Books on journalism

Ken Doctor, who blogs at Content Bridges, has a new book out. "Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get" promises to take readers "inside the fast-changing landscape of shrinking newspapers and always-on digital news." I know plenty of journalists who don't want to be inside that fast-changing landscape anymore, but Doctor is an insightful observer and the book is worth checking out.

A library of books barred from Texas prisons

One thing prisoners have a lot of is time. One way to pass that time is to read. But prisoners in the Texas system have a short list to choose from, considering all the publications banned by the state's department of corrections.

From the Austin American-Statesmen:

Novels by National Book Award winners Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and William T. Vollmann have been banned in recent years. Award finalists Katherine Dunn and Barry Hannah are on the Texas no-read list, too, as are Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike.

Prisoners can't peruse certain books by Pablo Neruda and Andre Gide, both Nobel laureates. "Krik? Krak!" by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who last year won a MacArthur "genius" grant, is prohibited behind Lone Star bars. Books of paintings by some of the world's greatest artists — da Vinci, Picasso, Botticelli, Michelangelo — have been ordered out of state correctional facilities.

And just because a book is a best-seller in the free world doesn't mean it's available on the inside. Harold Robbins, Pat Conroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry and James Patterson belong to the don't-read fraternity. Mystery writer Carl Hiaasen does, too, as do Kinky Friedman and Janet Fitch, whose "White Oleander" was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

John Grisham has had four blockbusters banned since 2005. And inmates will have to wait for parole before diving into "Precious," the book by Sapphire that last year was turned into a critically acclaimed movie.

Political connections don't seem to count for much, either. Her father may have been governor and president, but Jenna Bush's "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope" made the banned list in November 2008.

Four in the evening

1. The Washington Post reaffirms its allegiance to impartial journalism with a new social media policy. WaPo

2. Tehran Bureau has teamed up with Frontline to expand coverage of Iran. NYT

3. Read a banned book, it'll be good for your soul. Scott Martelle

4. Given the challenges we face in Afghanistan, it's time to take a closer look at Yemen. Time

The 24-hour diplomacy cycle

Did Google make our foreign policy stupid?

In an interview this morning, Former Sec. of State Colin Powell told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he brought the State Department into the "electronic age" when he bought 44,000 computers and encouraged his staff to rely more on websites than books to do their jobs.

From the transcript:

And I used to tell them, get rid of all the books in your office. You don't need them anymore, as long as you have a couple of search engines and Wikipedia. And then I challenged my people to try to keep up with Wikipedia in terms of changes in countries. That was a challenge.

But I believe the electronic age has fundamentally changed the way in which we do business in every aspect of human life, but in diplomacy and politics as well -- instantaneous transmission of information, instantaneous knowledge.

As I like to say, we've gone from a lunar world where you measured everything in days, weeks and months, to a transactional world where every single transaction has to be put into your information system, into your decision system.

A State Department without the Internet and computer-literate staff would be ridiculous. But so is a State Department that stops referencing the collective wisdom of books in favor of the short-hand history of Wikipedia.