Blog Posts by Subject: News Media, Journalism and Publishing

This post will decipher the Library's record of the NYT and demonstrate how to use the NYT to conduct other newspaper research.

On Thursday, May 30, 2013, I was lucky enough to take a trip to the annual Book Expo America. This year, it was held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It will be in New York City for the next two years; after that, I believe that it will be in Chicago.

I fell in love with Book Expo America when I first attended the conference in 2012 at the suggestion of my supervisor. This event is different than most of the other conferences in the New York City area that I have attended, which 

"I think it's a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power." Ai Weiwei, "Ai Weiwei 'Does Not Feel Powerful'"BBC, October 13, 2011.

Ai Weiwei was commenting on being named the most powerful person in the art world in 2011 by ArtReview magazine after 

Fact: Hardly a day goes by without some discussion in the press about "drones" — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS).

Fact: Despite public awareness of U.S. drone programs, very little hard information has been offered to the public.

Fact: Portions of the legal and public policy justifications for implementing U.S. drone programs, as well as other documentation and information about these programs, have been only reluctantly provided to the public.

Fact: You have an opportunity to learn more about many of these and other information issues 

Of what concern are drones to librarians and other information professionals? I mean those drones, scions of the remote-control model airplanes of a more innocent age — now grown up and more sinister and troublesome than anyone might have predicted in their youth (or might they?)

The use of drones in the area of national security, not to mention law enforcement generally, has emerged as a hot topic recently. The topic isn't new of course. Nevertheless, the discussion has begun to heat up, with 

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is intended for mature readers onlyRecognize the icon above? Perhaps you may not realize this but Playboy the publication, historically speaking, has been a leading magazine devoted to freedom of expression and human rights (to a certain extent). Founded in 1953 in Chicago by Hugh Hefner, Playboy has often been perceived as a "taboo" 

Harriet Walden may not be a household name. But for forty years she was, as former New Yorker magazine fiction editor William Maxwell wrote in a letter bemoaning her retirement, "the pin that [kept] the wheel attached to the axle" in her role as secretary and office manager at the New Yorker magazine.

Walden joined the New Yorker in 1944, as secretary to the magazine's infamous editor and founder, Harold Ross. She was replacing her 

Extraction:  ... 3. a. The action or process of obtaining (the constituent elements, juices, etc.) from any substance by heat, pressure, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary - available online with a NYPL library card.)

Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale, by Tom 

DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Reading Room

In the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, there is a reading room with high wooden carved ceiling called the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Reading Room. You may have seen the historical room decorated with large murals reflecting major publishers of periodicals, newspapers and books at the turn of the century by

Crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Politics. Lobbying. Old boys. Influence.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll.

It may shock the gentle reader to learn that petroleum is power. Well, maybe not. Look around — at the street, at houses and businesses. Without oil we'd stop, and maybe freeze (but we'd have light, since oil is rarely used for electricity 

I have been curious about independent publishing since I have heard other panelists in the Children's Literary Salons talking about it, so I was thrilled to be able to experience a Kid Lit Salon solely on that topic on December 8, 2012 in the South Court Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Betsy Bird, Youth Materials Specialist at NYPL, mentioned that NYPL has recently posted Children's Books 2012: 100 Titles for 

July dawn. A passerby finds a scavenger lying in the mud by the Mumbai airport road. Crying for help — leg mashed and bloody — probably hit by a car. "Thousands of people passed this way every morning." ... "At 2:30 p.m., a Shiv Sena man made a call to a friend in the Sahar Police Station about a corpse that was disturbing small children."

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, 

Run to failure: meaning operate your equipment (business) all out, don't bother to care for and maintain it (much less inspect it) properly — until everything has been pushed beyond its limits. To add insult to injury, ignore, and even penalize, your front-line people when they alert you to, or object to, the deliberate neglect.

Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, by Abrahm Lustgarten

It's been well over two years since the BP oil exploration 

New Yorkers experienced two major life events in the past few weeks: a superstorm and a hotly contested presidential election. Those two events have more in common than you might think. They both stressed us out. They both left us blurry with some of the details... what happened and what didn't, what was said and what was only hearsay. What was underreported and what was blown way out of proportion.

With social media 

This year the musical Newsies got nominated for eight Tony Awards. The popularity of the Disney Broadway show based on the Disney film has led many of our younger patrons to ask about the newsboys and the strike they led in 1899 on which the film and play are based.

If you are interested in learning more about the strike of 1899 (there were other strikes before and after) simply do 

For 25 years the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism has highlighted in-depth, investigative reporting. It was established in 1987, through a gift from Joseph Bernstein to the NYPL, in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein (now Helen Bernstein Fealy). The award plays an important role in safeguarding the first amendment and raising public awareness about significant world events and important issues. The 2012 finalists have all garnered acclaim this past year for stories that criss cross 

In this week's installment of I Love Reading I want to talk about the kind of reading that is not books, not news, not blogs, but something in between. It demands a little bit more of your attention span than Twitter, but maybe not as much as your book group's latest pick. It can be from last week or fifteen years ago, and still be relevant to today. It can be a true tale of crime and punishment, an

As previously posted, on March 15, SIBL will celebrate Freedom of Information Day (FOI Day) with speaker Robert Weissman from the organization Public Citizen. FOI Day has been the main focus of our annual efforts to highlight the public's right to know. But it need not be NYPL's only activity, and so I offer a suggestion: let's use this as an opportunity to move from one day to an entire week — Sunshine Week at NYPL!

I am pleased to announce our upcoming Freedom of Information Day celebration at the Science, Industry and Business Library. It will be held on Thursday, March 15, 2012 from 10:30 a.m. to noon in Healy Hall (on the lower level), and will feature as guest presenter Robert Weissman, president of the public advocacy organization Public Citizen. This event is free and open to the public. No reservations are required.

A regular annual event here at SIBL, Freedom of Information Day was recognized by a