Home Page - Winning with the News Media

As a reporter for 30 years in both newspapers and television, Clarence Jones was always taking risks. He specialized in the Mafia, dirty cops and crooked politicians. Who better to kill you and get with it than a Mafia hit man or a corrupt cop who will be assigned to investigate your death?

His friends were always warning him: They're Gonna Murder You.

But he persisted, and became the only reporter for a local station to ever win three DuPont Columbia awards – television's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

Click here to learn more about Clarence at this website's author page.

He's a great story teller. The war stories from his remarkable reporting career read like a murder mystery or a spy novel. Go with him into the bookie joints in Louisville with a hidden camera. Or to a Miami crime scene, where the victims were almost certainly murdered by cops.

Travel with him as he tails Florida's chief justice to a Las Vegas casino. And as you cover Martin Luther King's civil rights campaigns, always start your car with the door open. If the KKK has planted a bomb, the blast will blow you out of the car. You'll probably survive.

Hold your breath as Clarence's car sinks in a canal, so he can show you how to escape. Control your fear in the middle of a race riot when the police retreat and the mob turns on you. Watch as Clarence secretly records Richard Nixon at a private meeting, telling Southern delegates to the 1968 Republican National Convention what the President-to-be thought of court-ordered busing to integrate racially-segregated schools.

Cringe as he shares inside stories of how news was slanted at his first newspaper and public officials were coddled. Rejoice in the chapter "Bosses with Balls" as owners and editors at his later paper and TV stations take career and financial risks to support his reporting.

Worry about the future of the democracy as mega-corporations take over news outlets and the bean counters abandon journalism's goals of truth, fairness, and public service.

Jones tells it the way it was. The way it REALLY was. And how great reporting may yet triumph.

You can read the first section of They're Gonna Murder You at amazon.com (both print and Kindle Editions); at Barnes and Noble (the Nook Edition), or at smashwords.com (all other formats). Smashwords.com is the book's distributor to online booksellers. If you don't have a mobile e-book reader, both amazon and Barnes & Noble have free downloadable programs that offer all the functions of a Kindle or Nook on your computer. At Smashwords, you can get the Adobe Acrobat version and read it on your computer without having to download a separate program.

You can order Winning with the News Media from amazon.com, or from this website (with free shipping).

Much of this website is devoted to extensive excerpts from the 8th Edition of Winning with the News Media (see navigation bar at the left of each page). Reviewers who deal with the media on a day-to-day basis call it the "bible" and say it is simply the best book ever published on this subject.

Unlike many websites, there are few bells and whistles. Just good, solid content.

If you're planning to read extensively, a suggestion: Adjust your browser to enlarge the font one notch.

The author of the book, and creator of this site, is Clarence Jones. He travels the world teaching government and corporate executives:

He knows what he’s talking about. The book -- and this website -- draw from his experience as one of the nation’s most respected reporters in both newspapers and television, and his current career as author, seminar leader, crisis consultant and on-camera coach.

In his preface to the book (complete text) Jones voices his concerns about organizations which fail to create (and rehearse) their media crisis plan.

The suggested checklist in the book was created for a seminar on crisis management that he began the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 at a federal training center near Washington, DC. -- how that morning changed his life and his hope that it has made others more willing to prepare for disaster.