"A rare blend of great storytelling and pure wisdom, Little Bunch of Madmen is the best thing yet written about the state of modern journalism by one of its few true living masters, and every reporter working today should go out and buy it and read it." ~ Jon Lee Anderson    Staff Writer, The New Yorker Order Now Official Site

Friends, Colleagues, World at Large,

I'm thrilled to announce Little Bunch of Madmen: Elements of Global Reporting, a correspondents' field guide and a handbook for anyone who wants to keep track of the world. Books are due in August for a September 1 pub date.

After 40 years of covering mayhem, human triumph, and mass looniness on seven continents, I started out to write an insider's guide for students and young correspondents. But as I gathered advice and rip-roaring tales from colleagues, it was clear the same larger lessons are essential for readers, viewers, and listeners back home.

It ended up at 262 pages, an objet d'art by Giorgio Baravalle of de.MO Design, but we kept the price at $12, no more than an empty Moleskine notebook. Take a look, please, at bunchofmadmen.com. You can pre-order now for $9.60. I mean, hey.

In the 1930s, H.R. Knickerbocker wrote: "Whenever you see hundreds of thousands of sane people trying to get out of a place and a little bunch of madmen struggling to get in, you know the latter are newspapermen." Today's madmen, and women, face challenges old H.R. never imagined.

As the first chapter says:

"This is the manual I wish I'd had back in the 1960s when I was dropped into Congolese mayhem, clueless, sleepless, and scared witless. Much of the Congo spoke French, but I didn't. My sister Jane, only half joking, cracked: "You'll have to say the guy is dead because you don't know the word for wounded." With a measure of luck, I emerged intact. But my work, not to put too fine a point on it, was pathetic. Trial and error is no way to cover events that help shape the course of a planet.

"This is also the primer I wish people back home could have had at hand as they puzzled over our dispatches and watched television newscasts. However good correspondents might be, distant readers and viewers tend to miss the point unless they understand the process of newsgathering."

If you've read Escaping Plato's and wanted to swallow hemlock in despair, this one is nontoxic, even upbeat. Correspondents aren't vanishing; they are only shape-shifting. Opportunities have never been better for gutsy, resourceful reporters willing to make their own way.

The book is a cornerstone of Reporting Unlimited, a little company I formed to help inspire students to work abroad and to train correspondents from different cultures to see beyond the simple elements of stories that matter.

Soon, our site will offer teaching plans for university and high school journalism courses as well as guidance for discussion in book clubs.

We're now a little bunch, but we urge others to join in - given today's world - a vital cause. Thanks to generous friends, we have no corporate or foundation ties. We hope to work with the many effective programs and groups that already do much to support reporting across borders.

Profits from the book (he says hopefully) will go into this outreach, as will any kind offerings. For the latter, our site has a Donate button. And I can be reached at mort.rosenblum@gmail.com.

Please help us get going by passing this on to your own lists. And take a look at the book. All thoughts are most welcome.

With many thanks,

Mort