When I was fortunate some years ago to be offered a position in a communications program, a wise ... more When I was fortunate some years ago to be offered a position in a communications program, a wise man suggested I begin my study of the field with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. It was advice I quickly regretted accepting. As a historian of US culture schooled in classics and philosophy, I found little originality or wisdom in the book. But, because of its lucidity, it found its way into my course syllabi, which led to repeated re-readings, and a creeping appreciation of its relevance to twentieth-century discourses about journalism, propaganda, mass communications, the mass society and mass culture, and the public sphere. Public Opinion has become a kind of litmus test for media and communication scholars.
Journalism history has suffered a twodecade-long crisis of confidence. In the 1970s and 1960s, th... more Journalism history has suffered a twodecade-long crisis of confidence. In the 1970s and 1960s, thoughtful scholars composed analyses of the "problem of journalism history" that have become standard prefatory footnotes to new research.' While there is no real consensvis among these critics, a fairly starxlard list of complaints has emerged: Journal ism history overemphasizes metrop>olitan daily newspap)ers and neglects wonrien, minorities, labor, alternative media, religion, and other groups and topics. Journalism history is whiggish or progressive, presenting a simplistic narrative of the emergence of the modern Fourth Esute as champion of democracy and ignoring all the stuff of a more critical history. Journalism history is "professional" and neglects 'social history,* both in terms of journalism's internal social structure and of its place within the larger society.'
The following article describes the three roles of Wilbur Schramm, that influenced the process of... more The following article describes the three roles of Wilbur Schramm, that influenced the process of establishment of a new academic field in China scholar structure - the communication study. The authors review the visit of Schramm in China in 1982 and discuss the impact of this tour for Chinese academic society. Schramm`s Chinese name "Xuan Weibo" has not only phonetic but also ideological meaning - "The Great Uncle of Dissemination." The following article answers the question - why did China choose Schramm for the role of "icebracker" for the establishment of communication studies in the country?
The article attempts to provide a labor history of the news through the period of the industriali... more The article attempts to provide a labor history of the news through the period of the industrialization of the news system in the United States. It begins by characterizing newswork as labor and questioning the division between intellectual and mechanical labor in the news industry. It then surveys the mode of production of news, identifying occupational pressures and the evolving division of labor. Using the minutes of select locals of the International Typographical Union (ITU), it offers observations on craft unions in newspapers; it then contrasts that history with the professionalization project of newsroom workers. It concludes by considering the counterfactual possibility of journalists organizing as craft workers in concert with typographers, and wondering whether such a project would have offered a way of redressing persistent class biases in capitalist news systems.
This article examines the recent history of journalism history, comments on its agenda and aspira... more This article examines the recent history of journalism history, comments on its agenda and aspirations, discusses its place in journalism studies, and speculates on how it might matter as a source of insight or of resources for action in the current crisis of the news industry. Despite a history of frustration and confusion, journalism history can claim at least modest significance to both journalism studies and the news industry.
Although usually considered a longstanding tradition, journalism is a relatively recent assemblag... more Although usually considered a longstanding tradition, journalism is a relatively recent assemblage of standards and values governing the news environment. This article discusses the formation of journalism as an ism in the context of the industrialisation of the news media. It situates journalism as an ideology of expert observation within struggles over the power of news media in the first half of the twentieth century. Noting that the ability of journalism to discipline the news depended on bottlenecks in the media system, the article traces the crisis of hegemony that has accompanied the digital transformation of media infrastructure. It concludes by imagining a new hegemonic journalism.
The article critiques Jeffery Alexander’s book The Civil Sphere. It argues that Alexander’s appro... more The article critiques Jeffery Alexander’s book The Civil Sphere. It argues that Alexander’s approach should be augmented by incorporating insights from journalism studies, particularly indexing and Bourdieu’s analysis of the journalistic field, and by paying closer attention to the play of hegemony in the case studies Alexander provides to exemplify the proper working of the civil sphere. It closes by suggesting that Habermasian approaches may provide more useful norms for media professionals and activists.
US newspapers did not assume their modern form until well into the 20th century. Through the 1880... more US newspapers did not assume their modern form until well into the 20th century. Through the 1880s, all but the largest metropolitan dailies limited themselves to four pages in length and featured very little illustration. Until the 1920s, most dailies crowded dozens of items on their front pages, producing a Darwinian struggle for the citizen's attention. By the 1960s, newspapers came to look fully modern, with all the cues of expert explanation incorporated into their appearance and organization, accommodating a citizenry with little time or inclination to read. Soon after that, the modern moment began to erode. For the most part, historians have ignored these changes in appearance, implicitly judging the form of news to be insignificant compared with the movement of information through the newspaper or the explicit engagement of news-workers in the political realm. This is a mistake. The form of news has as much to do with its work in the world as its content does. Changes in form signal deep changes in the role the newspaper has played in the civic life of the nation. Transmission, ritual, form Form matters because news media function ritually. Carey (1988) drew the now-familiar distinction between ritual and transmission models of communication: Although journalists and scholars tend to think of the news media as working by transmitting information to readers (who will then feed back
This article introduces a group of articles on the history of paper and issues of scarcity in the... more This article introduces a group of articles on the history of paper and issues of scarcity in the history of newspapers and news media generally. The articles discussed share a concern with the parallels between paper scarcities in newspaper history and spectrum scarcities in broadcast history. This introductory essay comments on the similarities and differences between the two kinds of scarcity and comments more broadly on the rise and fall of bottlenecks in media systems, paying attention both to how scholars have discussed materialities of media communication and how legacy news media in the digital era have encountered a new competitive landscape.
In his 2000 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, Robert Darnton, one of t... more In his 2000 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, Robert Darnton, one of the foremost cultural historians and probably the most widely read scholar in the interdiscipline called the history of the book, called for his-torians to begin working on the history of ...
Journalism history took its initial shape from the memoirs of newspaper conductors who also subsi... more Journalism history took its initial shape from the memoirs of newspaper conductors who also subsidized its initial archives, which consisted primarily of the collected files of newspapers. It then helped form the core of professional education in journalism. This original journalism history tended to assume a hegemonic notion of journalism and to promote a Whiggish grand narrative of journalism. Recent
After reviewing the emergence of online newspapers, we offer observations based on historical and... more After reviewing the emergence of online newspapers, we offer observations based on historical and design analyses of major US sites, supplemented top-down by innovators in the Americas and Europe and bottom-up by sites serving one locality in Massachusetts. Despite losing typical print elements, the late modern designs emphasize text, with minimal multimedia content, especially on local sites. Instead of giving outlet to news handicraft, corporate and promotional models abound. The web flattens hierarchies, exposes content sources, and deforms journalistic authority by disarticulating the audience. Historical parallels include 19th-century flows of design innovation from advertising into news and of informational tasks from reporting into photojournalism. Newspapers can coexist with the internet while surrendering some tasks, such as archiving factual background, becoming instead more analytical advocates.
Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic we... more Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic western model of journalism, which has dominated normative discussions for the past century, derives from a set of relationships and practices formed around relatively monopolistic daily newspapers and wire services at the end of the 19th century. This model assumes that news organizations are relatively autonomous from the state and that individual journalists are independent agents engaged in an agonistic relationship to power while representing the people by, among other things, giving expert accounts of affairs of public importance. It assumes that journalists’ capacity for independence is provided by the media organizations that employ them. This model of journalism never described more than a sector of the news environment, especially outside the West. At the end of the 20th century, its usefulness in the West diminished with the erosion of the bottlenecks that had enabled some news ...
The minimal, and perhaps most important, task of journalism in any well-run polity is to prevent ... more The minimal, and perhaps most important, task of journalism in any well-run polity is to prevent lying with impunity. News organizations accept this responsibility, but for a generation or more have demonstrated a lack of capacity to fulfill it. Journalists and allied organizations identify lies but are unable to correct them or exact punishment on even a symbolic level. In 2003, a coalition of nations led by the United States and the United Kingdom attacked Iraq. The coalition justified the War on the basis of fabricated intelligence on Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs and support of terrorism. The flimsiness of this intelligence was apparent to any conscientious journalist – or citizen. Nevertheless, the news media failed to discredit the rationale for war. This failure later produced apologies from elite news organizations, including the New York Times and Washington Post. To US Americans of a certain age, this failure was familiar. In 1983, a similar crisis of journalistic identity followed the US invasion of Grenada. News organizations thought that the Reagan administration had violated norms by restricting journalists’ access during the invasion; they were astonished that the broader public seemed not to share their outrage. Journalists’ sense of the rules of the game, grounded in a set of myths from the 1960s and 1970s, were out of step with facts on the ground. Two decades before Grenada, a fabrication about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin had been used to justify an expanded war in Vietnam, which then became a perpetual fountain of public misinformation. The combination of the US loss in the war plus victories for the press in the struggle over publication of the Pentagon Papers and the subsequent Watergate scandal instilled a mythology about journalism’s power. That mythology embraced an account of the power of journalism that was based on a particular infrastructure. It held that professional journalists, enjoying a broad occupational independence and autonomy, could discover and publicize truths of public importance, and that an intelligent supervising public would then instruct, and where necessary punish, the people who ran things. We might call this a hypodermic needle model, in
When I was fortunate some years ago to be offered a position in a communications program, a wise ... more When I was fortunate some years ago to be offered a position in a communications program, a wise man suggested I begin my study of the field with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. It was advice I quickly regretted accepting. As a historian of US culture schooled in classics and philosophy, I found little originality or wisdom in the book. But, because of its lucidity, it found its way into my course syllabi, which led to repeated re-readings, and a creeping appreciation of its relevance to twentieth-century discourses about journalism, propaganda, mass communications, the mass society and mass culture, and the public sphere. Public Opinion has become a kind of litmus test for media and communication scholars.
Journalism history has suffered a twodecade-long crisis of confidence. In the 1970s and 1960s, th... more Journalism history has suffered a twodecade-long crisis of confidence. In the 1970s and 1960s, thoughtful scholars composed analyses of the "problem of journalism history" that have become standard prefatory footnotes to new research.' While there is no real consensvis among these critics, a fairly starxlard list of complaints has emerged: Journal ism history overemphasizes metrop>olitan daily newspap)ers and neglects wonrien, minorities, labor, alternative media, religion, and other groups and topics. Journalism history is whiggish or progressive, presenting a simplistic narrative of the emergence of the modern Fourth Esute as champion of democracy and ignoring all the stuff of a more critical history. Journalism history is "professional" and neglects 'social history,* both in terms of journalism's internal social structure and of its place within the larger society.'
The following article describes the three roles of Wilbur Schramm, that influenced the process of... more The following article describes the three roles of Wilbur Schramm, that influenced the process of establishment of a new academic field in China scholar structure - the communication study. The authors review the visit of Schramm in China in 1982 and discuss the impact of this tour for Chinese academic society. Schramm`s Chinese name "Xuan Weibo" has not only phonetic but also ideological meaning - "The Great Uncle of Dissemination." The following article answers the question - why did China choose Schramm for the role of "icebracker" for the establishment of communication studies in the country?
The article attempts to provide a labor history of the news through the period of the industriali... more The article attempts to provide a labor history of the news through the period of the industrialization of the news system in the United States. It begins by characterizing newswork as labor and questioning the division between intellectual and mechanical labor in the news industry. It then surveys the mode of production of news, identifying occupational pressures and the evolving division of labor. Using the minutes of select locals of the International Typographical Union (ITU), it offers observations on craft unions in newspapers; it then contrasts that history with the professionalization project of newsroom workers. It concludes by considering the counterfactual possibility of journalists organizing as craft workers in concert with typographers, and wondering whether such a project would have offered a way of redressing persistent class biases in capitalist news systems.
This article examines the recent history of journalism history, comments on its agenda and aspira... more This article examines the recent history of journalism history, comments on its agenda and aspirations, discusses its place in journalism studies, and speculates on how it might matter as a source of insight or of resources for action in the current crisis of the news industry. Despite a history of frustration and confusion, journalism history can claim at least modest significance to both journalism studies and the news industry.
Although usually considered a longstanding tradition, journalism is a relatively recent assemblag... more Although usually considered a longstanding tradition, journalism is a relatively recent assemblage of standards and values governing the news environment. This article discusses the formation of journalism as an ism in the context of the industrialisation of the news media. It situates journalism as an ideology of expert observation within struggles over the power of news media in the first half of the twentieth century. Noting that the ability of journalism to discipline the news depended on bottlenecks in the media system, the article traces the crisis of hegemony that has accompanied the digital transformation of media infrastructure. It concludes by imagining a new hegemonic journalism.
The article critiques Jeffery Alexander’s book The Civil Sphere. It argues that Alexander’s appro... more The article critiques Jeffery Alexander’s book The Civil Sphere. It argues that Alexander’s approach should be augmented by incorporating insights from journalism studies, particularly indexing and Bourdieu’s analysis of the journalistic field, and by paying closer attention to the play of hegemony in the case studies Alexander provides to exemplify the proper working of the civil sphere. It closes by suggesting that Habermasian approaches may provide more useful norms for media professionals and activists.
US newspapers did not assume their modern form until well into the 20th century. Through the 1880... more US newspapers did not assume their modern form until well into the 20th century. Through the 1880s, all but the largest metropolitan dailies limited themselves to four pages in length and featured very little illustration. Until the 1920s, most dailies crowded dozens of items on their front pages, producing a Darwinian struggle for the citizen's attention. By the 1960s, newspapers came to look fully modern, with all the cues of expert explanation incorporated into their appearance and organization, accommodating a citizenry with little time or inclination to read. Soon after that, the modern moment began to erode. For the most part, historians have ignored these changes in appearance, implicitly judging the form of news to be insignificant compared with the movement of information through the newspaper or the explicit engagement of news-workers in the political realm. This is a mistake. The form of news has as much to do with its work in the world as its content does. Changes in form signal deep changes in the role the newspaper has played in the civic life of the nation. Transmission, ritual, form Form matters because news media function ritually. Carey (1988) drew the now-familiar distinction between ritual and transmission models of communication: Although journalists and scholars tend to think of the news media as working by transmitting information to readers (who will then feed back
This article introduces a group of articles on the history of paper and issues of scarcity in the... more This article introduces a group of articles on the history of paper and issues of scarcity in the history of newspapers and news media generally. The articles discussed share a concern with the parallels between paper scarcities in newspaper history and spectrum scarcities in broadcast history. This introductory essay comments on the similarities and differences between the two kinds of scarcity and comments more broadly on the rise and fall of bottlenecks in media systems, paying attention both to how scholars have discussed materialities of media communication and how legacy news media in the digital era have encountered a new competitive landscape.
In his 2000 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, Robert Darnton, one of t... more In his 2000 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, Robert Darnton, one of the foremost cultural historians and probably the most widely read scholar in the interdiscipline called the history of the book, called for his-torians to begin working on the history of ...
Journalism history took its initial shape from the memoirs of newspaper conductors who also subsi... more Journalism history took its initial shape from the memoirs of newspaper conductors who also subsidized its initial archives, which consisted primarily of the collected files of newspapers. It then helped form the core of professional education in journalism. This original journalism history tended to assume a hegemonic notion of journalism and to promote a Whiggish grand narrative of journalism. Recent
After reviewing the emergence of online newspapers, we offer observations based on historical and... more After reviewing the emergence of online newspapers, we offer observations based on historical and design analyses of major US sites, supplemented top-down by innovators in the Americas and Europe and bottom-up by sites serving one locality in Massachusetts. Despite losing typical print elements, the late modern designs emphasize text, with minimal multimedia content, especially on local sites. Instead of giving outlet to news handicraft, corporate and promotional models abound. The web flattens hierarchies, exposes content sources, and deforms journalistic authority by disarticulating the audience. Historical parallels include 19th-century flows of design innovation from advertising into news and of informational tasks from reporting into photojournalism. Newspapers can coexist with the internet while surrendering some tasks, such as archiving factual background, becoming instead more analytical advocates.
Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic we... more Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic western model of journalism, which has dominated normative discussions for the past century, derives from a set of relationships and practices formed around relatively monopolistic daily newspapers and wire services at the end of the 19th century. This model assumes that news organizations are relatively autonomous from the state and that individual journalists are independent agents engaged in an agonistic relationship to power while representing the people by, among other things, giving expert accounts of affairs of public importance. It assumes that journalists’ capacity for independence is provided by the media organizations that employ them. This model of journalism never described more than a sector of the news environment, especially outside the West. At the end of the 20th century, its usefulness in the West diminished with the erosion of the bottlenecks that had enabled some news ...
The minimal, and perhaps most important, task of journalism in any well-run polity is to prevent ... more The minimal, and perhaps most important, task of journalism in any well-run polity is to prevent lying with impunity. News organizations accept this responsibility, but for a generation or more have demonstrated a lack of capacity to fulfill it. Journalists and allied organizations identify lies but are unable to correct them or exact punishment on even a symbolic level. In 2003, a coalition of nations led by the United States and the United Kingdom attacked Iraq. The coalition justified the War on the basis of fabricated intelligence on Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs and support of terrorism. The flimsiness of this intelligence was apparent to any conscientious journalist – or citizen. Nevertheless, the news media failed to discredit the rationale for war. This failure later produced apologies from elite news organizations, including the New York Times and Washington Post. To US Americans of a certain age, this failure was familiar. In 1983, a similar crisis of journalistic identity followed the US invasion of Grenada. News organizations thought that the Reagan administration had violated norms by restricting journalists’ access during the invasion; they were astonished that the broader public seemed not to share their outrage. Journalists’ sense of the rules of the game, grounded in a set of myths from the 1960s and 1970s, were out of step with facts on the ground. Two decades before Grenada, a fabrication about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin had been used to justify an expanded war in Vietnam, which then became a perpetual fountain of public misinformation. The combination of the US loss in the war plus victories for the press in the struggle over publication of the Pentagon Papers and the subsequent Watergate scandal instilled a mythology about journalism’s power. That mythology embraced an account of the power of journalism that was based on a particular infrastructure. It held that professional journalists, enjoying a broad occupational independence and autonomy, could discover and publicize truths of public importance, and that an intelligent supervising public would then instruct, and where necessary punish, the people who ran things. We might call this a hypodermic needle model, in
… of the Media Ecology Association, v3. …, Jan 1, 2002
This essay outlines the ideas of Urie Bronfenbrenner, who developed the notion that human experie... more This essay outlines the ideas of Urie Bronfenbrenner, who developed the notion that human experience occurs within four interdependent levels, from the proximate experiences with microsystems, through the layers of a mesosystem, an exosystem, and a macrosystem, which range from immediate experience with other persons through an institutional level to the broadest ideological field. Using these ideas, we explore newspapers as environments that have presented these levels in several aspects of their visual form and textual contents through U.S. history. Specifically, we consider the visual style of newspapers, the type of production techniques used in their manufacture, and the larger metaphor or ideal that organized their view of public life. These combined into several formations: the printerly, partisan, Victorian, and modern. After considering how the understanding of the newspaper relates to conceptions of the audience and the citizenry, we examine the typical imagery the newspaper used to represent its readers through history.
The term journalism history is of relatively recent coinage, more recent than the term journalism... more The term journalism history is of relatively recent coinage, more recent than the term journalism, of course. But the discourse now called journalism history has a longer history, one that tracks the rise of news culture as a realm of first print culture and later media culture. As each new formation of news culture appeared, new genres of doing the history of news developed. Throughout this history of journalism history, the boundary separating it from other forms of media history has been porous and blurry. Since the 1970s, journalism history has been wrestling with an identity crisis, one that in many ways anticipates the broader crisis in the identity of journalism today.
A design revolution is said to have transformed newspaper front pages in the past twenty years. T... more A design revolution is said to have transformed newspaper front pages in the past twenty years. The revolt toppled "traditional" makeup, replacing it with "modern" layout. 2 Click and Stempel first noted the shift in 1974. 3 By 1981, so many newspapers had been redesigned that García reported, "The look of American newspapers is rapidly changing," 4 and by the end of the decade, Moen cited "enormous activity in the field of newspaper design in the 1980s." 5
This book takes a fresh look at the role of the newspaper in United States civic culture. Unlike ... more This book takes a fresh look at the role of the newspaper in United States civic culture. Unlike other histories which focus only on the content of newspapers, this book digs deeper into ways of writing, systems of organizing content, and genres of presentation, including typography and pictures. The authors examine how these elements have combined to give newspapers a distinctive look at every historical moment, from the colonial to the digital eras. They reveal how the changing "form of news" reflects such major social forces as the rise of mass politics, the industrial revolution, the growth of the market economy, the course of modernism, and the emergence of the Internet. Whether serving as town meeting, court of opinion, marketplace, social map, or catalog of diversions, news forms are also shown to embody cultural authority, allowing readers to see and relate to the world from a particular perspective. Including over 70 illustrations, the book explores such compelling themes as the role of news in a democratic society, the relationship between news and visual culture, and the ways newspapers have shaped the meaning of citizenship. —From the book jacket
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Papers by John Nerone