Journalism and Crime
Bethany’s second book offers a critical and transdisciplinary examination of the relationship between journalism and crime over a 470-year history. It explores the cultural, political, and social significance of crime journalism, which is considered the longest sustained genre of media. The book is a valuable resource for understanding how crime journalism reflects and influences shifts in media ownership, profit priorities, new technologies, and legal and political governance.
Journalism and Celebrity
Journalism and Celebrity provides the first account of its kind, revealing the people, places, platforms, and production practices that created celebrity journalism culture, following its origins in the 18th century London press to its reinvention by the American mass media.
Through a transdisciplinary approach to theory and method, this book argues that those who place celebrity in binary to what journalism should be often miss the importance of their mutual dependency in making our societies what they are. Including historical and contemporary case studies from the UK and US, this book is excellent reading for journalism, communication, media studies, and history students, as well as scholars in the fields of journalism, celebrity, cultural studies and political communication.
David Bowie: Critical Issues
Through a theoretical framework of performance theory and a detailed textual analysis of all Bowie interviews and feature articles in Q Magazine from 1989-1999, as well as a critical examination of Bowie’s 1990s image, Bethany’s co-authored chapter Turn Myself to Face Me: Bowie and the discovery of authentic self argues that through his final performance Bowie was finally able to emerge as a musician entirely on his own terms. This freed him from the expectations of the personae from the 1970s and the commercial pressures of the 1980s. By performing this hyperreal version of self instead of constructed characters, he was finally able to reveal his authentic self to audience as the 21st century approached.
Forthcoming…
Bethany has four chapters currently in production for international handbooks focusing on the history of popular journalism.
“Information as Instruction: A short history of attack journalism” for the International Handbook of Information History and “The Radical Origins of Lifestyle Journalism” for the International Handbook of Lifestyle Journalism” are both out this year.
“Wandering Crusaders: a short history of the investigative crime journalist” for The Handbook of Investigative Journalism and “David Bowie: On Time, In Interview” for a new Handbook of David Bowie will be published in 2025.
Author / Journalist / Academic / Educator 