Bruce Porter

Bruce Porter

Like many journalists, Bruce Porter detoured through other fields before discovering his chief calling, among them stints as a stream guard in the Aleutians for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a traveling billboard inspector for a New York ad agency whose chief client was Old Crow whiskey. After that he worked as a reporter for a number of newspapers, including the Hartford Courant, Providence Journal, New York World Telegram & The Sun and the old New York Post under publisher Dolly Schiff, and then spent several years at Newsweek magazine, first as a back-of-the-book writer and then its urban affairs editor. With his experience covering the black riots of the 60s and 70s, he became a consultant on civil disorder to the Ford Foundation, with whose support he wrote two books, Blackout Looting! (l979) and The Miami Riot of 1980 (1984), as well as a monograph on his experience being embedded with Scotland Yard and other British police departments to see how they dealt with street rioting in the United Kingdom in 1981.

In the 80s and 90s he served as director of the Journalism Program at Brooklyn College, where he and a colleague, Timothy Ferris, wrote a textbook The Practice of Journalism (1990). At the same time, as an adjunct professor, he taught magazine writing at the journalism school and came here full-time in 1998. His fourth book, Blow (1994), about a cocaine smuggler, made the NY Times best-seller list and appeared as a movie in 2001. His magazine articles, many dealing with prisons and the criminal justice system, have appeared in, among other places, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, the NY Times Magazine, Connoisseur, New York, and Gourmet.

He graduated from Hamilton College with a history degree and from the Columbia Journalism School.