RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is something of a white-knuckle ride with — spoiler alert — a broadly happy ending ... It is not necessarily a book for those who have a favorite restaurant but would rather not know what goes on in the kitchen ... The perfect news organization has yet to be created, but there are a vanishingly small number willing to admit as much. It’s incredibly rare to encounter a newspaper, or broadcaster, prepared to apply the same scrutiny to itself that it routinely subjects to others. And herein may lie a clue to The Times’s institutional strength ... Nagourney tells the story with restrained skill, including 53 pages of endnotes to support his narrative. It is, if you like, a history of kings and queens, and some readers might have wished to hear more from the foot soldiers. But it’s an important story.
Eliot Higgins
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)One of the creation myths of the web was the nerd in his spare bedroom who became very rich/famous/powerful simply through the talent that these new technologies could set free and amplify. One such geek – an anonymous Leicester office worker in his early thirties – was Eliot Higgins. A socially awkward computer enthusiast with an interest in the news, he discovered a simple truth: if you searched online in a slightly obsessive way you could discover information that neither the press nor the experts knew. This was, Higgins realized, more fun than playing online video games ... Higgins’s book is a chronology of this journey from bedroom to global enterprise. It reads easily, if at times the author can’t resist diving into the weeds of how he and his team tracked down the tiniest needle in the haystack of data ... Bellingcat shows that the utopian hopes for the internet were not wholly misplaced – and that there is much we can learn from the motivations and methods of its pioneering amateurs.
Seymour M. Hersh
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"His memoir is—with some niggling reservations—a master class in the craft of reporting ... Will most future newsrooms ever again be in a position to allow their reporters the resources and time to do the kind of work that Hersh, in his prime, so magnificently produced? His memoir is a compelling argument for why they should.\
