Books | Sports

October 31, 2008

The Passion of Buzz Bissinger

The author of Friday Night Lights is a fierce advocate of print journalism, even as he senses its imminent obsolescence.

Max Lakin

The name Buzz Bissinger might be most closely associated with Friday Night Lights, the transcendent chronicle of a Texas city built on high-school football, and its various spawn. But the Bissinger canon extends further than Odessa's Permian Panthers, further even than sports journalism. He's a standard-bearer of immersion reporting—story-telling journalism that evokes both place and time, and gathers the threads of life in America.

Bissinger's work—the investigation of Philadelphia political and judicial graft, for which he and his colleagues shared a Pulitzer; the exposé of a young reporter for the New Republic led astray by his own ambition—is all very familiar, even if you didn't know his name was attached.







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Article by Max Lakin

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