After Henry
by Joan Didion
call number: F Didi

This is a collection of eleven journalistic essays: some straight reportage, some book reviews, and some impressionistic. The Henry of the title is Henry Robbins, who was Didion's editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and then at Simon and Schuster. Didion was devastated when Henry died unexpectedly at the age of 51 in 1979, and despaired of ever writing again without Henry's guiding hand, but she persisted and these essays are some of the results.

Most of the essays in this collection are not only journalism but include studies of how journalism works. "Times Mirror Square" is a lengthy history of the "Los Angeles Times" and how the Chandler family used it to build up Los Angeles and their own fortunes (which were primarily based on land development and not on selling newspapers). "Girl of the Golden West" deals with Patty Hearst, an unremarkable young woman who became the center of a long-running media frenzy in 1974-1975 when she combined the roles of heiress, kidnappee, and bank-robbing revolutionist.

The most interesting essays in this collection deal with the question of how an event becomes newsworthy. In "Insider Baseball" Didion investigates why a presidential candidate (Michael Dukakis) playing catch is newsworthy. In "Shooters Inc." she follows President George H. W. Bush as he tours world trouble spots in search of a photo op. The last essay, "Sentimental Journeys" deals with (among other things) the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case. This case got massive media attention, but there were 3,254 other rapes reported in New York City that year and most of those got little or no coverage, even though some were just as violent and horrifying as the Central Park Jogger case. The essay assembles some evidence on the causes for these disparities.

These essays were written the 1980s and the collection published in 1992, but they have aged well, as long as you realize that they no longer describe current conditions. The writing is a little bit topical and calls out many persons and events that were current when the essays were written but have now been forgotten, and this sometimes makes the writing hard to follow (Wikipedia is a good reference for looking these up).