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In her new book, Shelia Weller tells the triumphant story of how leading female TV news reporters Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Christiane Amanpour achieved success.

The story reveals how these women climbed the ladder to success and uncovers rivalries in the newsroom. The Daily Beast has published some highlights from the book, which is not without its tawdry rumors.

For instance, this excerpt: “When Diane beat Katie on an interview with a 57-year-old woman who’d given birth to twins, Katie mused aloud, according to a person who heard the comment: ‘I wonder who she blew this time to get it.’”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Author and Indiana University communication and culture assistant professor Ilana Gershon wrote a fascinating essay looking at the Manti Te’o hoax through her fieldwork with Samoan migrants.

Gershon wrote The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media, and spent many hours studying stories passed between Samoan migrants. She found some fascinating roots to the hoax about the football player’s imaginary girlfriend. Check it out:

Reading Jeremy Schaap’s interview with Manti Te’o on ESPN, what strikes me as particularly Samoan about this story? Manti Te’o opens with a very familiar Samoan worry – it is not his own shame he is concerned about, he is worried about the shame this will bring to his whole family, all those who share his last name … So much of this news story is hauntingly familiar to me from fieldwork with Samoan migrants: the role of family, the half-hearted attempts to verify a person’s identity that fail, the strong spiritual connection Te’o thought he felt with Kekua, and the hoax itself.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Former John McCain campaign adviser Nicole Wallace used the frustrations resulting from her work on the McCain-Palin campaign to write her debut novel, Eighteen Acres. The embedded video from Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint shows a scene from the book launch party at SoHo House.

Wallace began writing her novel immediately after Barack Obama‘s win ended the McCain and Sarah Palin‘s campaign. The novel explores the ups and downs faced by the first female president and her two female staff members during a re-election battle.

Here’ s more from Publisher’s Weekly: “The book is ‘partly an emotional response to the election’ admitted Wallace, whose contentious relationship with Sarah Palin was spotlighted in Going Rogue. Yet it is not a retaliation (as fun as that sounds). Wallace instead toyed with the genre of political fiction as a medium for exploring the complexity or ‘indignities’ of woman’s role in politics. Drawing mainly from her six years as a senior aid with the George W. Bush administration, she offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the White House from an ambitious female’s perspective.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Just received my December issue of Glamour (Women of the Year). This issue is also the debut of Katie Couric’s new column focusing on inspiring women.

I remember when Push by Sapphire was published. It was the late 90’s and I heard how riveting the book was. I tried to read this book, but I couldn’t. It was just too “raw.” Too much. I put it down and didn’t pick it up again.

So, here it is. Ten years later and I finished reading PUSH this weekend. Again, it was a hard book to read. Very disturbing and heartbreaking. But also shows how the main character, despite all the obstacles, never gave up.

So what made me decide to finally finish this book? First, I must admit it is because of the movie, Precious, which is based on the novel. Plus, writer friends like Jeannine Montgomery, wrote raves about it. But I think what made me really want to give this book another try was looking at two recent interviews with the author.

Borders Media has an interview with the author and she said some things that really struck me. I’m paraphrasing but Sapphire says that Precious was stunted in language so it was hard and painful for her to verbalize her thoughts (hence the wording and dialect in the book), but at the end, she “owned” her language. The language that had defined her as less was now hers to define herself as whole. The author’s goal was not to portray Precious as someone to pity but as someone to empathize.

The author is also in another interview @Katie Couric. In this interview, Sapphire talks about the seeds of the novel idea as well as the journey to the movie screen. I thought the interview was enlightening and it also gave me more insight to what the author was trying to achieve.

Was the book still hard to read? Absolutely. It brings home to me the effect of how parenting and education can affect a child’s life and opportunities. Some children are given some terrible circumstances to endure. Some of them make it. And some of them do not.

Now ten years later, it’s almost surreal that Sapphire and I share the same agent. I have been affected by this book in a way that I’m still trying to comprehend. I plan to go see this movie, and I know it will be difficult. But if there was one lesson that I learned from this book is that sometimes you must push. Push through the circumstances, push through the difficulty, push through the obstacles to get to the other side.