De Commerciele Massamedia 38

'Confessions of An American Media Man
Tom Plate, journalism veterean and academic, publishes a tell-all memoir about his decades in the business.
By MediaChannel.

Tom Plate, longtime Asian columnist and academic, has penned a memoir entitled Confessions of An American Media Man; the subtitle promises to reveal “What they didn’t teach you in journalism school.” Forbes writer James Brady previews it:

Tom started out as a “scholarship boy” at classy Amherst, where he and future best-selling author Aaron “Urban Cowboy” Latham published a quickie guide to dating in the Ivy League, Where the Boys Are. It sold out, co-eds in those days being what they were; Latham put his share into mutual funds, and Plate bought a sports car. “He’s worth millions. I’m not,” Tom said wryly.
Following an internship at The Washington Post under the newly arrived Bradlee, Plate was off to grad school at Princeton, passing up an offer to stay on and ignoring Ben’s counsel, as well, that “graduate school is B.S.”
Tom is wonderful at the behind-the-scenes stuff–such as when then-owner CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) banned the word “cancer” from Family Weekly lest Big Tobacco cancel the ads–but he’s less gripping when he recounts numerous “scoops” he scored, and gloriously candid about his own occasional lapses.
Wooed by Time magazine, he went out and got whacked the night before, showed up hung-over for lunch with a senior Time exec, who fortunately was even more hung-over, so Tom got the job. When they were both at New York magazine, Gail Sheehy sweet-talked Plate into dishing anonymously about his sex life for her book Passages. He was devastated to find himself described as “short-legged and porky” with bad skin, yet instantly identifiable to all. On another occasion, while editorial page editor of the L.A. Times, Plate dyed his hair black to impress a new boss with his youth, only to draw titters from his own staff.
In conversation with me, Plate said, “This isn’t a ‘get even’ book. It’s real, it’s honest. And there could be a sequel. I’m 11 years into my Asian column twice a week, and 11 years as a full-time teacher at UCLA. And Andrea (his social worker wife) and I are still together.”
Plate’s bio on the Tribune media group’s site describes him as
a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the Century Association of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, with a master’s degree in public and international affairs. He is the author of five books and has been a journalist at Time, Newsday, New York Magazine and “CBS Family Week.” From 1989-1995 he was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Deadline Writing Award and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Award for “Best Editorial.” Recently, he was a Media Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow in Tokyo at the famed Foreign Press Center’s annual Asia-Pacific Media Conference. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and for the last several years has been a participant at the annual retreat of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.'

Lees verder: http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/03/01/confessions-of-an-american-media-man/