Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting Paperback - 2011

Winner of the AEJMC Tankard Book Award and the American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award

"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, Best Books of 2009

"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

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, reflecting 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.

John Maxwell Hamilton, the Hopkins P. Breazeale Foundation Professor of Journalism, was the founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and currently is the university's executive vice chancellor and provost.

He 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, and he was a longtime commentator on public radio's Marketplace. Hamilton is the author or coauthor of five other books and editor of the LSU Press book series "From Our Own Correspondent."