporting that you are whistling about right now as you scroll through the endless news through the nights. Will any part last and gain the status of classic journalism? Ed Yong’s work this year on the Atlantic coronavirus pandemic comes to mind as a possibility. The same goes for the New York Times reports on Trump’s tax returns.
But it’s still so early in this wildly tumultuous decade. It will certainly be very different from the outlook for 2030.
READ MORE by Margaret Sullivan:
