I am....and I'd not heard of the book before.
I'm thinking of getting it!
Would you recommend it?
Yes and no. I do the Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™ threads here on FRee Republic and have been doing them for about four years now. And I have been a news junkie all of my life. The DeathWatch™ threads chronicle all things news and media and particularly pay attention to the business of media and how it is paid for.
For the past 2 or 3 years, I have read everything I could get my hands on about the media industry that I could. Bios of CBS' Paley, NBC's Sarnoff, The NY Times' Sulzbergers, W. R. Hearst, etc, etc. I figure if we conservatives are going to supplant the Old Media, we better learn some history of the industry and how it grew up. And maybe read about some famous "journalists" and what the "news" business was all about.
Last June I started my own weblog and began covering local news - school board, county commission, city hall, etc. So I guess I'm a reporter now.
I would recommend the book - the author worked for Western Union for almost all his life. Some interesting stuff about the early days of wiring the world. I'm about halfway through it.
In the last batch of stuff I got from Amazon, I got the three-volume history of the industry by Erick Barnouw:
# A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States To 1933 , Oxford University Press, 1966.
# The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933-1953, Oxford University Press, 1968.
# The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States from 1953, Oxford University Press, 1970.
I look forward to reading them.
What exactly do you do in telecom? Have you ever seen this website? Fascinating!! The networking is as important as the medium and the message. The internet will have as profound an effect on the world as the invention of movable type 500 years ago, in my opinion.
http://long-lines.net/