The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O’Shea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If you lived within the orbit of Tribune Co. or the L.A. Times within the last decade, this book will be interesting to you. It’s a quick read with a number of fine anecdotes. That means it’s mostly inside baseball, so if you’re looking for great insights into the fate of journalism in the (sadly likely) post-newspaper age, you’ll want to look elsewhere. O’Shea throws in a handful of mea culpas but little reflection on how the narrow hard-news definition of journalism he espouses might be a contributor to its decline right along with the Internet and the corporate barbarians who are on the receiving end of his hand-wringing.