“This memoir stands out for a particularly gripping kind of sentience in the storytelling,” said Amy Aronson, professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize. “Ferguson knows how and when to report the cruel, jagged facts of conflict and when to insert herself into the experience of confronting them, humanizing the stakes, bringing us in.”

The prize honors the late Ann M. Sperber, who wrote Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press. The $1,000 award was established through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette Sperber to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on journalism and media. Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies has presented the award annually since 1999.

Jane Ferguson is an international correspondent for PBS Newshour and a contributor to The New Yorker who has reported from nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. As a journalist, she lived in Beirut and other cities in the Middle East for 14 years, reporting from the heart of conflicts in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Sudan, and Gaza. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into civil war during the Arab Spring. She was smuggled into rebel-held Syria as revolution became all-out war, traveling alone to film and document the Assad regime’s crackdown on its own people. 

Ferguson traveled to South Sudan in 2017 to cover the complicated conflict and humanitarian disaster engulfing the country, reporting on the widespread famine and horrific war crimes that were causing droves of people to flee. When the Taliban claimed Kabul, Afghanistan in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport to cover the United States’ withdrawal from the country.

As a Protestant who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1980s and 1990s, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence. Journalism became a calling that could provide a small measure of justice. She previously received the prestigious George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award. 

Ferguson joins a storied list of previous Sperber Prize winners, including Robert Caro, Charles M. Blow, and Seymour M. Hersh. 

The award ceremony is Nov. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus at 6:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

They are: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives: America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists (MIT Press, 2023); Santi Elijah Holley’s An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created (Mariner, 2024); Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir (Mariner, 2023); Alan Philps’, The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War (Pegasus Books, 2023); and Ari Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (HarperOne, 2024). 

Honoring a Storied Biographer

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university.

Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional. It has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Professor of Communication and Media Studies Amy Aronson, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said the five finalists emerged from a pool of 48 titles considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive a $1,000 prize and be invited to keynote a public award ceremony held at Fordham’s Manhattan campus on November 11. The 6 p.m. event is free and open to the public.

“Our finalists take readers to profound encounters in less-traveled corners of the U.S. and the world,” Aronson said. 

“They take us behind the front lines in dangerous conflict zones, reveal hidden stories of journalistic risk-taking, and into carefully researched biographies of public visionaries.  All show us the vital importance of journalists and media voices in the world today.” 

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. The most recent winner was The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmsted. 

The Finalists

LaFollette’s Writing for Their Lives profiles the first generation of women reporters who worked for Science Service, the first news organization in the country dedicated entirely to scientific journalism.  LaFollette, author of Science on American Television, reveals that when the Service began in 1921, very few journalism organizations covered science at all, and those that did treated the subject cavalierly, putting any science hobbyist already on staff onto the rare stories deemed important enough to cover. They were all male hobbyists, of course. LaFollette explores how an aspiring and ambitious group of women writers confronted pervasive sexism and gender discrimination to create meaningful careers for themselves while developing a new and increasingly crucial journalistic beat.

Tupac Shakur, the late rapper who was killed in 1996 at the age of 25, was the “spark” for Holley’s An Amerikan Family, which explores the story of the Shakur family and their work for Black liberation in America. Some may be familiar with the rapper’s mother, Assata Shakur, the activist and writer for the Black Panther Party newsletter, living for three decades in Cuban exile, and many have come to know at least something about the iconic Tupac, her son. But Holley, a writer published in the Atlantic, New Republic, Economist, Guardian, and Washington Post, reveals that the branches of the Shakur family tree spread widely and ran deep into the underground of the civil rights struggle. The book is both a family genealogy and a larger story of one community’s struggle for racial justice, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in that quest. 

Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment is the memoir of a journalist who has covered nearly every war and humanitarian crisis of our time. A correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Ferguson was in Yemen for the Arab Spring. She managed to report from rebel-held Syria during its civil war despite the ban on foreign journalists. She was one of the last reporters to remain in Afghanistan when the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021. Born and raised a Protestant in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence or grave suffering. Her debut book chronicles the story of a remarkable woman coming into her own in the world’s most perilous and devastating circumstances as she dares to tell the hardest stories on earth as an act of justice.

Philps’ The Red Hotel takes readers inside the experiences of a cadre of American, British, and Australian journalists who reported from Moscow when Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941. They were allowed to stay and report on the war at the Eastern front – as long as their stories were flattering to the Stalin regime. To help ensure this impossibly good press, they were billeted at the luxurious Metropol Hotel and supplied with bottomless vessels of vodka, lavish banquets, and young Russian secretaries and translators who were spies and sometimes prostitutes. Philps, who served as Moscow correspondent for Reuters and foreign editor of the Telegraph, reveals that while many of the translators conveyed Kremlin disinformation, some were dissidents who whispered to reporters about the truth of Soviet life and Stalin’s lies. 

Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World takes readers around the globe to reveal the stories behind the sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking narratives he reports to his listeners. The co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, this book, his first, takes readers from Turkey to Ukraine to Indonesia to Northern Iraq; from drag shows in Florida to the corridors of power in Washington, DC; from war-torn locales in the Middle East and Africa as he follows the paths of refugees fleeing conflict to big cities and small towns.  The result is a memoir-in-essays that is a love letter to journalism and a look at scores of individuals who not only refuse to break but also manage to confront life’s ugliness with beauty, meet horror with humor, and smile in the face of whatever might come next.  

For additional information, questions, or press inquiries, please contact Amy Aronson at [email protected].

Published by Yale University Press, The Newspaper Axis presents an eye-opening look into how the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat as Adolf Hitler’s power began to rise in pre-World War II Germany. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent.

The Newspaper Axis shows how these media titans worked in concert—including sharing editorial pieces and coordinating their responses to events—to influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, how they echoed fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda, and how they weakened and delayed both Britain’s and America’s response to Nazi aggression.

Fordham Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, director of the Sperber Prize, said that Olmsted wrote a highly important work, making it the jury’s choice among the excellent works that were finalists for the 2023 Sperber Prize. “The Newspaper Axis makes an important contribution to both journalism history and our understanding of the roots of World War II,” Knobel said. “It was a revelation to learn how these six press barons were on the wrong side of history when it came to Hitler. Previous historians had simply never put all the pieces together to show how these newspaper owners were interacting with each other to downplay the Nazi threat. The archival research that went into this book is impressive.”

Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, who studies the cultural and political history of the United States since World War I. Her first book, Challenging the Secret Government (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), examined the congressional and journalistic investigations of the CIA and FBI after Watergate. Her second book, Red Spy Queen (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), analyzed the origins and significance of the spy scare of the 1940s. Her third book, Real Enemies (Oxford University Press, 2009), explored the dynamic relationship between real government conspiracies and anti-government conspiracy theories. Her fourth work, Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (The New Press, 2015), analyzed the conservative reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Newspaper Axis is her fifth book. Professor Olmsted also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and has published journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence, and anticommunism. Olmsted received doctoral and master’s degrees from the University of California at Davis and a BA with honors and distinction in History from Stanford University.

The Newspaper Axis was one of the four works chosen as the finalists for the 2023 Sperber Prize. More than 50 works with 2022 copyrights were considered. The other finalists for this year’s prize were Deborah Cohen’s Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War (Random House), Mary Llewellyn McNeil’s Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll (Whaler Books), and Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future (HarperCollins).

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  Last year, the winner was Elizabeth Becker, for her biography of three female journalists working during the Vietnam conflict, You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War.

In addition to its annual awards ceremony, the Sperber Prize also hosts a podcast, which features authors whose works were considered for the prize. Seasons One and Two of the podcast are now available on your favorite podcast platform or via RSS.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. With questions, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said almost 50 books with 2022 copyrights were considered for the award. “We agonized over the choice of finalists, as so many of the books published in 2022 were worthy of recognition,” she explained. “The finalist books are simply extraordinary. The three biographies all involve years of research, with the authors examining in some cases dozens of archives for original material. And the one memoir reads like a piece of history. These are all important and worthy works.”

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

The four finalists, in alphabetical order:

Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War (Random House). Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the story of journalists John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, chronicling how empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered. And as fighting engulfed the globe in the 1930s and 40s, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Cohen, the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University, brings these journalists to life and captures how global upheaval felt up close.

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll (Whaler Books). A United Press correspondent in Europe before and during World War II, Carroll was deputy director of the U.S. Office of War Information–charged with countering misinformation coming out of Germany–editor of the Washington Bureau of The New York Times, and finally editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. In a career that spanned 45 years, he embodied the gold standard of journalism, mentoring a generation of reporters, editors, and publishers. His story, captured by McNeil, a former student of Carroll’s, is especially relevant today as the world faces the war in Ukraine and continued attacks on the truth. What the West failed to understand, Carroll wrote more than 80 years ago, was the power of Hitler’s propaganda. Long-term exposure to such propaganda could cause a similar result elsewhere, warned Carroll: “[T]he Hitler legend would bear watching.”

Kathryn S. Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler (Yale University Press) As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent. Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis.

Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (HarperCollins) After working as a reporter for CNN, Maria Ressa transformed news coverage in her homeland, the Philippines, by creating the innovative online news organization Rappler. But by its fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine president. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is not only the story of Ressa and of Rappler, but shows how global social media companies are aiding and abetting disinformation. Maria Ressa remains the CEO and President of Rappler and is the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.

In 2022, the Sperber Prize was awarded to Elizabeth Becker for You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, published by PublicAffairs. The Sperber Prize jury also awarded former CBS and NBC News correspondent and professor Marvin Kalb with a certificate of appreciation in 2022 for his distinguished career in journalism and his two recent memoirs.

The winner of the 2023 Sperber Prize will be announced in September and awarded in November at a ceremony held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The second season of the Sperber Prize podcast will be launching shortly, including interviews with last year’s winner, Elizabeth Becker, and the authors of four books considered this year.  The first season in 2022 included interviews with the 2021 winners of the Sperber Prize, Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., for Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M.M. Blume for Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World; Marvin Kalb; former 60 Minutes Producer Ira Rosen, author of Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes; Lucy Rose Fischer on her book The Journalist: Life and Loss in America’s Secret War; and Dr. Alan Sperber, a member of the Sperber Prize jury and the brother of the late Ann M. Sperber. You can find the Sperber Prize podcast on your favorite podcast platform or via RSS.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. With questions, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

Becker, who covered Cambodia for the Washington Post, was awarded the Sperber Prize for her biography You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (Public Affairs, 2022). Kalb was awarded a certificate of achievement for his distinguished career in journalism and two memoirs: Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, (Brookings, 2022) and The Year I Was Peter the Great, (Brookings, 2018). 

The Sperber Prize, given annually for biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism, has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Breaking Out of the ‘Pink Ghetto’

Becker said she wanted to highlight how her subjects—Frances Fitzgerald, Kate Webb, and Catherine Leroy—broke the thickest glass ceiling in journalism by covering the Vietnam War, and in doing so, paved the way for women such as herself. They hailed from three different countries and came from radically different backgrounds, but all three paid their own way to get to Vietnam, and with little formal training, broke out of the “pink ghetto” of fashion, food, and family coverage that women journalists were confined to at the time.

Their outsider status was key, she said, to their ability to look beyond the battlefield, where their male counterparts had been trained to focus their coverage.

“So, you had ultimately with these three women an approach to war that included the whole country, the society, the people,” she said.

“Catherine Leroy spent a lot of time in the field, and she didn’t just take pictures of battle. She took a lot of pictures of soldiers waiting, soldiers being afraid, soldiers being in anguish when they went into battle, soldiers praying with the pastor, reading their mail.”

War Reporting Takes its Toll

Although they found some semblance of success and recognition—Webb won the George Polk award and Fitzgerald won the Pulitzer—Webb and Leroy both suffered from PTSD, and all three had messy personal lives that Becker did not shy away from in her writing. She noted that none of the women expressed regrets about going to Vietnam.

“One of the big gifts for me in writing this book was that I felt it was really good for me as a woman to be a part of all that that,” she said. 

“There was something that we could all be proud of, and I wanted to show that they not only broke the ceiling, but they changed journalism as well.”

Remembering Murrow and His Report on Buchenwald

Kalb, who appeared via Zoom, said he was touched to be honored with an award connected to famed journalist Edward R. Murrow. The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Murrow: His Life and Times (Fordham University Press, 1999). 

Kalb was the last person who Murrow hired at CBS News, and he said his favorite anecdote about Murrow was how in 1945, he visited the Buchenwald Concentration camp and saw for the first time what a death camp looked like. 

“Murrow was overwhelmed, and when he went back to his hotel room and to sit down to write his piece, he couldn’t do it. I don’t know whether it was two days or three, but it took him a while before he could absorb what he had seen, and be able to present it adequately to the American people on radio,” he said.

An Appreciation for Khrushchev

Today’s broadcast journalists would not be given the same opportunity, he said, and he noted that in writing the third memoir of his time in Russia, which he’s doing now. the benefit of time has given him a better appreciation for Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Khrushchev is a major focus of all three of his memoirs.

It’s hard to believe that Khrushchev was so foolish to believe he could move missiles and 50,000 Soviet troops into Cuba without the United States noticing—thus triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he said. But Kalb, who covered the crisis as a new reporter, has come around to respect him now, particularly compared to current Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“He was the one Communist leader who recognized that he had made a profound mistake, and he publicly apologized and pulled the missiles out of Cuba and saved the world from a nuclear confrontation,” he said.

“I take my hat off to him this many years later. I don’t know any other Communist leader, perhaps even non-Communist leader, who would have had the guts to do that.”

“I’m a year away from finishing this third memoir, and it is fun, it is exciting, and I thank all of the Sperber committee for thinking about me for this award.”

Published by PublicAffairs, Becker’s biography tells the long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war—American Frances FitzGerald, Australian Kate Webb, and French national Catherine Leroy. The three women arrived in Vietnam with strikingly different life experiences, but one common goal: to shed light on what was actually happening in the conflict in Southeast Asia. “At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine and Kate paid their own way to war, arrived without jobs, challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement and resentment of their male peers and found new ways to explain the war through the people who lived through it,” as Becker’s website explains.

Elizabeth Becker began her career as a war correspondent for the Washington Post in Cambodia. She has been the Senior Foreign Editor for National Public Radio and a New York Times correspondent covering national security, economics and foreign policy. She has won accolades from the Overseas Press Club, DuPont Columbia’s Awards and was part of the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of 9/11. She is previously the author of When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the classic history that has been in print for 35 years; and Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, an expose of the travel industry that was an Amazon book of the year. More about her work and career can be found at www.elizabethbecker.com.

Fordham Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, director of the Sperber Prize, said that Becker’s book stood out, even among the excellent works that were finalists for the 2022 Sperber Prize.  “Our jurors had effusive praise for the research and writing of You Don’t Belong Here,” she explained.  “The book shed light on the work of three brilliant journalists, two of whom are little known in the United States. Becker not only did a wonderful job of bringing their stories to life, but she also contextualized Fitzgerald, Webb and Leroy’s accomplishments in the larger history of the Vietnam conflict. More importantly, Elizabeth Becker also managed to humanize all those caught up in the war. The book makes a huge contribution to both journalism studies and history.”

The Sperber Prize jury will also award a certificate of achievement to Marvin Kalb for his distinguished career in journalism and his two recent memoirs. Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, was a finalist for the 2022 Sperber Prize, and his previous memoir, The Year I Was Peter the Great, was also considered for the 2018 Sperber Prize. Both were published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Assignment Russia, Kalb’s second memoir of his years living in the Soviet Union, presents a personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the Cold War and the early days of television news. Kalb not only describes what it was like to try to manage his work and life under the Soviet system, but also gives new insights into the work of CBS News in the US during the late 1950s. Kalb’s distinguished journalism career spans more than 30 years and includes award-winning reporting for both CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club. He is also  a nonresident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy program at Brookings.

Kalb was the last person hired by famed journalist Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, creating a special connection to the Sperber Prize—which is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography Murrow: His Life and Times.  One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the university. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Five biographies and one memoir were chosen as the finalists for the Sperber Prize, including the books by Becker and Kalb. More than 60 works with 2021 copyrights were considered.

The other finalists for this year’s prize, in alphabetical order, were:

• Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, published by Encounter Books.
• Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, published by Doubleday.
• Lisa Napoli’s Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, published by Abrams.
• Donald A. Ritchie’s The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington, published by Oxford University Press.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  In 2021, the Sperber Prize was awarded to two biographies, Kerri K. Greenidge’s biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume’s FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World about war correspondent John Hersey.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. With questions, please contact Dr. Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a professional in journalism. The award has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999. 

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said that nearly 60 books with 2021 copyrights were considered for the award. 

“This year, there were so many wonderful biographies and memoirs that we found it difficult to pick the finalists,” said Knobel. “The seven members of the jury found a great many of the books nominated to be well-written, well-researched, and absolutely fascinating.”  

Here are the six finalists:

• Elizabeth Becker’s You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, published by Public Affairs. This work tells the long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war.  Becker, an award-winning author and journalist, has covered national and international affairs as a Washington correspondent at The New York Times, a senior foreign editor at National Public Radio, and a correspondent at The Washington Post. 
• Marvin Kalb’s Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, published by Brookings. This book, Kalb’s second memoir of his years living in the Soviet Union, presents a personal journey through some of the darkest moments of the Cold War and the early days of television news. Kalb’s distinguished journalism career spans more than 30 years and includes award-winning reporting for both CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. He is professor emeritus at Harvard University and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club.
• Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, published by Encounter Books. For half a century, Sarah Josepha Hale was the most influential woman in America. As editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale was the leading cultural arbiter for the growing nation, a powerful advocate for educational and professional opportunities for women, and the godmother of our national Thanksgiving Day. Melanie Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She spent 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, where she began as a copy editor on the overnight desk in Hong Kong and rose to become op-ed editor, editorial writer, and deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
• Judith Mackrell’s The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II, published by Doubleday. The Correspondents presents the untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent. Mackrell is the critically acclaimed author of The Unfinished Palazzo and Flappers. She is also a celebrated dance critic, and her biography of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina, was short-listed for the Costa Biography Award.
• Lisa Napoli’s Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, published by Abrams. This group biography profiles four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined National Public Radio. Napoli has had a long career in print, radio, TV, and online journalism. She has worked at The New York Times, Marketplace, MSNBC, and KCRW. She is the author of three previous books, Radio Shangri-La, Ray & Joan, and Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News.
• Donald A. Ritchie’s The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson’s Washington, published by Oxford University Press. In the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in hundreds of papers from 1932 to 1969, as well as on weekly radio and television programs, the investigative journalist Drew Pearson revealed news that public officials tried to suppress. The Columnist examines how Pearson managed to uncover secrets so successfully and why government efforts to find his sources proved so unsuccessful. Ritchie, the author or editor of more than one dozen books, is the Historian Emeritus of the U.S. Senate.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. In 2021, the Sperber Prize was awarded to two biographies, Kerri K. Greenidge’s biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume’s FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World about war correspondent John Hersey.  

The winner of the 2022 Sperber Prize will be announced in September and awarded in November at a ceremony held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

More information about the award, its jury, and its history can be found at Sperberprize.com. If you have any questions, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

“It’s a historic year, the first time in our history that we had two authors honored, and the first time we’ve had two women honored,” said Father McShane, who presented the award to Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., for her biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume, Ph.D.,  for FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, about war correspondent John Hersey.

The award ceremony for The Sperber Prize, given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, a critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow, took place via Zoom on Wednesday night. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the prize and its $1,000 award were established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Beth Knobel. Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize, said this year’s winning biographies were so well written and researched that the award had to be given to both authors. The winners will each receive $500 as prize money. 

Both winners were asked about their inspirations and the research behind the behind writing their books. Both shared that they wanted to write the hidden stories of investigative journalists who documented atrocities happening in their communities and in their country. 

“Black stories are always far more complex than we believe. Stories like Trotter’s ought to be as analyzed, discussed, and studied as Dubois, Garvey, King, and Malcolm X,” said Greenidge. 

“It has been my hope, with Black Radical, to reorient the scholarship toward these stories, not as a form of hagiography or racial exceptionalism, but as a way to challenge ourselves to more completely reckon with our complicated and often painful racial history,” she said.

Blume explained how the attack on journalists during the Trump era influenced her motivations for writing Hersey’s biography.

“My research coincided with the Trump era. Suddenly and shockingly, America’s best journalists were dubbed enemies of the people by Trump his followers, and journalists began to be threatened,” said Blume. “My entire life, without exaggeration, has been centered on newsrooms and my extended community of reporter colleagues is like family and then suddenly in the Trump era, my family was on a hit list,” she said.

Prompted by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, both authors discussed journalists as vital figures in enforcing freedom of the press and how journalists are very important documenters of history.

“Trotter was warning about, responding to, protesting, and organizing [to protect]one of his goals as a journalist– to be able to hold a mirror up to nature. The press should be used this way to critique and question power,” said Greenidge.

Blume said that the subject of her book made it impossible to ignore the brutal realities of Hiroshima.

“After Hersey’s report came out, the only way that you could be oblivious to what nuclear warfare portended for humanity and what the Americans have done to win the war was through willful ignorance,” said Blume.

Father McShane shared that he was amazed that he recently discovered the hidden history of the Tulsa Massacre, written about in Black Radical. 

“You help us to see the importance and power of journalism, but also the harm of national amnesia,” said Father McShane. 

Ann’s brother, Alan Sperber, M.D., and his wife Betty offered their congratulations to the 2021 award recipients and detailed the history of the Sperber family’s close association with Fordham University since Ann’s book was published by the Fordham University Press. 

“Throughout his presidency, Father McShane has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Sperber Prize and a close friend of the Sperber family,” said Alan Sperber. 

Knobel said that they had considered over 25 books for the prize, including one from Fordham faculty. 

“Another book we considered was written by one of our own, our department chair in communication and media studies at Fordham, Amy Aronson. Her book was on the founder of the ACLU, Crystal Eastman, who also did some time as a writer, journalist, and founder of a publication. That is an astoundingly beautifully written and researched book,” said Knobel.

Father McShane said the Sperber Prize has become known for its acknowledgment and support of important biographers. 

“This has become one of the coveted prizes in the world of journalism, publishing, and research,” he said.

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said that the jury decided to present the award to two books this year, as each was so deserving of the prize. The two winners will receive $500 each and are invited to speak about their works at a virtual Fordham award ceremony on November 3.

Knobel praised Black Radical for bringing the work of the Boston newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter to light. “Black Radical is a revelation,” Knobel said. “William Monroe Trotter was truly a seminal figure in the civil rights movement, but his extraordinary life story had been little known by the wider public until Kerri Greenidge brought it to prominence through this book.” Trotter, a Harvard graduate, founded the Boston Guardian newspaper and used it as a platform to call for racial justice in early 20th-century America. “Black Radical is exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and extremely timely. In telling Trotter’s story, Greenidge deftly sheds new light on the entire civil rights movement from Reconstruction into the 1930s,” Knobel said. The book was published in 2020 by Liveright Books, a division of W.W. Norton.

The second winning book, FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, explores how reporter John Hersey came to expose the U.S. government cover-up of the consequences of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion for The New Yorker in 1946. “FALLOUT cuts to the very core of what makes journalism a valuable public service: watchdog journalism,” Knobel explained. “Blume’s gripping narrative explains how Hersey showed that the U.S. government was lying when it said there were no ill effects from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Blume’s archival research, done around the world, puts the reader in Hersey’s shoes and in those of his editors at The New Yorker, trying to face down systemic hypocrisy.” The book was published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster.

Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora and director of the American Studies program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Greenidge received her doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, where her specialty included African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her research explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and democratic populism during the Progressive Era. Her work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and PBS. For nine years she worked as a historian for the Boston African American National Historic Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006).

Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and biographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Her last nonfiction book, Everybody Behaves Badly, was a New York Times bestseller.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  More information about the prize can be found at Sperberprize.com.

The Sperber Prize will be awarded on November 3 at 6 p.m. in a Fordham virtual ceremony that will be open to the public.

For more information, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.

Ironically, the award was given to Hersh for a book— Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018)—that he never planned to write.

An investigative journalist who’s penned 10 books about topics as varied as Henry Kissinger, John F. Kennedy Jr., and the Gulf War, Hersh said Reporter was actually the result of his failure to finish what would have been his 11th book. After decades cultivating sources deep within the American military and intelligence community, he signed a contract and got a big advance to write a book about former vice president Dick Cheney. Then his sources got cold feet.

“I began to share some of the stuff I was going to say, and they said, ‘We’re going to go to jail if you do that,’” Hersh said at the award ceremony, held at the Lincoln Center campus.

“I’d gotten a huge contract and I’d worked for years on their money, and said, ‘I’m dead.’ [The publisher] said, ‘Well, you can do one of two things. You can go to the gulag and start paying us a dollar a week, or do a memoir.’ So that’s why I did it. Not for mercenary reasons, but to save my life,” he said, laughing.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded Hersh, whose work also includes a 2004 bombshell piece about U.S. military abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, for being someone who educates the public through his life’s work. Father McShane called Reporter “a story of incredible strength, and incredible courage that is told with a very critical but loving eye.”

“There is one phrase that I think probably characterizes your life, and it is this: There is no hunger like the hunger of truth,” he said to Hersh.

“Once you have tasted it, it creates a longing, and you have spent your life really giving into that longing.”

Andrew Meier, chairman of the department of journalism at the New School, said at the ceremony that he read Reporter in one night and it left him mesmerized, stunned, and eternally grateful to Hersh for his work. He called it a landmark of our generation. When he reviewed the book last summer for Book Forum, he dubbed it a “miracle.”

“Hersh has done more than stand witness; he has done the hard digging, again and again and again, and even now, he’s still digging, five decades and counting of scoops,” he said.

In his acceptance remarks, Hersh also reflected on the lessons he learned as a young reporter covering crime in Chicago. Some were harsh ones about the pervasiveness of racism, even within journalism, such as when he was instructed by an editor to “cheap up” a story about the death of a family when it was revealed they were black.

He also recalled a time when he was instructed to self-censor a story about police misconduct to protect a good relationship with authorities. And in a knock at the current obsession with breaking news first, he also said he learned you could be a better reporter even if you were the second one to write about something.

Perhaps most relevant to today’s current events, he said, is the value of the sources that he’s been able to cultivate over the years. As an example, he singled out Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who sacrificed his career in the military when he leaked a report on Abu Ghraib to Hersh.

“Over the years I’ve learned that the people to find are those people on the inside who believe in being there even now, in this government, who believe the best thing they can do is the best they can. Who are inside, in a sense, and are not afraid to talk about things that go wrong, and take a chance,” he said.

He also had advice for aspiring journalists in the audience.

“If you want to do better in life and reporting, as a journalist, do read before you write,” he said. “Have enough information so you can do a narrative. That means do a lot of work.”

The Sperber Prize was established in 1999 by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986).

Past winners have included New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, for his memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), and Robert Miraldi, who won in 2014 for his biography of Hersh, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

The prize is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

The award, which was presented in a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus, was given for Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). It was accepted by Gottlieb’s wife, Maria Tucci. During his considerable career, Gottlieb served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker. Considered one of the greatest editors of the mid-to-late 20th century, he worked with the era’s leading authors—John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Janet Malcolm, and Robert Caro, to name a few.

Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., Fordham’s associate vice president and associate chief academic officer, called it an especially relevant tome to be honored amidst a crowd of book lovers.

“I think in the academic world, you’ll find many of us who identify completely with Robert Gottlieb when he writes ‘From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting,’” he said.

“It was fascinating for me to see how editors work with authors to, as he put it, ‘Edge a book closer to its platonic self.’ I felt like I was peeking behind a curtain and getting a glimpse of this mysterious process.”

Patricia Bosworth, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a member of the Sperber Prize jury, hailed Avid Reader as a “buoyant memoir of a remarkable career,” and spoke fondly of her experience working with Gottleib on Diane Arbus: A Biography (Knopf, 1984).

She recalled that although she had earned the trust of Arbus’ brother Howard Nermorov, Arbus’ estate refused to work with her or let her reproduce the late artist’s photography.

[Gottleib] said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re going to write about the photographs, describe them, find out how she took the pictures. Photographs will not matter,’” she said.

“Once he said that to me, it gave me confidence. I was really worried about it before.”

He taught her that work is more fun than fun, she said.

“Digging deep into something can be one of the most exciting things a writer and editors can do—discovering collecting, shaping. Bob said in his book, that ‘Work is my natural state of being.’ That’s what I learned from him, so I’m forever grateful,” she said.

In remarks delivered on his behalf by Tucci, Gottleib joked that he assumed that, having edited biographies of George Balanchine, Charles Dickens, and Sarah Bernhardt, tackling a book about himself would earn him ridicule for engaging in an “act of nervy self-indulgence.” He said he was thrilled that the prize was being given for a book that is really about books.

“I don’t know which is more gratifying: helping a writer make his or her book even better than it already is, or watching your enthusiasm for a writer or a book spread out into the world at large. And they’ve been paying me to do these things for 62 years now!” he said.

“I’ve always believed that editors should do their work invisibly, without attention being called to them. And yet I can’t pretend I’m indifferent to seeing our work honored, so I’m happy to accept this tribute not in my name only, but in the name of my whole club.”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselotte Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986). It is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.