Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season, long-listed for the 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award in South Africa, where Messitt lived and worked as an independent journalist for 8 years. A dual-citizen, she was the founder of Amazwi, a rural non-profit media organization that trained woman journalists, and publisher of its award-winning newspaper, The Villager. She would later become the founding national director of Report for America, a national service program that places emerging journalists in newsrooms across the country, addressing critical coverage gaps and the changing landscape of local news. Maggie Messitt is Norman Eberly Professor of Practice and Director of the News Lab at Penn State University, USA
This book is an unusual, imaginative braiding together of two countries – the United States and South Africa – and two streams of history: the growth of democracy, and the growth of a probing, vibrant, defiant press. Maggie Messitt has a fine eye for the telling detail, the shocking fact, the unsung hero or heroine. * Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022) * In these very challenging times all over the world, we need works like those featured in Maggie Messitt's Newspaper, for they give me and will surely give other readers the hope we all need to keep on keepin' on! * Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives (2022) * Messitt’s work reveals that from Fredrick Douglas to George Floyd, newspapers serve as not only “the first draft of history” but also a compelling outlet for historical, discursive analysis."" * Tribal College Journal *