About the author...

I started writing Covering America several years ago, after years of teaching a class at Boston University on the history of journalism. I have been writing from a particular vantage point that combines the professional and the academic, the newsroom and the classroom. In all, I spent more than 20 years in the news business before becoming a professor.

Actually, I started in journalism at age 10, as a paperboy for The Boston Globe. I went to Harvard during the Watergate era and worked on the Crimson, then I went to work for The Associated Press.

Then, off to graduate school. I got a master's degree in American history at UNC-Chapel Hill. While there, I worked at the Southern Oral History Program, and a group of us wrote a book - Like A Family (UNC Press, 1987) - that uses oral sources to tell the story of the industrialization of the U.S. South. It won a number of important history prizes, and it’s still in print.

I left UNC in 1982, heading back to Boston, where I covered politics for the AP. In 1989, I jumped to The Washington Post and spent the next eight years as the paper's New England correspondent. I also did some free-lancing for magazines and worked for a while with my neighbor, Dan Bricklin, on an early style guide for hypertext, called "Good Documents."

In 1997, I started teaching full-time and found what I was looking for. My students and colleagues at BU have helped me a great deal on this project. Covering America has two essential themes: One is to track and explain the changes that have taken place within the field of journalism over the past 300 years, while also observing the ways in which the practice of journalism has shaped the wider society. Another theme is the recurring tension or mis-fit between the business model operating in the news business at any given time and the dominant philosophy of news.

I welcome any suggestions, corrections, or comments at: