Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies has announced the finalists for the 2026 Ann M. Sperber Book Prize, which honors outstanding works of nonfiction that illuminate the power of journalism and storytelling.
The five finalists, all published in 2025, are Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, by Colleen Dulle; Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by David Enrich; Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by Michael M. Grynbaum; Queen of Bohemia Predicts Her Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, by Eve M. Kahn; and On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, by Steve Oney.
Fordham Book Prize Highlights Journalism’s Role in Public Life
The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother, Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs focused on media professionals and journalism’s role in public life. It has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.
Amy Aronson, professor of journalism and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize, said the finalists emerged from a wide-ranging and exceptionally strong field of submissions. A committee of judges adjudicates the selection process, with this year’s winner to be announced Oct. 1. The recipient will receive a $1,000 prize and deliver the keynote address at a public ceremony held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan on Oct. 26, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
‘The Battleground Over Truth, Power, Memory, and Public Trust’
“This year’s finalists explore journalism not simply as a profession, but as a battleground over truth, power, memory, and public trust,” Aronson said. “Together, these books reveal reporters and writers navigating institutions under pressure—from network television and public radio to the Vatican, the courtroom, and the digital-information economy. What unites them is a deep understanding that journalism is never merely about transmitting information. It is about witnessing, interpreting, questioning authority, and helping the public understand the forces shaping civic life.”
Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro; Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow; Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley; Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson; Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri Greenridge; Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh; The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley; Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb; and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. Recent winners include The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn Olmstead and No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir by Jane Ferguson.
For last year’s silver anniversary, the jury honored Small Acts of Courage by Ali Velshi with the Sperber Prize and bestowed a special Career Achievement Award on Connie Chung for her book, Connie: A Memoir.
More about this year’s finalists:
Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, by Colleen Dulle (Image/Penguin Random House Christian Publishing)
Drawing on years covering the Vatican during a period of scandal, upheaval, and reform, Dulle offers an unusually intimate portrait of the emotional and spiritual tensions of religion reporting. Blending memoir with institutional critique, she examines what it means to pursue truth inside one of the world’s most secretive and symbolically powerful institutions—while wrestling personally with faith, doubt, loyalty, and moral responsibility.
Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by David Enrich (Mariner Books)
In this sweeping investigation of legal intimidation and attacks on press freedom, Enrich traces the quiet but coordinated efforts to weaken protections for journalists and public scrutiny in the United States. The book reveals how wealthy individuals, political operatives, and institutional power increasingly use the courts not only to silence reporters, but to reshape the boundaries of truth itself.
Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, by Michael M. Grynbaum (Simon & Schuster)
Grynbaum chronicles the rise of modern television news through the ambitions, rivalries, glamour, and ruthless competition that transformed broadcast journalism into both a cultural institution and a business empire. At once a media history and a study of power, the book captures the personalities and corporate forces that shaped the stories Americans came to trust—and the cracks that eventually emerged beneath the polished surface.
Queen of Bohemia Predicts Her Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson, by Eve M. Kahn (Fordham University Press)
Recovering the life of an unconventional and largely forgotten woman writer-journalist moving through New York’s bohemian and literary worlds, Kahn reconstructs a vivid cultural history of performance, publicity, reinvention, and female self-fashioning. The result is both biography and excavation: a portrait of a woman who understood the porous boundaries between journalism, spectacle, identity, and art long before the modern media age.
On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR, bySteve Oney (Avid Reader Press)
Oney delivers a deeply reported history of National Public Radio that is as much about the fragility of public trust as the evolution of American audio journalism. Moving from NPR’s idealistic beginnings through financial crises, internal conflicts, cultural influence, and political backlash, the book charts the aspirations—and contradictions—of an institution that helped redefine how Americans hear the news.
Learn more about the Sperber Prize.
Media Contact:
Amy Aronson, PhD
Department of Communication and Media Studies
Fordham University
