The History Division asked four members to have a virtual “chat” about oral history. The group explored the method’s challenges, pitfalls, practices, and possibilities. Here’s what they had to say.
Joining the chat are Teri Finneman (University of Kansas), Melita Garza (University of Illinois), Will Mari, (Texas A&M University) and Perry Parks (Michigan State University).
Oral history is well established in the discipline of history with a capital “H,” but by comparison, remains much less used as a method in journalism history. How has your work been received by conference paper and journal reviewers, as well as journal editors, in our field, many of whom are less knowledgeable about the method, including not only its limitations, but also its ethics, rigors, and contributions to the historical record? How have you positioned the strengths of oral history as a method in academic settings?
TF: I’ve spent years also having to defend my qualitative work and book chapters, so this isn’t much different. Some people will just refuse to get it, no matter what non-quant method you use. You have to stand up for yourself and fight. A main question that comes up with reviewers is why oral history instead of qualitative interviews? I emphasize the point of oral history is to NOT be anonymous, like most interviews are, because who is speaking is critical to the point of the article. Furthermore, the point is to create a permanent public record, whereas interview transcripts remain in the hidden possession of the researcher. I have found I am more likely to have to describe every single little step of my oral history methodology than I do with my qual methodology.
PRP: As the editor of a journalism history journal, I have not seen much reviewer pushback on oral history as a method. I’ve also observed a slight uptick in submissions that present oral history(ies) as a principal primary source. My guidance to oral historians is to carefully consider how these interviews complement other forms of primary evidence and secondary context, so that a study does not rely too heavily on the memories and motivations of a single or a few people who have a very rich but also very limited perspective on historical events. Researchers should be prepared to cross-check factual claims (particularly those involving other people’s words and actions) against archival records and to follow up with oral history participants when contradictions arise. One way of positioning the strengths of oral history is to emphasize its phenomenological nature and its epistemology of lived experience, which of course is an essential and often underrepresented element of media history.
MMG: I agree with Teri that oral history, as a subset of qualitative methods, suffers from the skepticism that some empiricists cast on anything that isn’t computed with a number. Assigning numbers to things doesn’t make the data/findings more objective, given the subjectivity involved in selecting the topic, selecting the research questions, assigning values to numbers, selecting the material to study and/or the participants, etc., etc. Perry correctly notes that oral histories need to be contextualized and crosschecked with other sources and historical records. All archival materials and other sources, not just oral histories, must be fact-checked and consideration given to the narrow, limited, and agenda-driven frameworks that may have guided their creation and interpretation.. For instance, relying on the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina’s most widely circulated newspaper, and its most impactful, for an accurate and unbiased account of the 1898 Wilmington massacre or coup, we now know would be folly. But the bigoted publisher, Josephus Daniels, and the rest of the white supremacist state newspapers, were successful for many years in painting the white mob actions as a black instigated riot. Oral history is one way to retrieve the voices of those who don’t have access to a printing press. It’s no accident that the white supremacists first attacked and burned The Daily Record, Wilmington’s black-owned newspaper, before they continued on their murderous march through the city. The question of how well interviewees remember events is salient. Never mind what happened in the past. We already know that present-day eyewitness accounts can be inaccurate, and can honestly differ, especially when witnesses are located at different vantage points. All that said, I’d like to pushback on some pushback. A reviewer characterized a paper I wrote on how Spanish-language and Latino editors and publishers, most of whom cater to essential workers, handled COVID-19 pandemic coverage, as non-history. The primary method I used was oral history, with these interviews contextualized both with history of the ethnic press and other current sources. The main argument against the scholarship was that ten years hadn’t passed since the pandemic. The ten-year rule has always seemed a reasonable limit, and some might quibble that a decade is still insufficient for the events of the past to be fully understood and considered. After all, more than 150 years have passed since the Civil War and new scholarly books and journal articles are being published about it every year. That said, it’s indisputable that the COVID-19 pandemic was a historical event. Will we know more about when ten years have passed in 2030? Very possibly. But in the meantime, the recollections and experiences of those who lived through it are fresh, and getting those voices into the historical record matters. This is where I think there is some misunderstanding of oral history as a method of history. It’s also worth noting that how U.S. history textbooks have written about the pandemic has already been the subject of scholarly research (see Wayne Journell writing in 2024 in the Journal of Education).
WM: I haven’t had pushback, per se, but sometimes when my some of my subjects are still alive (since I look at very recent media history, such as the arrival of the computer and then the internet in newsrooms), I can get some interesting feedback from reviewers who were or are from the same generation of people I may have interviewed about their technology use. These experiences of course can vary quite a bit, and so occasionally I have had to remind editors and/or reviewers (not in Journalism History, to be clear), especially in more journalism studies journals, that oral history can produce a good representative sample, but that in most cases, it can’t be an exhaustive or total sample. Just like any other method, it needs context and explanation. That being said, I find it to be an exceptionally robust and helpful (maybe even occasionally fun!) way to interrogate even more-new history, including events of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (or even, as Teri Finneman and I found, with the c. 2020-22 pandemic). My encourage to my fellow media historians is to try to learn, at least, to incorporate the method into their research. It’s not for everyone, but it can really add depth and nuance to our work.
In his 2004 article for The Oral History Review, Mark Feldstein described journalism and oral history as “kissing cousins.”[4] To what extent do you find this true, or at least accurate? How would you explain the relationship, if there is one?
TF: This is very true, and I have an entire lecture built around explaining the similarities and differences, so it’s hard to summarize it in just a few sentences. Key differences include the legal paperwork involved, the control the subject has over the entire process, the fact oral histories span months of time from start to finish, the cost, and the need to find an archive to house all of the oral history materials at the end. As far as the interview, I tell my students, “This is tea with the queen,” not grabbing a 30-second soundbite, to contrast the differences in pacing. But, overall, they do have many similarities.
PRP: I’d expect journalism historians to be among our best oral historians, since so many of us come out of the professional journalistic tradition and were interviewers long before we were academic researchers. A lot of the skills for eliciting good stories transfer: mixing open-ended and closed-ended questions, listening carefully and following up to pull out the rich details from the most telling episodes, etc. I think a difference with most oral histories is their tendency to be more credulous, more solicitous, and less challenging of the subject’s position than many journalistic interviews. It’s possible both that more journalistic interviews (particularly of non-officials) could adopt a more oral history kind of stance, and that more oral history interviews could challenge their subjects a little more forcefully.
MMG: Again, Teri is spot on. As a method, oral history was initially treated as human subjects research and subject to IRB rules. Some universities still treat it as such. Either way, it is best practice to follow these protocols. Ensuring that interviewees, many of whom are being interviewed about how they responded to traumatic events, are properly safeguarded, is part of that protocol. Participants must be informed of their rights, and even their right to strike anything from the transcript they are uncomfortable with. It must be made clear to them that they are free to decline any question they don’t wish to answer.. So this is clearly not journalism. Gotcha isn’t part of this method. The interviewer must then check with other sources, as Perry emphasized, to contextualize, attempt to resolve conflicting stories, and fill in missing gaps, etc., as they should when using any other materials as the basis of their study.
In The Princeton Guide to Historical Research, Zachary M. Schrag notes: “Oral historians have the superpower of creating primary sources.”[2] More than a “superpower,” it is best practice for oral historians to create publicly accessible archives that other scholars can study.[3] How have you (or could we) take steps to create publicly accessible archives of oral history work? Are there existing oral history archives you have found useful?
TF: I have found state historical societies to be great to work with. I have archives in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. Another is through RJI at Mizzou and another is a massive website that Poynter built for my project with Will Mari. Frankly, if you just ask, historical societies are very helpful. They send you paperwork to sign and you ship over all your stuff in a Google folder. It’s quite easy, actually.
PRP: It’d be cool for the History Division and/or the American Journalism Historians Association to be able to develop sustainable infrastructure for building oral history repositories. The History Division had a good run with its multiyear podcast (thanks to Teri and many others), but the resources for keeping up projects like that are demanding and hard to sustain.
MMG: Some of my oral histories are housed at the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For my latest book project, I’m investigating possibilities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library.
WM: Just to echo Teri, but we’ve tried hard to make sure that our oral histories wind up in archives whenever possible, especially at the state and university level. In my classes, I have had students submit some of their media history research to our university archives, and that has made those same students excited and proud to have contributed to the historical record.
Are there any tools, tips, or strategies for doing the work of oral history that you’ve found particularly helpful? How do you collect, organize, and utilize the oral histories you work with?
TF: This is my favorite part. Finding an archive and writing a journal article is just the beginning, as far as I’m concerned, not the end. My oral histories have been turned into the Dakota Journalists podcast, a documentary on PBS in the Dakotas, and now two traveling museum exhibits. I also keep an eye out for when my subjects pass away to make sure their oral history transcripts get in the hands of local media to incorporate into news stories. As far as tips, always ask for too much in the legal paperwork. I did not do this the first time and had to go back and ask my original subjects to sign new forms. Thankfully, they were still living. But you may have no current plans to do a podcast or documentary or whatever, but I guarantee it is better to include everything under the sun you could possibly do with that oral history so that you are covered if you need it later. Another tip is to make sure you are taking notes during the oral history of things to double check during breaks, like name spellings. It did happen to me once that my subject died before we had finished going through her transcript, so it’s critical to get every little detail possible the day of the taping. My favorite how-to book is Don Ritchie’s Doing Oral History.
MMG: My latest book project started before the pandemic, and those interviews were in person and audio only. Post COVID, I’ve conducted all interviews on ZOOM and recorded them using both the audio and video function, with the interviewee’s permission. Be sure to pin the speaker so the focus remains on the interviewee. When I was a reporter, and preparing for an interview, I always followed best practice to gather what had already been written or produced about the subject, and to look at all public records. For breaking news, this wasn’t always possible to do. It’s difficult to prepare insightful questions if you don’t already have some grounding in the subject. By doing this, you will not only make the most of your interview time, but you will have made a good start at gathering some of the secondary sources required for context. Prepare a list of detailed questions, but listen carefully and ask needed follow-ups, even if doing so takes you away from your list of questions. If you don’t know where to start, consider attending an oral history workshop. The Voces Oral History Center at UT Austin offers an outstanding week-long Summer Institute, for instance. Check out the many resources available through the Oral History Association (OHA), especially their “Best Practices, Guidelines, and Toolkits” web page. Also, if you are looking for a stellar example of how the archival tool of oral history is used well with other primary and secondary sources to tell a compelling historical narrative, consider Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Norton, 2019). For an understanding of the theoretical constructs of oral history, I recommend Oral History Theory by Lynn Abrams.
WM: I have found that both Evernote and Notion have helped me to collect and organize my notes with oral history work. I have used both in my projects with international colleagues such as Juliette De Maeyer (along with other more prosaic tools such as Google Drive). I would also encourage my colleagues to check with their universities or colleges to see if they can provide software for transcription for free or at least a reduced educator rate. I have been able to get help for my students, as well, with access to those kinds of resources for their assignments.
[1] Zachary M. Schrag, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press, 2021), 133.
[2] Schrag, Princeton Guide, 183.
[3] Oral History Association, OHA Principles and Best Practices: Principles and Best Practices for Oral History (Oral History Association, 2025), 9.
[4] Mark Feldstein, “Kissing Cousins: Journalism and Oral History,” The Oral History Review 31, no. 1 (2004): 1-22