Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2023.2203022
G. Perreault, Leonardo Caberlon, Cameron Stuart
ABSTRACT Gaming journalism began its existence under attack from the rest of the journalistic field and from US culture as a result of its audience: young, diverse, and progressive. This study argues that early gaming magazines (n = 150) repaired the gaming paradigm during the development of gaming’s mainstream acceptance from 1991–1995 by challenging stereotypes of gamers: imagining gamers as diverse, social, and mature.
{"title":"Audience Repair as Paradigm Repair: Fixing the ‘Gamer’ in Games Journalism","authors":"G. Perreault, Leonardo Caberlon, Cameron Stuart","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2023.2203022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2023.2203022","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Gaming journalism began its existence under attack from the rest of the journalistic field and from US culture as a result of its audience: young, diverse, and progressive. This study argues that early gaming magazines (n = 150) repaired the gaming paradigm during the development of gaming’s mainstream acceptance from 1991–1995 by challenging stereotypes of gamers: imagining gamers as diverse, social, and mature.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"95 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42286157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2023.2195346
M. Socolow
Network television news, in the United States, has been profitable since its inception. Yet network executives, scholars, and journalists continually repeat the myth that the commercial television networks historically provided news as a money-losing public service in the public interest. In testimony before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress, in public relations materials, and in memoirs and interviews, network news employees asserted, and continue to claim, that sacrificing advertising revenue while absorbing the costs incurred in producing news programs proved networks operated in the public interest. Yet much evidence reveals the inaccuracy of such assertions. News programming on American television attracted significant advertising revenue from its inception in the 1940s, as the success of commercial news shows such as NBC’s Camel News Caravan and CBS’s Television News with Douglas Edwards (sponsored by Oldsmobile), proved. But TV news only matured into the most lucrative form of commercial television programming during the 1960s. That transformative decade began the year John F. Kennedy was elected president, and ended in 1970, when ten years of overall television advertising revenue growth plateaued as the American economy began to retrench. The decade was filled with sensational and historic events relayed—often live, through innovative new technologies—directly into the homes of the American citizenry. The American populace’s increasing TV news habit during the 1960s attracted a growing roster of advertisers and sponsors who funded the expansion of news divisions, an increase in news programs, and, ultimately, the growing profitability of network TV news. The crucial moment in American broadcast journalism’s commercial evolution occurred in November 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. The coverage of the assassination and the ensuing drama involving the president’s funeral, and the murder of presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, riveted a remarkably high percentage of Americans to their television sets. The reliability and professionalism of broadcast journalism over those days intensified, and propelled, the burgeoning attraction of commercial sponsors to television news. Within two years, news would emerge as the most lucrative genre of broadcasting on the commercial airwaves—with top news shows generating more gross advertising revenue for the broadcasting corporations than entertainment or sport programming. This distinct aspect of American television’s economic history has been largely ignored in both scholarship and public commentary on TV news. Instead, the myth that news failed to earn corporate profits prior to the emergence of the CBS News program 60 Minutes in the
{"title":"Commercial Television’s Secret Goldmine: The Hidden Riches Generated by US Network TV News, 1960–1970","authors":"M. Socolow","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2023.2195346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2023.2195346","url":null,"abstract":"Network television news, in the United States, has been profitable since its inception. Yet network executives, scholars, and journalists continually repeat the myth that the commercial television networks historically provided news as a money-losing public service in the public interest. In testimony before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress, in public relations materials, and in memoirs and interviews, network news employees asserted, and continue to claim, that sacrificing advertising revenue while absorbing the costs incurred in producing news programs proved networks operated in the public interest. Yet much evidence reveals the inaccuracy of such assertions. News programming on American television attracted significant advertising revenue from its inception in the 1940s, as the success of commercial news shows such as NBC’s Camel News Caravan and CBS’s Television News with Douglas Edwards (sponsored by Oldsmobile), proved. But TV news only matured into the most lucrative form of commercial television programming during the 1960s. That transformative decade began the year John F. Kennedy was elected president, and ended in 1970, when ten years of overall television advertising revenue growth plateaued as the American economy began to retrench. The decade was filled with sensational and historic events relayed—often live, through innovative new technologies—directly into the homes of the American citizenry. The American populace’s increasing TV news habit during the 1960s attracted a growing roster of advertisers and sponsors who funded the expansion of news divisions, an increase in news programs, and, ultimately, the growing profitability of network TV news. The crucial moment in American broadcast journalism’s commercial evolution occurred in November 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. The coverage of the assassination and the ensuing drama involving the president’s funeral, and the murder of presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, riveted a remarkably high percentage of Americans to their television sets. The reliability and professionalism of broadcast journalism over those days intensified, and propelled, the burgeoning attraction of commercial sponsors to television news. Within two years, news would emerge as the most lucrative genre of broadcasting on the commercial airwaves—with top news shows generating more gross advertising revenue for the broadcasting corporations than entertainment or sport programming. This distinct aspect of American television’s economic history has been largely ignored in both scholarship and public commentary on TV news. Instead, the myth that news failed to earn corporate profits prior to the emergence of the CBS News program 60 Minutes in the","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"91 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49648528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2023.2195347
Raymond McCaffrey
{"title":"Covering Terror at the 1972 Summer Olympics: ABC Sports and the Evolution of Live Broadcast News","authors":"Raymond McCaffrey","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2023.2195347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2023.2195347","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"87 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46002441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2161800
Anna E. Lindner, Michael Fuhlhage, D. Frazier, Keena S. Neal
ABSTRACT The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 raised the stakes for antislavery Whites and people of African descent in the United States by making resistance to slave catchers a federal crime. This study uses historical theme analysis to examine the rhetoric employed by newspapers in the Detroit River Borderland, which connected Michigan to Canada West, to promote or resist the Fugitive Slave Act from 1851 to 1852. While the Canada-based Voice of the Fugitive, edited by the formerly enslaved Henry Bibb, and the Michigan Christian Herald, a Baptist antislavery newspaper in Detroit, argued that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional and immoral, the proslavery Detroit Free Press supported the Act. These differing stances evince the divisiveness of the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been developed as a compromise measure a decade before the US was divided by civil war.
{"title":"“If Ever Saints Wept and Hell Rejoiced, It Must Have Been Over the Passage of That Law”: The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River Borderland Newspapers, 1851-1852","authors":"Anna E. Lindner, Michael Fuhlhage, D. Frazier, Keena S. Neal","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2161800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2161800","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 raised the stakes for antislavery Whites and people of African descent in the United States by making resistance to slave catchers a federal crime. This study uses historical theme analysis to examine the rhetoric employed by newspapers in the Detroit River Borderland, which connected Michigan to Canada West, to promote or resist the Fugitive Slave Act from 1851 to 1852. While the Canada-based Voice of the Fugitive, edited by the formerly enslaved Henry Bibb, and the Michigan Christian Herald, a Baptist antislavery newspaper in Detroit, argued that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional and immoral, the proslavery Detroit Free Press supported the Act. These differing stances evince the divisiveness of the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been developed as a compromise measure a decade before the US was divided by civil war.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"28 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42916671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2161787
Glen Feighery
ABSTRACT This study examines news coverage of a federal project that resulted in the building of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River and sparked an environmental controversy. The project pitted boosters against conservationists, and this research illustrates how western newspapers promoted growth through dams and irrigation. Acknowledging the region in which several newspapers operated, this study uses New Western History to better understand journalism history by highlighting the harsh landscape and the persistence of pioneer values in the 1950s. This research also introduces a new element of environmental journalism history by adding to understanding of such reporting in the 1950s and by approaching the dam controversy from the perspective of journalism rather than environmentalism. Whether newspapers focused on growth and prosperity or preserving natural beauty, their coverage reflected the complexity of the region and its ecosystem.
{"title":"Wear the Blue Star: Frontier Values vs. Environmentalism in News Coverage of Colorado River Dams, 1954-1956","authors":"Glen Feighery","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2161787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2161787","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study examines news coverage of a federal project that resulted in the building of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River and sparked an environmental controversy. The project pitted boosters against conservationists, and this research illustrates how western newspapers promoted growth through dams and irrigation. Acknowledging the region in which several newspapers operated, this study uses New Western History to better understand journalism history by highlighting the harsh landscape and the persistence of pioneer values in the 1950s. This research also introduces a new element of environmental journalism history by adding to understanding of such reporting in the 1950s and by approaching the dam controversy from the perspective of journalism rather than environmentalism. Whether newspapers focused on growth and prosperity or preserving natural beauty, their coverage reflected the complexity of the region and its ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"45 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43342532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2161866
Edgar C. Simpson
ABSTRACT In the months after the US Supreme Court struck down the doctrine of separate but equal in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Mississippi legislature passed a series of laws designed to thwart desegregation. Among them was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission. This study examines the commission’s actions within the context of the public sphere and its attempts to spy on and intimidate White state journalists. This study argues that examining how the commission functioned as a particularly nefarious manifestation of White supremacy within the context of public information is vital to understanding how debate and policy can be shaped.
{"title":"Manipulating the Sphere: Mississippi’s Post-Brown Offensive Against White Journalists","authors":"Edgar C. Simpson","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2161866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2161866","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the months after the US Supreme Court struck down the doctrine of separate but equal in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Mississippi legislature passed a series of laws designed to thwart desegregation. Among them was the creation of the state Sovereignty Commission. This study examines the commission’s actions within the context of the public sphere and its attempts to spy on and intimidate White state journalists. This study argues that examining how the commission functioned as a particularly nefarious manifestation of White supremacy within the context of public information is vital to understanding how debate and policy can be shaped.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"4 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42686765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2161809
Jeanne S. Criswell, Robert H. Gobetz, F. E. May
ABSTRACT Gannett’s purchase of the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star in 2000 created fertile and historically uncommon conditions for considering ownership’s impact on news coverage. This study provides quantitative evidence that a local newspaper’s quality before an ownership change substantially influences whether a new ownership model will have a positive, negative, or neutral effect. The two newspapers’ similar characteristics, shared ownership history, and simultaneous purchase undergird this study’s quantitative evidence and reduce the influence of variables that could account for inconsistencies in previous content analyses, including those specifically examining the effects of a Gannett purchase. In this case, Gannett ownership had a significantly more detrimental impact on the Republic than on the Star. The study also suggests implications for the USA Today Network and the evolutionary arc of commercial journalism, particularly in view of the Gannett and GateHouse merger.
{"title":"The Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star: A Comparative Analysis of Content Changes After Purchase by Gannett","authors":"Jeanne S. Criswell, Robert H. Gobetz, F. E. May","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2161809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2161809","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Gannett’s purchase of the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star in 2000 created fertile and historically uncommon conditions for considering ownership’s impact on news coverage. This study provides quantitative evidence that a local newspaper’s quality before an ownership change substantially influences whether a new ownership model will have a positive, negative, or neutral effect. The two newspapers’ similar characteristics, shared ownership history, and simultaneous purchase undergird this study’s quantitative evidence and reduce the influence of variables that could account for inconsistencies in previous content analyses, including those specifically examining the effects of a Gannett purchase. In this case, Gannett ownership had a significantly more detrimental impact on the Republic than on the Star. The study also suggests implications for the USA Today Network and the evolutionary arc of commercial journalism, particularly in view of the Gannett and GateHouse merger.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"49 1","pages":"61 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41976730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2115734
Lorraine Ahearn, Barbara Friedman
ABSTRACT Ideological clashes over race in American memory reveal an existential divide in journalism, between an ethos of activism and the normative rituals of objectivity. This study examines a crisis of memory that occurred upon a newspaper’s centennial in the 1980s alongside mainstream commemorations of the US civil rights movement amid an age of apology and backlash. The Birmingham News, a White newspaper that in the 1960s used proximity to a national story to conceal rather than bear witness, a generation later sought to reposition itself in a radically changed environment. This study, building on the scholarship of journalism as a site of collective memory, analyzes how a news organization arbitrated a reckoning with the past and its own professional failure. We analyze the strategies by which the News sought forgiveness and redress, and thereby sought to reclaim authority. The case illustrates how notions of journalistic legitimacy collide with the project of truth and reconciliation, and how journalists find a way forward by refashioning collective memory to navigate the present.
{"title":"A Commemorative Bind: How the Birmingham News Redressed Past Journalistic Failure through Contemporary Civil Rights Memory","authors":"Lorraine Ahearn, Barbara Friedman","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2115734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2115734","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ideological clashes over race in American memory reveal an existential divide in journalism, between an ethos of activism and the normative rituals of objectivity. This study examines a crisis of memory that occurred upon a newspaper’s centennial in the 1980s alongside mainstream commemorations of the US civil rights movement amid an age of apology and backlash. The Birmingham News, a White newspaper that in the 1960s used proximity to a national story to conceal rather than bear witness, a generation later sought to reposition itself in a radically changed environment. This study, building on the scholarship of journalism as a site of collective memory, analyzes how a news organization arbitrated a reckoning with the past and its own professional failure. We analyze the strategies by which the News sought forgiveness and redress, and thereby sought to reclaim authority. The case illustrates how notions of journalistic legitimacy collide with the project of truth and reconciliation, and how journalists find a way forward by refashioning collective memory to navigate the present.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"48 1","pages":"283 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45513225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00947679.2022.2124764
Joseph P. Jones, Earnest L. Perry
ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the Chicago Defender and its largest national sponsor, the tobacco industry, from 1947–1975. As a member of the Black press during an age of increasing civil rights activism and intensified media competition, the Defender had difficulty attracting national commercial sponsorship. Tobacco companies were the lone exception and patronage meant more than advertising space. Analyzing editorials, articles, feature columns, advertising, letters to the editor, and internal tobacco industry documents, the authors found a purposeful commercial sponsor given a disproportionate voice. The Defender provided tobacco companies access to a constituting force of the African American 1 social imaginary and an outlet to embed themselves in the African American community and Black identity. Tobacco executives intentionally targeted Black media outlets, and sponsorship extended far beyond the Defender. Placed in historical context and considering an advocacy press’s primary role of serving a community, the authors question the independence allotted by such funding. By studying the best traditions of the Black press—and how it was influenced by its most important commercial sponsor—this study reaffirms journalism’s foundational purpose as a principled and inclusive tool of democratic worldmaking.
{"title":"Smoke and Mirrors: The Chicago Defender, Tobacco Sponsorship, and the Health of the African American Public Sphere","authors":"Joseph P. Jones, Earnest L. Perry","doi":"10.1080/00947679.2022.2124764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2022.2124764","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the Chicago Defender and its largest national sponsor, the tobacco industry, from 1947–1975. As a member of the Black press during an age of increasing civil rights activism and intensified media competition, the Defender had difficulty attracting national commercial sponsorship. Tobacco companies were the lone exception and patronage meant more than advertising space. Analyzing editorials, articles, feature columns, advertising, letters to the editor, and internal tobacco industry documents, the authors found a purposeful commercial sponsor given a disproportionate voice. The Defender provided tobacco companies access to a constituting force of the African American 1 social imaginary and an outlet to embed themselves in the African American community and Black identity. Tobacco executives intentionally targeted Black media outlets, and sponsorship extended far beyond the Defender. Placed in historical context and considering an advocacy press’s primary role of serving a community, the authors question the independence allotted by such funding. By studying the best traditions of the Black press—and how it was influenced by its most important commercial sponsor—this study reaffirms journalism’s foundational purpose as a principled and inclusive tool of democratic worldmaking.","PeriodicalId":38759,"journal":{"name":"Journalism history","volume":"48 1","pages":"303 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43613319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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