Book Talk, NYU American Journalism Online with Brooke Kroeger, Kim Todd, and Undaunted’s Editor at Knopf, Jonathan Segal—March 23, 2023

Clockwise, Lydia Page of NYU AJO, Segal, Todd, Kroeger

Just a scrapbook from an (unrecorded) Zoom event hosted by Adam Penenberg‘s American Journalism Online graduate program at NYU with Undaunted‘s editor Jonathan Segal and  Kim Todd, author of Sensational about the stunt girls of the 1880s and 1890s, newly out in paperback. Kim and I talked about the history of women in journalism with Kim focusing on the hundreds of young women journalists who followed Nellie Bly into the stunt era, and Jon spoke of why publishing a history of journalism’s women struck him as an idea whose time had come when he went looking for a book of this nature, aimed at a general readership, and could not find one. Brooke added that the most recent such effort, in fact, was Ishbel Ross’s Ladies of the Press, published by Harper  & Brothers in 1936. (Before Ross began writing books, she was known in her day as the “front page girl” nonpareil, a man’s idea of what a newspaper woman could and should be.) Brooke offered a rush through the decades to give a fleeting glimpse into how the role and place of women in the profession has evolved since the 1840s and shared stories from the careers of Aline Mosby and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, two among the many women featured in Undaunted.