Emus Loose in Egnar

<p>At a time when mainstream news media are hemorrhaging and doomsayers are predicting the death of journalism take heart: the First Amendment is alive and well in small towns across America. In <em>Emus Loose in Egnar</em> award-winning journalist Judy Muller takes the reader on a grassroots tour of rural American newspapers from an Indian reservation in Montana to the Alaska tundra to Martha's Vineyard and discovers that many weeklies are not just surviving but thriving. In these small towns stories can range from club news to Klan news from broken treaties to broken hearts from banned books to escaped emus; they document the births deaths crimes sports and local shenanigans that might seem to matter only to those who live there. And yet as this book shows us these little stories create a mosaic of American life that tells us a great deal about who we are--what moves us angers us amuses us. Filled with characters both quirky and courageous the book is a heartening reminder that there is a different kind of bottom line in the hearts of journalists who keep churning out good stories week after week for the corniest of reasons: that our freedoms depend on it. </p><p></p><p>Judy Muller is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and is the author of <em>Now This: Radio Television and the Real World</em>. She is also an NPR commentator and has worked as a correspondent for ABC CBS and PBS winning numerous Emmy awards and in 2010 the prestigious Peabody Award.</p><p></p>