Static: Citadel Broadcasting, which owns four local radio stations, is preparing to file for bankruptcy at the end of the year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The chain is the parent company of popular local urban stations WEMX-FM (94.1) and KQXL-FM (106.5). The move doesn’t come as a surprise; last year a Morningstar analyst warned that Citadel’s shares could be worthless because of debt burden and declining cash flows. In 2004, the company’s stock was trading at $16 a share—that value has dropped to less than a nickel today.
One of the best: Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting, a history book by John Maxwell Hamilton, the dean of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication, has been named as one of the best books of the year by Slate, an online news and commentary magazine. Jack Shafer, who covers the media for Slate, selected Hamilton’s book. “Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine—the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet—to produce an authoritative book,” says Shafer. Journalism’s Roving Eye was published by LSU Press this fall. See the full review here.
