Let's Get Canonical—The Best Journalism Books

Chris Suellentrop's Big 10

The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson
A Journalist's Guide to Public Opinion Polls, by Sheldon R. Gawiser, G. Evans Witt, Walter R. Mears
The AP Stylebook and Libel Manual and Working With Words: A Handbook for Writers and Editors, Brian S. Brooks, et al. (Assuming you've already read Strunk and White)
The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, edited by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam
Lenin's Tomb, by David Remnick
The Portable Mark Twain
The Harvest Gypsies, by John Steinbeck
How To Lie With Statistics, by Darrell Huff

Ashley Craddock's Faves

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be KilledWith Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch
Our Guys, by Bernard Lefkowitz
Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman
Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, Parts 1 & 2, Library of America
The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm
Floating Off the Page: The Best Stories from the Wall Street Journal's Middle Column, edited by Ken Wells
All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell

Gregg Easterbrook's Canon

History of Standard Oil, by Ida Tarbell
My Lai 4, by Seymour Hersh
The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam
Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties, edited by Harold Hayes
National Defense, by James Fallows
The Promised Land, by Nicholas Lemann
Walter Lippman and the American Century, by Ronald Steel
The Power Broker by Robert Caro (partly to teach how the book is both great and yet totally wrong about some things) and TheArmies of the Night by Norman Mailer (to teach how a highly praised book can be bad beyond belief)
A Moment on the Earth (best analytical book of the last decade!), by Gregg Easterbrook 

Clara Jeffery's Essentials

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, by Alex Kotlowitz
Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker profile of Al Gore, reproduced in the Slate ebook The Sons. You must install Microsoft Reader to read The Sons.
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
Red-Dirt Marijuana, by Terry Southern
The White Album, by Joan Didion
My War's Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd
Nellie Bly on Blackwell Island
And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
This American Life, the public radio series
Errol Morris films, I'd make 'em watch a lot of docs actually, including all Frontline documentaries..

Jack Shafer's Must Reads

Martyr's Day, by Michael Kelly
The Earl of Louisiana, by A.J. Liebling.
The New Precision Journalism, by Philip MeyerBoss, by Mike Royko
Huey Long, by T. Harry Williams
The Literary Journalists, edited by Norman Sims
Newspaper Days, by H.L. Mencken
Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel
The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms,by Ron Rosenbaum