Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File

252 Pages·1995·14.088 MB·English

by  Hanno Hardt, Bonnie Brennen

Newsworkers
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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