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International Encyclopedia of Media Studies: Volume I: Media History, 2013

Newspapers emerged in colonial British North America in the early 1700s. By the time the first muskets were fired in the American revolt against King George III in 1775, a powerful new cultural imagining of the press's central role in the public debates of citizens and the functioning of modern democracy defined journalism. Newspapers were seen as essential to liberty, spreading information and opinion among "free-born citizens." Indeed, across three centuries this notion of the press's service to a broad deliberating public has permanently informed and justified the press's public mission, its political rhetoric, and its claims to special authority in the contentions of the democratic public sphere. From partisan journals to independent, professional dailies, from small struggling print shops to giant media conglomerates, from a few pages of cotton rag to today's electronic websites, a public ethic of service to democracy has informed the North American press's proudest moments and rationalized its worst practices.

Book History, 2012

In 1974, James Carey published “The Problem of Journalism History,” and the article quickly became famous in the field. The ideas and arguments Carey presented are still the subject of inquiry and debate. “The central and as yet unwritten history of journalism,” he wrote, “is the history of the idea of a report: its emergence among a certain group of people as a desirable form of rendering reality, its changing fortunes, definitions and redefinitions over time.” This article attempts a history of the idea of a report in America from 1885-1910. It explores what producers and observers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American print marketplace understood an appropriate report of the world to be and how social forces and cultural values shaped this understanding. From 1885 to 1910, a particular discourse about literary work and facticity came into and passed out of being, reflecting differing ideas and intense cultural negotiation about appropriate representational strategies, prose style, voice, and genre in print culture, including imaginative and journalistic expression. The formerly distinct but fluid genres of literature and journalism separated into rigid categories of public expression.

2010

1982

ED217448 - The Business Values of American Newspapers: The Nineteenth-Century Watershed.

Journal of Communication, 1995

2016

Readership has always been a necessary element in news transmission, but it took on added importance with journalism's widespread commercialization in the 1800s. It became an increasingly urgent issue, particularly for US newspapers, toward the end of the twentieth century. Readership was unexpectedly in steady decline and the cause didn't appear to be clearly identifiable. As readers left, the print industry pulled together to find out why-and to strategize, collaboratively, on ways to win readers back, keep the ones they still had, and attract new ones. A key focus became making content "reader-friendly." This paper delves deep into some of the dynamics and outcomes of that time. Newspaper readership continues to decline in the early part of the twenty-first century, but readership online is on the rise. The study suggests that readership itself may not have been the problem; newspaper readership was.

International Journal of Communication, 2017

Content analyses of large and internationally influential American newspapers show that today only 35% of the front-page articles are traditional, event-centered news articles, down from 69% 25 years ago. Of the event-centered news, only 47% mentioned the main development in the first paragraph. This study argues that newspapers have transformed in functions and style such that they no longer deliver first-instance news reporting, but serve as an analytical and/or in-depth complement to the more immediate, instantaneous online news outlets. Broader implications of the findings including theoretical connections to comparative media systems, medium theory, and professional role conceptions of journalists are discussed.

2015

The aims of this article were to find the tendency of yellow journalism headline which often appears and to reveal the function of language in yellow journalism headline. The data sources in this research were taken from English printed magazines and newspapers which were indicated as yellow journalism product. This research was a descriptive qualitative research. The research findings indicated that the form of headline was simple sentence. Simple sentence had some patterns: subject + verb, subject + verb + object, subject + verb + complement and subject + verb + object + complement. It was also found that a headline existed of phrase. The tendency of phrase were: noun phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase. The headline had referential function , expressive function and social function.

2017

Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what qualities--both textual and thematic--helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry "go viral" in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. Prior to copyright legislation and enforcement, literary texts as well as other non-fiction prose texts circulated promiscuously among newspapers as editors freely reprinted materials borrowed from other venues. What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas--literary, political, scientific, economic, religious--circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences? By employing and developing computational linguistics tools to analyze the large textual databases of nineteenth-century newspapers newly available to scholars, this project will generate new knowledge of the nineteenth-century print public sphere.

American Periodicals, 2016

This essay reengages the familiar topic of yellow journalism through the historical and formal discontinuities introduced by electrical telegraphy during the Spanish-American War. It places popular newspapers such as William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the context of signal-processing technologies such as telegraphy and the wire-based press, which allowed for the manipulation of alphanumeric data through electrical signals. By breaking down the continuities of communication into discrete series and signals, telegraphy created the conditions necessary to coordinate action at a distance through the manipulation of serial data: the signs, signals, and other discrete bits of intelligence that were actively reconstructed by newspapers to produce the continuous spectacle of war news and sensational journalism.

1975

Journalism Studies, 2003

SUMMARY 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.

Media History, 2014

In late nineteenth-century USA, technological developments in paper production—a shift from a reliance on scarce cotton rag to plentiful wood—drastically reduced the price of newsprint. That decline helped overturn the reigning economics of the daily newspaper and resulted in the rise of new cheap papers with vastly expanded circulation. This novel mass press encompassed almost all Americans in the public sphere as represented by its pages. Focusing on newspapers in Detroit, this 10 study examines the manifold consequences this shift had for the press’s economics, its news agenda, and the implicit identity of the audience it addressed. The rise of a mass press in the late nineteenth century, however, was not specific to Detroit or the USA. As comparative historians have highlighted, the emergence of a mass press in Europe and elsewhere was a turning point that deeply marked the historical evolution of press systems around the globe.

1988

The workers' movement has long recognized the importance of the press and other cultural institutions in developing and sustaining class consciousness and the movement itself. Hundreds of workers' newspapers were established throughout the United States by labor unions, working-class political organizations, and sympathetic editors. These papers, ranging from handwritten , locally-circulated sheets to national daily newspapers published in regional editions (many published in foreign languages), were later supplemented by news services, broadcasting and (more recently) public relations campaigns. While scattered studies of individual newspapers and foreign-language newspapers published by immigrant socialists exist, little research into the operation, content, and influence of labor publications has been conducted as yet. (Six tables of data and 82 references are appended.) (MM)

Review of Linda J. Lumsden, "Black, Whate, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917" (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2015).

Media History, 2013

This impressive book brings together two strands of media history to create a new narrative, attempting to explain how and why newspaper journalism in Britain and the United States was transformed between the 1830s and the first decades of the 20th century, establishing the popular style of journalism we know today. It is the culmination of many years' scholarship by the author, a Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, whose sizeable contribution to 19th-century newspaper history includes two pertinent essays on the 'new journalism' or 'yellow journalism', as this phenomenon is known in Britain and the United States respectively. The two essays are a 1988 chapter, 'How new was the new journalism?' and his 1994 development of one strand of that chapter, 'The Americanization of the British press, 1830-1914'. (1) Here he has fleshed out the latter article into book form, although the broader framework of the earlier piece would have made a better monograph.

This study examined journalistic press criticism between 1865 and 1930. It sought to understand how the first modern journalists conceived of their profession in a period of great transitions. As the study revealed, journalists writing about journalism between 1865 and 1930 discussed recurring themes such as commercialization, sensationalism, advertising, and ethics. They expressed ambivalence toward the rise of big business in their field and the consequences it could have on the quality of the work. In the process, journalists also defined journalism as a profession providing a public service or as a business aiming solely for circulation and profit. Definitions shifted depending on the period during which the journalists wrote. Criticism during the period under study often reflected the social and cultural trends journalists witnessed. During the postbellum era, it mirrored the belief in the American Dream of wealth, well-being, and democracy. In the 1890s, criticism focused on the downsides of commercialism, expressing the fears people felt toward the new corporate giants. During the progressive period, the writings of press critics revealed the pride they felt in the civic services journalism provided. But World War I brought an end to progressivism. During the 1920s, disillusioned journalists criticized "mediocre" journalism. Their frustration echoed that of the old generation of progressives. Underlying the journalists" criticism was also the perception they had of news. Excited about the democratic promise of this new concept, postbellum critics praised journalism more than they criticized it. During the 1890s, and despite the downsides of commercialism, journalists never lost hope because, for them, news democratized information. The progressive period seemed to confirm the democratic potentials of news, promoting pride among critics. But the v propaganda campaigns of World War I broke the spell, as critics realized that news was potentially susceptible to propaganda. The establishment of public relations as a profession based on the spinning of news during the 1920s further aggravated the problem. Journalists, who had kept their optimism throughout the previous fifty years, became concerned, in the 1920s, that many newspapers did not live up to the democratic promise of the press.

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