Overview

Winner of the Goldsmith Prize, the Tankard Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association's Book of the Year, John Maxwell Hamilton's Journalism's Roving Eye has quickly become the definitive history of American foreign reporting. This edition includes a new preface and updated text that reflects the most current developments in foreign reporting. Beginning with the colonial era, the book focuses on underlying factors- such as technology and public opinion- as well as a cavalcade of personalities who bring the narrative to life in arresting detail, making this an indispensable resource for anyone eager to understand the evolution of foreign newsgathering.

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9780807143599

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Reviews

Journalism's Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton... spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. The book, in its scope, detail, and sheer mastery, is a major achievement. -- James Boylan, Columbia Journalism Review Not just for journalism hounds, Journalism's Roving Eye ladles from the last two and a half centuries a detailed history of American reporting from abroad. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine -- the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet -- to produce an authoritative book. There is nothing like it in the library. -- Slate Magazine Journalism's Roving Eye is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering--foreign correspondence--that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now. -- Foreign Affairs Journalism's Roving Eye is a remarkable achievement and deserves to be ranked as the definitive history of American news coverage of the rest of the world. [It] should remind people of the richness of foreign reporting and the value of such journalism in an era where we are all citizens of the world. -- Dallas Morning News This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence. -- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

Journalism's Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton . . . spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. The book, in its scope, detail, and sheer mastery, is a major achievement.--James Boylan Columbia Journalism Review Not just for journalism hounds, Journalism's Roving Eye ladles from the last two and a half centuries a detailed history of American reporting from abroad. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine--the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet--to produce an authoritative book. There is nothing like it in the library. [Best Books of 2009]--Slate Journalism's Roving Eye is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering--foreign correspondence--that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now.--Foreign Affairs

Journalism's Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton... spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. The book, in its scope, detail, and sheer mastery, is a major achievement. -- James Boylan, Columbia Journalism Review Not just for journalism hounds, Journalism's Roving Eye ladles from the last two and a half centuries a detailed history of American reporting from abroad. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine -- the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet -- to produce an authoritative book. There is nothing like it in the library. -- Slate Magazine Journalism's Roving Eye is a prodigious account of a specific form of newsgathering--foreign correspondence--that has long been buffeted by pressures to cut costs and waning public interest in what happens abroad, even before the more recent challenges posed by the Internet. Journalism has a raffish and colorful past, but the annals of foreign reporting are particularly suited to the storytelling that Hamilton provides. His book is an expansive narrative that also underscores serious questions about what is happening now. -- Foreign Affairs Journalism's Roving Eye is a remarkable achievement and deserves to be ranked as the definitive history of American news coverage of the rest of the world. [It] should remind people of the richness of foreign reporting and the value of such journalism in an era where we are all citizens of the world. -- Dallas Morning News This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence. -- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

Author Information

John Maxwell Hamilton, the Hopkins P. Breazeale Foundation Professor of Journalism at Louisiana State University, began his journalism career at the Milwaukee Journal and reported from abroad for the Christian Science Monitor and ABC Radio. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and many other newspapers and magazines. He was a longtime commentator on public radio's Marketplace. Hamilton served in the Agency for International Development during the Carter administration and on the staffs of the House of Representative's Foreign Affairs Committee and the World Bank. He has been a fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, and was a visiting professor for two years at the Washington Program of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Hamilton is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the board of directors of the International Center for Journalists. He is the author or coauthor of five other books, as well as editor of the LSU Press book series, From Our Own Correspondent. He was the founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

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