Representations of Journalistic Professionalism: 1865-1900
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REPRESENTATIONS OF JOURNALISTIC PROFESSIONALISM: 1865-1900 by CHALET K. SEIDEL Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Kimberly Emmons Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2010 ! 1 ! DEDICATION I did this for me. ! 2 ! TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................4 Abstract ..................................................................................................................................5 Introduction: Locating the History of Journalistic Professionalism.......................................7 Chapter One: Editorial Brains and Reportorial Brawn in the Corporatized Newsroom.............................................................................................40 Chapter Two: The Representation of Journalism as an Apprenticeship to Literature........................................................................................78 Chapter Three: The Representation of Journalism as a Form of Entrepeneurship.............................................................................................122 Chapter Four: The Representation of Journalism as a Form of Knowledge Work ..........................................................................................151 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................189 Works Cited........................................................................................................................199 ! 3 ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to the members of my dissertation committee. Gary Stonum’s advice and challenging questions helped shape this project from the beginning. Molly Berger has been both a mentor and friend during my time at Case and I am grateful for her time and the expertise she contributed so generously. Thrity Umrigar stepped in during a crucial stage of the process. This project would not have come to fruition without the careful reading, encouragement, and guidance provided by my chair, Kimberly Emmons. Her grace and professionalism are an inspiration. I am especially grateful to Martha Woodmansee. Her course on Authorship Studies launched my research and her guidance gave this project shape. I wish to thank all my professors in the English Department, particularly Kurt Koenigsburger who has been a source of advice, encouragement, and much needed reality checks since my first semester on campus. I am grateful to Case’s School of Graduate Studies for providing travel and research funding. I have enjoyed tremendous support and camaraderie from many including my peers at Case; my friends in Lafayette, Indiana; and my colleagues at Westfield State University. I am especially grateful to Jenny Johnstone and Sarah Rubin, both gifted with wit, compassion, and excellent comic timing. Jamie McDaniel was my travel buddy during the journey from coursework to completion and I look forward to sharing the many successes I know he will achieve. Morgan Reitmeyer, Danielle Cordaro, and the unfailingly generous grad students in Purdue’s Rhetoric and Composition program kept me afloat when I was far from home. My big-hearted colleagues and friends at Westfield State College helped me balance the demands of a tenure-track position while finishing this project. Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful for the love and support of my family, especially my parents, Edward and Janice Seidel. My partner and nemesis, Ehren Pflugfelder, has had to endure more conversations about late nineteenth-century journalism than any person should have to. He has been my friend, sounding board, and my reward when the day’s work is done. Words are not enough. ! 4 ! Representations of Journalistic Professionalism: 1865-1900 Abstract by CHALET K. SEIDEL This dissertation examines the development of journalism as a writing profession in late nineteenth-century America, paying particular attention to the reporters and correspondents who composed the bulk of the newspaper's news content. Journalism was becoming a viable profession in this period and writing, the journalist’s primary occupational duty, became an important and contested component in articulations of journalists’ professional identities. Such articulations form a discourse of professionalism that shaped both the identity of the journalist as well as the value of his writing. I examine this discourse through nonfiction and literary texts including journalism textbooks, speeches by prominent editors and publishers, trade journals published by and for journalists, and fiction by former journalists. In this corpus, I identify three representations of journalistic professionalism circulating in this period: representations of the journalist as a literary apprentice, as an entrepreneur, and as a knowledge worker. Each manifests a different way of conceptualizing authorship, the nature of writing, and the writer’s relation to the text. For example, dual conceptions of writing as both a learnable craft and an expressive art shape the representation of journalism as a form of literary apprenticeship. Aspiring literary writers were encouraged to apprentice in journalism in order to develop their technical skills, yet cautioned against ! 5 ! staying too long lest their expressive faculties become too blunted to create art. The entrepreneurial model conceptualized the journalist as a businessperson profiting from his highly marketable writing skills. While the representation of journalism as a form of knowledge work also positioned journalists as purveyors of a valuable commodity, writing in this model was viewed as a transparent vehicle for the transmission of information, separating form and content and subordinating writing skill to information gathering ability. Representations of journalistic professionalism are shaped by multiple, sometimes competing, conceptions of writing, which, in turn, are subject to the shaping influence of social and cultural forces like emerging technologies and educational regimes. All of the representations I identify existed simultaneously; collectively, they represent the raw materials from which journalists forged their professional identities in this period and which continue to influence conceptions of journalistic professionalism today. ! 6 ! Introduction: Locating the History of Journalistic Professionalism In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the typical newspaper was a four-page weekly produced by a single editor who likely also served as the printer and publisher. By the end of the century, New York’s urban dailies were sprawling enterprises bringing readers the “daily history of the world” in multiple editions employing hundreds of editors and writers, not to mention the legions of employees in the production and business departments. The extraordinary growth and reach of daily newspapers was enabled in part by communication technologies like the telegraph and typewriter, as well as by innovative print technologies like the steam-driven rotary press, the linotype typesetting machine, and the stereotype plate, all of which helped make printing exponentially faster and more economical than it had been only decades before. At the same time, cooperative news agencies like the Associated Press were making it easier for newspapers to gather news. Addressing students at Union College in 1893, The (New York) Sun editor and publisher Charles Dana extolled these developments in the methods and means of newspaper production. He predicted that they would revolutionize the practice of journalism, “raising it to a higher dignity than it has ever occupied” (64). He projected a bright future for the journalist, a figure whose occupational outlook and professional standing was dramatically transformed in the late nineteenth century. For the first time, daily news journalism offered a career option attractive to large numbers of middle-class persons such as the college students Dana addressed. This dissertation examines the development of the daily news journalist as a writing professional in late nineteenth-century America, paying particular attention to newswriters, the reporters and correspondents who wrote the paper’s news content. There have been numerous studies of genres of journalistic writing in this period, as well as of specific groups ! 7 ! of newswriters, such as war or foreign correspondents. My aim is not to contest this historical record. Rather, by examining the discourse through which the journalist’s professional role was articulated my analysis aims to uncover the ideological underpinnings of the multiple, competing conceptions of journalism that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. I have chosen to analyze a variety of nonfiction and literary texts from the period spanning roughly the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the nineteenth century because this is the period in which the journalist’s professional role was beginning to crystallize. The distinct, hierarchically organized occupational roles that today constitute the taken-for-granted structure of the modern newsroom are actually a historically recent invention, developing in the last half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the hierarchical roles developed rapidly as emerging communication, printing, and transportation technologies radically remade the practices of journalism.