Learning the “Outsider” Profession: Serial Advice Columns in The Journalist

Abstract

This article explores the role a late nineteenth-century trade journal, The Journalist, played in disseminating standardized reporting practices and rules of behavior and in sorting labor away from already saturated markets. An examination of four, multi-part serials published by this trade weekly found they contained guidelines for defining, gathering, and writing news stories. However, this study also found the column writers gave pragmatic advice about coping with barriers to accepted reporting practices. In some cases, the authors showed beginners how to bend or otherwise successfully violate the rules, or counseled them to abandon professional standards when instructed to by editors and publishers. This indicates early news trade journals functioned as much as forums for building community and discussing why journalism could not attain the same sort of professional standards as law and medicine as they did agents of professionalization. Although this article continues media history's investigation of the professionalization of journalism, it presents evidence that even early practitioners recognized that this effort would not follow a linear path.