As I write this note, an army of springtime birds are singing in a cacophony of joy over the prospect of warmer weather. It is a song I can fully appreciate. There is something about springtime that brings such promise—and energy and joy. The seeds of last harvest, dormant all winter, are slowly pushing through the earth in new growth.
Research is much the same.
Ideas lay dormant, pushed aside by the tyranny of the urgent that is the academic life, then—after a restive moment—burst forth with potential to inform and expand our knowledge. It is work that helps us see our world in a new light. From a different angle.
As I was compiling the Spring edition of American Journalism, it struck me that the two fortieth anniversary essays in this issue both remind me of spring, in large part, because the authors dare us to see the world of possibility before us—rather than the things we already know.
It is safe to say that many historians are notorious for being late adaptors. Reluctant to embrace new technologies. Cynical of the latest and greatest. Some even eschew technology all together. Please note, this space is not designed to call that reluctance toward technology into question. Everyone has a different approach to their craft. Who am I to question that?
At the same time, I cannot resist a challenge to the willing to consider: What if?
What if research methods common to critical cultural studies could benefit historiographical approaches to the past?
What if artificial intelligence can assist us in culling through voluminous, digitized archives?
What if I applied these methods to my own research?
I find it impressive that two of our eight essays—from a challenge issued more than a year ago as part of a year-long fortieth anniversary celebration of the journal—would land so squarely in this vision-casing “what if” territory. (Talk about scholars from our community pushing the envelope and challenging us all to consider how new methods might inform our work.)
In his essay, “Historicizing Metajournalistic Discourse Analysis: Thinking Beyond Journalism About Journalism,” Michael Buozis challenges us to consider how the discipline of journalism history could be invigorated by researchers considering much broader conceptions of the actors, sites, and texts that constitute media history.
Meanwhile Meg Heckman and Giulia Taurino team up to demonstrate how “Shifting the Archival Gaze: A case for Leveraging Computational Methods to Uncover Media History Narratives” can utilize artificial intelligence through machine learning to catalog and make sense of the unpreceded number of digital materials now available to media historians. In their essay, Heckman and Taurino—a journalism professor and an AI researcher, respectively—describe their recent interdisciplinary efforts to use machine learning to explore a collection of roughly 5.7 million photographic negatives donated to their institution by the Boston Globe.
Both essays dare to ask what if. And I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did when I was preparing them for this issue.
Meanwhile, our original research plows challenging new ground as well.
In “‘Our Reporter Is Just Come From The Ruins’: Reporting Practices and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster,” Katrina Jesick Quinn and Mary M. Cronin revisit one of the most gruesome industrial disasters in US history to examine early breaking new reporting routines in the nineteenth century. Through the lens of the January 10, 1860, collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Quinn and Cronin evaluate how local, regional, and national newspapers utilized reporting strategies, story structures, and the journalistic standards throughout coverage of the incident.
Meanwhile, in “‘By Far the Best of Our Foreign Representatives:’ Vira B. Whitehouse and the Origins of Public Diplomacy,” Ayla Oden and John Maxwell Hamilton tell the story of how the Committee on Public Information’s efforts during World War I marked the beginning of American public diplomacy. They examine the role of suffragist Vira B. Whitehouse and her pioneering endeavors in Berne, Switzerland. In doing so, they put Whitehouse solidly into the historical record, both for her significant contributions to public diplomacy and her work as a suffrage leader with the movement in New York.
And Carolina Velloso uses the release of The Birth of a Nation through the mid-twentieth century, to examine how the film industry began featuring African Americans on the silver screen. Through the emergence of race films—major film productions created by African Americans and featuring Black artists—Velloso finds that many of these productions were frequently reported and reviewed on the pages of the Black press. She traces coverage of race films and in doing so, builds on literature from journalism and communication studies, as well as film studies to illustrate how the Black press fulfilled its role as an advocacy press and served its mission of racial uplift through its race film coverage.
Finally, associate editor Nicholas Hirshon continues his conversations on investigative journalism in an interview with Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate who ran for president of the United States four times and earlier this year, just before his eighty-ninth birthday, helped launch a non-profit newspaper in his hometown. In their discussion, Nader talks about meeting his childhood “hero,” the muckraker Upton Sinclair, castigates the New York Times for its “terrible, disgraceful” editorials during his 2000 presidential campaign, and offers a vision to support local journalism through a nonprofit model.