Letters to a Young Journalist

February 20, 2006
Former New York Times
reporter Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism; you'd expect this to be a book of practical tips and advice for students of the craft. It is not. Instead, Freedman has much to say about journalistic integrity, plain language and honest legwork, castigating recent malefactors like Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Dan Rather, and even scolding Janet Malcolm for her famous indictment of the journalist as "confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." The book is partly a memoir, looking back on the author's career, partly a lament over the state of today's journalism, a bastion of "chic misanthropy" or sheeplike conformism; and partly a heads-up to youth—he despises undergraduate journalism classes, counseling wannabes to choose almost any other major in favor of practical experience on the school newspaper. Not until halfway along or so does Freedman offer specific advice. Not a journalism primer, this could be an inspirational tract alongside one.