by Ronald R. Rodgers   

This study’s terrain of analysis is the decades of pastoral press criticism that arose around the rise of journalism as a force that helped to upend and reconstitute society and that shouldered aside religion and long-held traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It seeks to trace religion’s struggle to hinge the notion of social responsibility and all that entailed to the news ethic of daily journalism. Within the ambit of that criticism was censure, but also discussion, analysis, judgment, proffered solutions, and even approbation.

This historical analysis attempts to isolate as much as is possible one stream of influential discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does so by thematically analyzing hundreds of intellectual discussions and debates that appeared in books, the newspaper trade journals, religious and popular periodicals, sermons, speeches, tracts, secular and religious press accounts, autobiographies and memoirs, and reports of religious associations.

All of these media were the source of considerable critical discourse about the newspaper, which in their totality foster an ethos of proper journalistic conduct.[i]

The year 1923 is roughly the end point of the time frame of this book. It is that year the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ adopted the Canons of Journalism, the first nationwide code of ethics for the profession and the first formal call for press responsibility in the United States long before the Hutchins Commission report in 1947.

While it is difficult to signpost any particular year, given the slow and haphazard pace of change, this book begins with the antebellum rise of the penny press in 1833 and accounts for the influence on the pulpit and the press of the postbellum rise of modernity, the growth of Gilded Age industrialism and powerful corporations, the political and corporate corruption of the age, the changing face of the United States with hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving to feed the industrial machine, the population shift from rural to urban areas, and the subsequent surge of the reactionary agrarian Populist and, later, more middle-class Progressive movement, which was entwined with the religiously oriented and influential Social Gospel movement – each of which were voluminous in their critique of the daily press.

Enmeshed in all this change and reaction was the growing and transforming newspaper, which, at its core, had substituted “the market for the mission,” as one scholar has asserted.[ii] Indeed, the long conversation about the newspaper’s mission in society correlated with the growth of newspapers. And it was this conversation, I have argued elsewhere, that informed an ethos that helped codify journalistic norms for the twentieth century – seen at its earliest and most pronounced in the Canons of Journalism.

One argument I make in this study is that today, many journalists – whether at newspapers or at the panoply of digital venues captured under the rubric of “news media” – are as equally unmoored as their brethren decades ago. The advertising budgets of newspapers have been gutted. The Internet, social platforms, and mobile devices have transformed how news is consumed and shared.

The industry is struggling to find new ways of supporting journalism. And in the process, journalists are struggling to keep their footing as they attempt to redefine their news ethic for a new era. This, then, is a struggle to define the mission of journalism not unlike that of the past. But one thing the journalists of the past had that those of the present do not is a recent history from which they could draw to redefine that news ethic – the exemplars of an old ideal of newspapering from an era that one writer has described as the “Golden Age of the Newspaper,” when “editors and reporters labored to make newspapers for sensible people, never for fools.”[iii]

[i] Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, (Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 7.

[ii] Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1981), 7.

[iii] George F. Spinney, “Newspaper Methods Yesterday and To-Day,” Pearson Magazine 23, no. 5 (May 1910): 600.

Spring has sprung! And with spring comes a new edition of Clio!

This issue features an update on the History Division’s plans to adopt Journalism History as the divisions’s journal. PF&R Chair Melita Garza details work a graduate student has begun to explore the history of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Co-graduate Student Liason Chistopher Frear explores possibilities with transnational history and there’s an excerpt from Kathleen Wickham’s book We Believed We Were Immortal: 12 Reporters Who Covered the 1962 Integration Crisis at Ole Miss.

The spring Clio also has some previews of activities at the annual convention and the annual paper call.

And much more!

You can find the Spring 2018 edition on the Clio page, or you can go directly to the Spring 2018 edition.

Just in time for post-grading reading (or maybe a break from grading), the Winter 2018 edition of Clio is now available.

In this issue:

• With the 2017 annual convention still fresh, history division chair Doug Cumming has a look ahead to programming for the 2018 convention in Washington, DC. There also are details about a proposed off-site convention workshop at the Library of Congress.
• An update on the efforts to adopt Journalism History as the History Division’s journal.
• Suggestions from PF&R Chair Melita Garza for incorporating Native American media into media history.
• Co-graduate student liaison Christopher Frear shares characteristics of a great mentor.
• An excerpt from Sid Bedingfield’s book Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance, 1935-1965.
• And details on the 2018 Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. The paper submission deadline is January 4.

And more!

You can find the Winter 2018 edition on the Clio page, or you can go directly to the Winter 2018 edition.

Need a memory refresh on History Division activities from the annual convention? The latest issue of Clio, the History Division newsletter, has you covered with a full rundown of the minutes of the division business meeting and photographs from different division activities in Chicago.

There’s much more in the fall issue. One of the issues the division is considering is adopting Journalism History as the official division journal. Clio Editor Teri Finneman has a rundown on the  state of the transition. With a vote to adopt the journal, an appeal has been presented to division members for financial support of Journalism History during the transition. Read more about the process in this issue.

Also in this issue:

• New division head Doug Cumming shares some thoughts on fake news and the importance of truth.
• Teaching chair Kristin L. Gustafson considers the role of mentors in fostering teaching excellence.
• An excerpt from The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson, the winner of the division book award.
• And there are plenty of news and updates about division members.

You can download the fall issue from the Clio page or go directly to the Fall 2017 issue.

Just in time to add to your summer reading list, the latest issue of Clio is here!

The summer issue has a rundown of History Division sessions at the upcoming annual convention in Chicago and profiles of the winners of the Book Award and the Covert Award. Make a note that the division members meeting is at 7pm on Friday, August 11.

Also in this issue:

• Division head Michael Sweeney has thoughts on the role the annual convention plays in the circle of life of a scholar.
• Frank Fee has an update from the committee exploring whether the division should take over the journal Journalism History.
• PF&R Chair Tracy Lucht addresses how journalism historians could respond to attacks on press freedom.
• An excerpt from Jason Peterson’s book Full Court Press: Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball.

And lots more!

Grab a glass of lemonade and the Summer issue of Clio. You can download the issue from the Clio page, or go directly to the Summer issue.

Spring has returned, and with it another edition of Clio, the History Division newsletter.

In this edition, division head Michael S, Sweeney has the results of a survey asking members whether the division should take over Journalism History as the journal of the division. Research chair Douglas Cumming draws on personal experience and his father’s files to illustrate how the practice of journalism also gives our students skills that are valuable in their general college education. You’ll also find an excerpt of the book The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan of Auburn University.

And if you need a check on the paper call for the annual convention, you’ll find it in Clio as well.

Take a break from the paper deadline and enjoy spring with Clio. You can download it from the Clio page, or you can go directly to the Spring issue.

We know journalism history is a useful topic, but the Winter 2017 edition of Clio in particular offers plenty of uses of journalism history for readers to consider.

Division chair Michael S. Sweeney reflects on using lessons of history to process the 2016 presidential election. Teaching chair Kristin L. Gustafson interviewed the University of Missouri’s Earnest Perry about history’s role in teaching reporting so that students can connect current events with the ones that preceded it. And PF&R chair Tracy Lucht reflects the role of teaching journalism history online for improving information literacy.

Newsletter editor Erika Pribanic-Smith also has included co-graduate student liaison Robert Greene II’s suggestions for graduate teaching assistants about using multimedia and a profile on history division member Dianne Bragg by Will Mari.

You can view the Winter 2017 Clio here, or you can download it from the Clio page.