Journalism History

James Carey and Journalism History: A Remembrance

"Operationalizing" was a term from traditional social science, which at that time held sway not only in communication research but in the "new social history" as well. Erickson, then a colleague of Carey's at the University of Illinois, was the most expansive, arguing that the basic values of the larger culture might be reflected in or embodied in the content of the press and the content of press criticism.5 Marzolf also argued that the content of journalism might reflect the larger culture,...

Party Rags? Politics and the News Business in Chicago's Party Press, 1831-71

As the penny press was getting started in cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, a thousand miles to the west Chicago's early newspapers followed a different path. The party papers of Chicago in the years from the city's founding in 1833 to the Great Fire in 1871 grew to incorporate elements more typically associated with the penny press even as penny papers that started there during the period failed. Chicago's party press by the 1850s and 1860s had begun to shed its formal ...

The Birth of Cbs-Tv News: An Ambitious Experiment at the Advent of U.S. Commercial Television

While numerous books and articles have focused on the early years of television as well as the development of broadcast journalism, the former topic usually focuses on the inventors and moguls while the latter area concentrates on the rise of radio news during World War II.3 The CBS television newscasts of 1941-42 have been mentioned in broadcast histories, but the references are mostly anecdotal and are often used to illustrate the medium's humble beginnings.4 In the past few decades, howeve...

Married to Rock and Roll: Jane Scott, Grandmother of Rock Journalism

Jane Scott, a rock music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1952 to 2002, was the first rock journalist at a daily U.S. newspaper; eventually the oldest rock critic on a daily paper; and finally, a woman in an area of journalism that was, and arguably still is, disproportionately crowded with young, male reporters. Over the fifty years, she became beloved by the world's biggest rock stars, as well as her readers, as she used luck, pluck, and a strong determination to succeed against t...

Double V in North Carolina: The Carolina Times and the Struggle for Racial Equality During World War Ii

Louis Austin, the editor of Durham's Carolina Times and one of the most outspoken of the southern black editors, was the leading proponent of the Double V strategy in North Carolina during World War II. He joined other black activists and newspapers in articulating a dual strategy in which blacks fought for victory abroad against the Axis powers while fighting for victory at home against the forces of white supremacy and racial oppression. He further stimulated the politics of protest in the ...

Pleading Their Own Cause: Letters to the Editor and Editorials in Ten African-American Newspapers, 1929-30

This research explores more than 1,534 published letters to the editor and 2,197 editorials in ten African-American newspapers from October 29, 1929, the day when the stock market crashed, through October 29, 1930. During this one-year period, African-American readers and editorial writers discussed and debated vital issues, attempted to make sense of the rapidly changing world, and created a sense of community on the editorial pages of their newspapers. This study, which examined papers from...

An Introduction to Book History

Seven chapters, plus succinct introductions and conclusions, structure the book: theorizing the history of the book; from orality to literacy; the coming of print; authors, authorship, and authority; printers, booksellers, publishers, and agents; readers and reading; and the future of the book. For instance, authors, authorship, and authority leads us from the days of handwritten manuscripts, when all but the classical authors were forced into the background, to the rise of the author as an ...

How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of Tv: The Lessons of Gore Vidal

The first chapter rushes superficially through recent scholarship on public intellectuals by Richard Posner, Edward Said, Neil Postman, and Michel Foucault (none of whom are/ were historians or traditional social scientists) before focusing on David Foster Wallace's article about the novel's decline and Vidal's position on that. Ultimately, for mass communication historians, Frank's book primarily is a specific wake-up call about the possibilities of studying novelists as news sources of man...

Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press

The documentary begins before World War I, when an enterprising young Seldes documents sexual harassment by one of his city's leading merchants, only to have his newspaper censor the story and use it to blackmail the harasser into increasing his advertising in Seldes' newspaper.

Public Relations in Britain

For example, in narratives of U.S. public relations history, the World War I Creel Committee is treated with little critical comment as a career launch of some noted individuals into private enterprise in the 1920s, with the development of the professional organizations twenty years or so later. Added to that might be studies investigating the roles of religion, social activism, and/ or women in twentieth-century British public relations (or earlier), areas not addressed in the book.

Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era

An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, she has spent much of her career addressing gender and feminism in the media, and her current book addresses these topics in the world of expanding television platforms. Most important to the creation of the women's brand of programming was the success of Lifetime and the introduction of Oxygen and Women's Entertainment cable networks that created a media environment that supported new portrayals of womanhood on television.

Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle Over Television Documentary

In the course of uncovering long lost details about the most controversial of films, such as Accuracy in Media's role in the controversy over The Selling of the Pentagon (characterized in the book as that organization's "first major target"), the author's observations on the way these films developed in concert with other things happening at about the same time in the social and political environment provide many insights about why things unfolded as they did. Interestingly, the author sugge...

The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce

The book's eight chapters focus primarily on the twentieth century with one chapter covering all of the wars before World War I. A scholar who has produced outstanding research on World War II and censorship, Sweeney devotes two chapters to that war, one to World War I, one to Korea and Vietnam, one to post-Vietnam conflicts, and another to the mediamilitary relationship in the twenty-first century. The growing number of reporters and types of media available to cover conflicts from World Wa...

Book And Electronic Reviews

Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism

The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginning of American Journalism, he chronicles the origins of journalism from Benjamin Harris' short-lived newspaper in the late seventeenth century to the 1790s, a decade that witnessed the rise of political parties. Burns echoes the hackneyed "dark age" of journalism paradigm, asserting that early Americans created a "press that libeled and exaggerated and berated," a press that "was at times vile, crude, unjust" and more of a "blight on the communities ...