“Bright and Inviolate”: Editorial–Business Divides in Early Twentieth-Century Journalism Textbooks

Abstract

Journalism in the United States, even in the midst of great change, continues a traditional separation between news and business operations. The origin of this divide and the metaphors used to describe it emerge from late nineteenth-century criticism of the press, as well as the consolidation of large metropolitan newspapers during that same era. In response to that criticism and inspired by new ideas of business efficiency and industrialized journalism, specialized business-management textbooks discussed a literal and figurative “wall” between business and news departments at newspapers. This study examines twelve of these texts, published between 1901 and 1955, for their extended discussion of this divide, in an effort to better understand how descriptions of an editorial–business barrier developed among journalists during this period of industrialized journalism. Some of the practical effects of the adoption of this metaphor, on both management and news workers, also are discussed.

Notes

David Boardman, “A Vow to Continue Impartial Reporting,” Seattle Times, October 20, 2012.

Jim Brunner and Andrew Garber, “Times Co. Criticized for Mc-Kenna, Gay-Marriage Ad Campaigns,” Seattle Times, October 17, 2012.

Dennis McDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 436–437.

Terence Smith, “Trouble at the LA Times,” PBS NewsHour, December 16, 1999; David Shaw, “Crossing the Line,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1999; McDougal, Privileged Son, 443, 445–447.

David Folkenflik, “Koch Brothers’ Newspaper Takeover Could Cause ‘Culture Clash,’” NPR, April 26, 2013, npr.org. Also see Amy Chozick, “Conservative Koch Brothers Turning Focus to Newspapers,” New York Times, April 20, 2013. The Koch brothers ultimately declined to buy the newspapers but said they remain interested in the media business.

The texts examined in this study are O. F. Byxbee, Establishing a Newspaper: A Handbook for the Prospective Publisher, Including Suggestions for the Financial Advancement of Existing Daily and Weekly Journals (Chicago: Inland Printer, 1901); John L. Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907); Don Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916); Phil C. Bing, The Country Weekly: A Manual for the Rural Journalist and for Students of the Country Field (New York: D. Appleton, 1917); Jason Rogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Editing, to Mechanical Production, to Circulation and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918); Emerson P. Harris and Florence H. Hooke, The Community Newspaper: Its Promise and Development (New York: D. Appleton, 1923); Buford O. Brown, Problems of Newspaper Publishing: With Special Reference to the Country Field, Including Weekly and Daily Newspapers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929); Thomas F. Barnhart, Weekly Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936); James E. Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937); Frank Thayer, Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938); Robert M. Neal, Editing the Small City Daily (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946); Frank W. Rucker and Herbert Lee Williams, Newspaper Organization and Management (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1955).

For the purposes of this study, a “specialized text” refers to a journalism textbook with a focus on management issues. These items were identified as part of a larger project that examined sixty-nine textbooks from the 1890s through the 1960s, using comprehensive bibliographies as well as the author's crosschecks with the books’ bibliographies. See Joseph Mirando, Journalism by the Book: An Interpretive Analysis of News Writing and Reporting Textbooks, 1867–1987 (PhD dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1992); Linda Steiner, Construction of Gender in Newsreporting Textbooks, 1890–1990 (Columbia, SC: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 1992). On the growth of journalism education, see Betty Medsger, “The Evolution of Journalism Education in the United States,” in Making Journalists, ed. Hugo de Burgh (New York: Routledge, 2005), 205–226; Joseph Mirando, “Objectivity Early On: Journalism Textbooks of the 1800s,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 16, no. 1 (2001): 23–32.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Gitte Gravengaard, “The Metaphors Journalists Live By: Journalists’ Conceptualization of Newswork,” Journalism 13, no. 8 (2012): 1067.

Ibid., 1066.

Warren Breed, The Newspaperman, News, and Society (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1952).

Gravengaard found that the metaphorical work speech used by journalists can represent conflicting role perceptions and values, such as the need for career positioning versus the public's need to know. Their conceptual metaphors can also be traced to the business models that fund journalism. Gravengaard, “The Metaphors Journalists Live By,” 1074, 1076.

Bonnie Brennen, “What the Hacks Say: The Ideological Prism of US Journalism Texts,” Journalism 1, no. 1 (2000): 106–113; Beate Josephi, “Journalism Education,” in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (New York: Routledge, 2008), 42–56; Albert Alton Sutton, Education for Journalism in the United States from Its Beginning to 1940 (New York: AMS Press, 1968).

Or, as Joseph Mirando explains, “The textbooks were intended to provide journalism with a set of ideals—not just the way journalism ‘should be’ practiced.” Mirando, Journalism by the Book, 10.

Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

In other industries during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, as JoAnne Yates reminds us, a fascination with efficiency led to a corresponding move to write down and systematize work processes in texts. In this case, textbooks written by and for journalists reflected existing journalistic practices and values. They weaved ethical discussions into their sections on how to manage advertising and how to best market newspapers to different audiences. JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12.

Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 81–112.

Ibid., 81, 88.

Ted Curtis Smythe, “The Reporter, 1880–1900: Working Conditions and Their Influence on the News,” Journalism History 7, no. 1 (1980): 1–10.

Baldasty, The Commercialization of News, 88–96.

Randal Sumpter, “‘Practical Reporting’: Late Nineteenth-Century Journalistic Standards and Rule Breaking,” American Journalism 30, no. 1 (2013): 44–64.

Daniel J. Leab, A Union of Individuals: The Formation of the American Newspaper Guild, 1933–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 229.

Ibid., 209, 215–216.

Will Irwin, Clifford F. Weigle, and David G. Clark, The American Newspaper (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969); see Irwin's part 12, “The Foe from Within,” but also part 10, “The Unhealthy Alliance”; part 11, “Our Kind of People”; and part 12, “The New Era.”

Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 215.

Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 217–221; Daniel C. Hallin, “Commercialism and Professionalism in the American News Media,” in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), 242–260.

Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Dover, 2010).

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Sinclair's position was perhaps in the minority, but his concerns about corporate control of journalism resonate today.

Tim Vos, “‘Homo Journalisticus’: Journalism Education's Role in Articulating the Objectivity Norm,” Journalism 13, no. 4 (2011): 435–449.

The author thanks Richard Kielbowicz for this and other helpful suggestions.

Vos, “‘Homo Journalisticus,’” 440.

Ibid., 443.

Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 221–222.

Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 89–90, 94–95, 100.

Ibid., 89; Oliver Knight, ed., I Protest: Selected Disquisitions of E. W. Scripps (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 198–214.

Tim Vos and You Li, “The Business Side of Journalism: A History of an Occupational Norm,” forthcoming. This study owes a debt to these authors’ work on the earlier development of a business–newsroom divide in American journalism.

Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 83. While fears about the “corporatization” of US newsrooms experienced a resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s, these concerns have long gripped the field, especially during periods of financial uncertainty.

Leo Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 290.

Vos and Li, “The Business Side of Journalism,” 11–12.

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 15.

Walter Williams and Frank L. Martin, The Practice of Journalism: A Treatise on Newspaper Making (Columbia, MO: Lucas Brothers, 1924), 17; Don Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishers, 1924), 443–444.

Vos and Li, “The Business Side of Journalism,” 15.

Ibid., 23–25.

Linda Lawson, Truth in Publishing Federal Regulation of the Press's Business Practices, 1880–1920 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 286.

Ibid., 287.

Ibid., 286.

Susan M. Kingsbury and Hornell Hart et al., Newspapers and the News: An Objective Measurement of Ethical and Unethical Behavior by Representative Newspapers (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1937).

Ibid.

Kingsbury and Hart, Newspapers and the News, 116.

Don Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916), 99.

Ibid., 98–99.

Ibid., 96–97.

Robert M. Neal, Editing the Small City Daily (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946), 106, 302–316.

Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade, 97–98.

Ibid., 103–104.

Ibid., 105–106.

John Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 305.

Ibid., 305.

Ibid., 305–306, 310–311.

Ibid., 257–258; Given comments on the health consequences for underpaid and overworked reporters, 259–260; and on editors’ ability to fire and hire at will, even as more experienced reporters were less susceptible to sudden dismissals, 261–262.

Ibid., 305.

Rogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Editing, to Mechanical Production, to Circulation, and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 77.

“Jason Rogers Passes at 61,” Rochester Evening Journal, April 27, 1932.

Rogers, Newspaper Building, 206–207, 230.

Ibid., 231.

Ibid., 166, 168.

Ibid., 232.

Ibid., 252.

Ibid., 169.

Donald Hornberger and Douglass Miller, Newspaper Organization (Delaware, OH: Bureau of Business Service, Ohio Wesleyan University, 1930), 3–4, 7–9.

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 9.

“The newspaper must be organized to perform similar functions [to a manufacturing company]. It obtains raw materials in the form of news, features and editorial ideas. This raw material is then processed, if you please, by adding ink and paper so that it becomes the finished product, the printed newspaper. The company must have a sales force to distribute its product and also to dispose of its advertising space.” Hornberger and Miller, Newspaper Organization, 13.

Ibid., 8–9.

Ibid., 17–18.

Ibid., 16; italics in the original text.

Ibid., 16.

Barnhart, Weekly Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 7–8; this and other management textbooks were often written with the assistance of other journalists and journalism professors—in this instance, Ralph Casey, a general-reporting textbook author and a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, who “not only read a large share of the manuscript and gave many useful suggestions but also gave constant encouragement for which the author is most grateful,” vi.

Ibid., 8.

Ibid., v.

Ibid., 11.

Ibid., 429–430.

Beth H. Garfrerick, “A History of Weekly Community Newspapers in the United States, 1900 to 1980” (PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 2009), 137.

Buford O. Brown, Problems of Newspaper Publishing: With Special Reference to the Country Field, Including Weekly and Daily Newspapers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 3.

Ibid., vii. Brown's editor, H. F. Harrington, himself a prominent journalism educator and textbook author, described it as “short on theoretical hokum … strong on practical shoptalk.” It was a “work-desk manual of instructions,” ix–x.

Ibid., 66–67, 69–70, 75.

Ibid., 69.

Frank Thayer, Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938).

Ibid., xi, xiii.

Ibid., 11–12.

Ibid., 27.

James Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), 26. Pollard's working life spans the majority of the time of this study (1894–1979). Scripps's model seems to have been respected by many reporters and reporters-turned-journalism-academics.

Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management, 19.

Ibid., 17.

Ibid., 17.

Ibid., 144–145, 222.

Ibid., 149.

Ibid., 153–154.

Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 286.

Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management, 19.

Ibid., 430.

Ibid., 432.

Brad Asher, “The Professional Vision: Conflicts over Journalism Education, 1900–1955,” American Journalism 11, no. 4 (1994): 304–320.

James E. Pollard, “Who's a Journalist? Writers No Longer Have Sole Claim to Title Many Have Scorned in Past,” Quill, November 1937, 9, 20.

Ibid., 28.

Brad Stone, “Why Jeff Bezos Bought the Washington Post,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 8, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013–08–08/why-jeff-bezos-bought-the-em-washington-post-em.

Justin Ellis, “Chris Hughes on Turning the New Republic into a Technology Company That Adapts to Its Readers,” Nieman Journalism Lab, February 5, 2013, www.niemanlab.org.

Ryan Tate, “Marc Andreessen Thinks the News Business Is About to Grow 1,000 Percent,” Wired, February 27, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/02/big-boom-news-change-read; Joshua Benton, “The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report Is One of the Key Documents of This Media Age,” Nieman Journalism Lab, May 15, 2014, www.niemanlab.org.

Marc Andreessen, “The Future of the News Business: A Monumental Twitter Stream All in One Place,” http://a16z.com/2014/02/25/future-of-news-business.

Hallin, “Commercialism and Professionalism,” 245–246.

John F. Redmond, “Newsprint and Costs Occupy IDPA [Inland Daily Press Association],” Editor & Publisher, February 19, 1920, 8.

Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).

Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 46–48. Also see Matthew Powers, “What's New in the Sociology of News? Connecting Current Journalism Research to the Classic Newsroom Studies” (paper, International Communication Association annual meeting, Boston, May 2011).

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Notes on contributors

Will Mari

Will Mari is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, [email protected].