Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade, 2000-2009: Nominees

New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, will be selecting The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States. Ten years ago New York University, using some of the same judges, selected The Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Twentieth Century in the United States.

The eighty works of journalism listed here were nominated by the faculty at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute (with some student suggestions) and by our outside judges, who include: Madeleine Blais (University of Massachusetts), Dorothy Rabinowitz (Wall Street Journal), Morley Safer (60 Minutes), Gene Roberts (University of Maryland), Ben Yagoda (University of Delaware), Eric Newton (Knight Foundation), Leon Dash (University of Illinois), Juan Williams (NPR), Sylvia Nasar (Columbia) and Greil Marcus (cultural critic).

The full-time faculty and our outside judges are now being asked to vote on these nominees — by March 22, 2010. The “Top Ten” — in order — will be announced on April 5, 2010, at New York University. Please feel free to comment on the nominees and make suggestions. Clicking on a nominee in the list that follows will bring up a short description and a link either to the work or to a discussion of the work.

– Mitchell Stephens, Professor of Journalism, NYU

The winners have been announced on this page.

List of Nominees

Pico Iyer, Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home, 2000.
Dave Marash (correspondent) and Jay LaMonica (producer), “Aids in Africa,” Nightline, 2000.
Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, 2000.
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2000.
Steve Kroft and Leslie Cockburn, “America’s Worst Nightmare?” 60 Minutes, October 15, 2000.
David Foster Wallace, “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub,” Rolling Stone, April 2000.
Richard Read, Brent Walth, Julie Sullivan and Kim Christensen, “Liberty’s Heavy Hand,” The Oregonian (Portland), 2000.
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, 2001.
Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles, “LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton,” HBO, 2001.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 2001.
Thomas E. Franklin, three New York firefighters raise the American flag in the World Trade Center rubble, The Record (Bergen County, NJ), September 11, 2001.
Paul Winfield, the headline: “U.S. ATTACKED,” The New York Times, September 12, 2001.
The staff of The New York Times, “A Nation Challenged,” fall 2001.
Rebecca Smith and John Emshwiller, Enron investigations, The Wall Street Journal, fall 2001.
The Boston Globe Spotlight Team, under the direction of Walter Robinson, “Abuse in the Catholic Church,” 2002.
Brad Grey, Dyllan McGhee, Jessica Malter, Sheila Nevins, John Hoffman and Jonathan Liebman, “In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01,” HBO, 2002.
William Langewiesche, American Ground, 2002.
Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed, 2002.
Sonia Nazario, “Enrique’s Journey,” Los Angeles Times, September-October 2002.
Alexandra Pelosi, “Journeys with George,” HBO, November 2002.
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” The New Yorker, March 2002.
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, 2003.
Martin Smith and Marcela Gaviria, “Truth, War and Consequences,” Frontline, PBS, 2003.
John Burnett, Anne Garrels, Steve Inskeep, Christopher Joyce, Mike Shuster, Ivan Watson and Eric Westervelt, coverage of the Iraq War, National Public Radio, January to June 2003.
C.J. Chivers (reporter), Dexter Filkins (reporter) and Tyler Hicks (photographer), The New York Times, 2003-2009.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, 2003.
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 2003.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.
Alma Guillermoprieto, “A Hundred Women: Why Has a Decade-Long String of Murders Gone Unsolved?” The New Yorker, September 2003.
David Barstow and Lowell Bergman, The New York Times, 2003-2004.
James Fallows, “Blind Into Baghdad,” The Atlantic, January/February 2004.
Caitlin Flanagan, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement: Dispatches from the Nanny Wars,” The Atlantic, March 2004.
Errol Morris (director) and Phillip Glass (composer), Fog of War, 2004.
Jen Banbury, Salon; Mary Mapes and Dan Rather, CBS’ 60 Minutes II; and Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker.
Samantha Power, “Dying in Darfur: Can the Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan Be Stopped?” The New Yorker, August 30, 2004.
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, 2004.
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine, October 2004.
Peter Beinart, “A Fighting Faith: An Argument For A New Liberalism,” The New Republic, December 2, 2004.
Jon Stewart, “Indecision 2004” and “Indecision 2008,” The Daily Show.
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, 2005.
Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, PBS, 2005.
George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, 2005.
Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: a Brief History of the 21st Century, 2005.
Jane Feltes and Ira Glass, “If By Chance We Meet Again,” This American Life, 2005 (radio) and 2007 (TV).
The Times-Picayune staff, New Orleans, La., for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina, August-December 2005.
Matt Taibbi, “Apocalypse There,” Rolling Stone, September 2005.
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” The New York Times, December 2005.
Dana Priest, reporting on the CIA’s secret “black site” prisons, extraordinary renditions and other Bush administration practices in the war on terror, The Washington Post, 2005-2006.
Shai Oster, Mei Fong, Jane Spencer, Gordon Fairclough, Andrew Browne, James T. Areddy and Jason Dean, reporting on China’s economic boom and its negative impact, The Wall Street Journal, 2006.
Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, 2006.
Spike Lee (director), When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, HBO, 2006.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, 2006.
Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change, 2006.
Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, Jesus Camp, 2006.
Judy Pasternak (reporter), Gail Fisher (photographer), “Blighted Homeland,” Los Angeles Times, November 2006.
Oded Balilty, photo of a lone Jewish settler challenging Israeli security officers, Associated Press, February 1, 2006.
Hans Rosling, illustrated lecture on human development, TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, February 2006.
Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, 2006.
Kyra Phillips and CNN’s Special Investigations Unit, “The Noose: An American Nightmare,” November 1, 2007.
Anne Hull, Dana Priest (reporters) and Michel du Cille (photographer), “Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army’s Top Medical Facility,” February 2007, The Washington Post.
Christopher Hitchens, “A Death in the Family,” Vanity Fair, November 2007.
David Gonzalez, “House Afire,” The New York Times, January 2007.
Alex Gibney(director) and Eva Orner, Susannah Shipman (producers), Taxi to the Dark Side, 2007.
Mark Maremont, Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Steve Stecklow, an extensive series on backdated stock options given to business executives, The Wall Street Journal, 2007.
Andrew Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters,” The Atlantic, December 2007.
Nate Silver, coverage of the 2008 presidential election on his blog, FiveThirtyEight.
Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, This American Life, National Public Radio: “The Giant Pool of Money,” May 2008.
Mark Jenkins (reporter), Brent Stirton (photographer), “Who Murdered the Virunga Gorillas?” National Geographic, July 2008.
Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, 2008.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, 2008.
James Marsh, Man on Wire, 2008.
Katie Couric, two-part interview with Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, CBS Evening News, September 24 and 25, 2008.
David Barstow, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” and “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” The New York Times, April 20, 2008 and November 30, 2008.
Atul Gawande, “The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas Town Can Teach Us About Health Care,” The New Yorker, June 23, 2009.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, 2009.
Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, 2009.
Ezra Klein, coverage of the health care debate on his blog, for the American Prospect and then The Washington Post, 2009.
Jonathan Torgovnik, “Intended Consequences,” MediaStorm, 2009.
David Grann, “Trial by Fire,” The New Yorker, 2009.