Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File PDF
Preview Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File
Newsworkers This page intentionally left blank Newsworkers Toward a History of the Rank and File Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, editors University of Minnesota Press M IN NE Minneapolis SO TA London Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newsworkers : toward a history of the rank and file / Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, editors. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2706-1 (he) ISBN 0-8166-2707-X (pb) 1. Press—History. 2. Mass media—History. 3. Reporters and reporting. 4. Press—United States—History. 5. Mass media—United States—History. 6. Reporters and reporting—United States—History. I. Hardt, Hanno. II. Brennen, Bonnie. PN4781.N37 1995 070.9—dc20 95-13849 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Introduction Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen vii 1 / Without the Rank and File: Journalism History, Media Workers, and Problems of Representation Hanno Hardt 1 2 / Discursive Strategies of Exclusion: The Ideological Construc- tion of Newsworkers Elizabeth (Elli) Lester 30 3 / The Emergence of the Reporter: Mechanization and the Devaluation of Editorial Workers Marianne Salcetti 48 4 / Cultural Discourse of Journalists: The Material Conditions of Newsroom Labor Bonnie Brennen 75 5 / The Site of Newsroom Labor: The Division of Editorial Practices William S. Solomon 110 6 / Words against Images: Positioning Newswork in the Age of Photography Barbie Zelizer 135 v vi / Newsworkers 7 / Alter native Visions: The Intellectual Heritage of Nonconformist Journalists in Canada David R. Spencer 160 8 / Newsboys: The Exploitation of "Little Merchants" by the Newspaper Industry Jon Bekken 190 Contributors 227 Index 229 Introduction Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen The traditional construction of media history has relied on notions of demo- cracy, progress, and community leadership to produce the image of an institu- tion that has secured the place of journalism in the annals of the United States. Current attempts to modernize the representation of media history through widely used textbooks repeat traditional views of what constitutes a history of the press; they present ideologically predisposed accounts that fail to consider issues of work and class. The result has been a history of institutional power without any consideration of the rank and file and their contribution to the social and political empowerment of contemporary media industries. This project is an effort to recover an alternative media history that ad- dresses the historical place of newsworkers and the role of labor in the rise of media capitalism. It addresses primarily the period between 1890 and 1940, perhaps the most eventful and dramatic period in the rise of the American press, as it relates to the commodification of news and follows commercial in- terests. It was also a time in which the relationship between technology and democracy was defined by "mass" communication and used to explain progress and freedom in American society. Thus, the rise of the mass press coincides with the industrialization of the United States and the emergence of the working class, which was strength- ened by the flow of immigration and the intensity of urbanization. But because its existence and influence relied on the well-being of the urban culture, the power of the working class faltered with the advancement of cap- italism and throughout periods of economic depression, which first began in the 1870s. Although the American labor movement advanced steadily throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, to protect its members it settled for class collaboration in industry and wel- comed the middle-class reform movements that occupied the Roosevelt,Taft, and Wilson administrations. Yet, job security and the protection of workers vii viii / Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen against sickness or unemployment, for instance, remained an ideal, albeit a lofty one, throughout the 1920s. Newspapers embraced the push for industri- alization as a path toward economic progress and expressed the sentiments of the business community. When the press emerged from the Great Depression, it also reflected the new structural patterns of industrialization in mergers and consolidations that resulted in part from dwindling circulation figures and the collapse of many newspapers. Its ownership frequently displayed a conserva- tive, anti-New Deal attitude, particularly toward the unionization of individu- alistic and poorly paid newsworkers and attempts under the terms of the child labor laws to stop the hiring of underage newsboys. Newsworkers were also caught in the rise of journalism as mass enter- tainment. They served the increasing demands for sensationalism, which cre- ated conformity, diffused partisan interests, and produced the realities by which society followed the visions of corporate America in the name of free- dom of the press. Their middle-class backgrounds or ambitions were de- flected, despite promises of professionalism, and squashed by the social and economic realities of newswork within a social and political climate that fos- tered industrial growth and led to the triumph of business interests. Their own voices were rarely heard and their story remains to be told. This book includes a collection of eight original essays by authors who share an interest in the need for a critical media history and a different vision of the press as a place of employment, an environment of work, and a site of struggle over conditions of labor and ideas of freedom. A history of newsworkers not only explains the nature and extent of in- dustrial growth in the newspaper industry, but also defines progress in terms of human capital, that is, the investment of labor, knowledge, and experience in the service of media ownership. In fact, most of the contributions to this book share an understanding of the centrality of newsworkers and class con- sciousness for the making of a history of newswork. A comprehensive ap- proach to the history of newswork would include those taking part in all the activities—ranging from typographical workers and printers and their unions to clerical workers and others—involved in the production of newspapers. However, the concept of newsworkers, as it emerges in this book, recognizes primarily individual and collective actors in the editorial process whose work is based on professional practices that are largely defined and enforced by press ownership. However, the contributors also acknowledge the impor- tance of those whose primary responsibility has been the actual distribution of newspapers under the rules and regulations of press management. Both newsworkers and newsboys are part of a working-class history; they share the Introduction / ix experience of work under the institutional constraints of a newspaper indus- try and the process of absorbing such experiences in cultural terms under the specific conditions of their social and economic existence. In this sense, the essays in this book incorporate a notion of class consciousness based on E. P. Thompson's definition of class as a historical phenomenon that occurs in human relationships over periods of time, through which patterns develop in ideas, relationships, and institutions. Thompson, whose contributions to a cultural approach to labor history are widely recognized, guides this alterna- tive history of the American press. The volume suggests that the fundamental nature of a history of class consciousness in the development of the American press is an essential chap- ter in the development of public communication. By doing so, it creates a vis- ibility for those whose work has shaped contemporary media and addresses the continuing need for an understanding of their history among others who will contribute to the economic and political growth of the press with their own labor. Traditional press historians have concentrated primarily on the structure of the institution and its major forces as well as on the importance of protect- ing content, instead of addressing the issue of production in terms of labor and newsworkers.They have done so under ideological conditions that have generated a top-down history of the press that privileged property and own- ership at the expense of an understanding of newswork. This book addresses the need for a history of newsworkers by focusing on a wide range of issues that relate to the conditions of journalism history as well as to the professional practices of newsroom workers and others in their specific historical situation. The result is a series of essays that provide indi- vidual visions of newsworkers and collectively offer possibilities for a recon- ceptualization of press history as a history of work. The introductory essay, by Hanno Hardt, explores the conditions of media history in the context of intellectual and theoretical developments in American historiography, its marginal existence, despite the recognized importance of communication in the development of the United States, and the challenges of theories of culture and society that have affected considera- tions of media and communication across a number of disciplines. Hardt concludes that the blind spot of American media historians remains their in- ability to react ideologically and politically against a persisting and over- whelming feeling of homogeneity, wholeness, and a sense of singular purpose that permeates the general histories of American journalism at the expense of
The list of books you might like
