The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2021)
Describe the focus of your book.
The focus of the book is on the lived experiences of rank-and-file news workers in and out of the newsroom spaces of the interwar years and early Cold War. I really wanted to show the development of the idea of “the newsroom” in the generations leading up to the newsrooms observed by Gans and Tuchman in the 1970s, and taking up the work of early journalism-studies scholars and media historians such as A.M. Lee, as well as the more recent work of Bonnie Brennen, Linda Steiner and Ted Curtis Smythe.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I was doing research on journalism textbooks while working with my adviser, Richard Kielbowicz, at the University of Washington. And these texts kept describing these dynamic, slightly crazy, and definitely already mythologized spaces that I knew from reading journalists’ memoirs. But they were also real, often exclusive, sometimes harsh, but ironically beloved spaces. And so I wanted to find out what they were really like, as best as one can, as physical spaces with a corresponding culture. But I couldn’t find a comprehensive history of the newsroom anywhere! There were lots of short, capsule-style histories, and some scholars, like Fred Fedler, but also Julia Guarneri, Michael Stamm and Aurora Wallace, had written these great, materiality-centered histories of news production and buildings. And so I wrote the book I wished I could have used to answer my questions, if that makes sense.
What archives or research materials did you use?
I used Quill, published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Editor & Publisher (now mostly scanned by the Internet Archive, and available online, just not in color), and the American Newspaper Guild’s Reporter. I also used the annual reports of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the American Society of News Editors, and other trade groups (and their publications), along with memoirs, textbooks and government documents from the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and the regional National Archives located in Seattle.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
As newsrooms change, getting smaller, more mobile, or even closing altogether (with journalists once again, as they did in the 18th century, working from their homes or coffee shops), I wanted to talk about why these spaces mattered and how they both reflected their temporal, cultural and societal contexts, and how they shaped journalism as we know it. That includes great things — holding governments and corporations to account — but also bad things, like being distinctly unfriendly places for women and people of color for many years. That would change by the end of the century. But their legacy is complex, like all human institutions. They represented a kind of precursor to the information society we live in today.
But to summarize the relevance for the present moment: The industrial journalism of the 20th century and big, metro newsrooms grew up together, influenced by forces such as unionization and early portable technologies (i.e. early mobile tech). While many of the examples of these large newsrooms may go away, I think they’ll always be a role for some kind of physical newsroom space, even if it’s a small one. And so again I wanted to show where that ideal and that idea had come from, to help understand where they may be going.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting book projects?
I had originally wanted to tell the story of the newsroom right on through the 20th century, the “entire thing,” as it were. That would have been too much (as it is, it took me nearly five years to finish the project). Richard wisely suggested cutting things off in the 1960s, as other scholars had and have done a great job of telling the newsroom’s story since, including folks like Matthew Pressman.
And so I guess my advice would be to be ok with stopping at a certain point. There’s plenty of research to go around. Ultimately, a lot of what I wanted to do in the original longer version turned out to be better in my two books for Routledge, that function as a kind of pair of short sequels; the first being a history of newsroom computerization (A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies, 2019), and a forthcoming book (early next year) on the history of the news industry and the internet (wish me luck!).