Comm455/History of Journalism

In class, we like to talk about how we’ve come full-circle in many aspects of news coverage. Using the Internet, we have expanded our “Edge,” much like people did hundreds of years ago with the invention of written news. Our wire services are influenced by a collaboration between New York newspapers, who sent reporters on […]

Chapter Two of Michael Schudson‘s “Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers” (see picture of Schudson below), discusses the bitterness between William Randolph Hearst and Richard Harding Davis over a story in Cuba (1897) where three Cuban women on an American ship was  searched and stripped by male Spanish officials; Davis never states that the Cuban women were searched by men.  Source: Wikipedia      While, the Cuban women […]

“American Journalism has been regularly criticized for failing to be ‘objective.’”  The opening lines of Michael Schudson’s “Discovering the News.”  If Lt. Colonel Slade heard those words, he would surely reply with, “This is such a crock of shit,” like he did in “Scent of a Woman” to the idea of objectivity.  Michael Schudson. UCSD.edu   The […]

When thinking about ethics or ethical standards, we sometimes over look these standards that good journalists and reporters follow every day when pursuing or writing a story.  The reason I think we forget about these ethical standards is because we often let our  own beliefs and political biases cloud our opinions about journalists and reporters, especially if we do not like how […]

Few correspondents in television today are so versitile and are so well connected to the world when compared to the most senior correspondent for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.   Samantha Bee has been making us laugh while watching The Daily Show since 2003.  Her eccentric behavior and use of shocking vocabulary fit in perfectly to the show.  Before working on […]

In Chapter 3 of Michael Schudson’s book, Discovering the News, he discusses journalism as entertainment from Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, and journalism as information from the rise of the New York Times. Shudson begins the chapter by discussing how at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was always a division among […]

In reviewing chapter 4 of Michael Schudson, several prominent themes are addressed: ranging from from the downfall of the democratic market society, the decline of facts in journalism, and the issue of subjectivity and objectivity in the press. But the overriding theme is the shift in journalism to a more “objective” style as felt to […]

How about this for irony? Writing a blog about the art of blogging. The word ‘blog‘ comes from the phrase “web log.” It is one of the newer forms of journalism, and it will forever change the way journalists work, and how their field will be conducted. According to Mitchell Stephens, who authored “A History of News,” … […]

One common question TV viewers may have when watching a breaking news story unfold is: “What’s it like to be there?” That question is answered in “Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11,” a collection of personal accounts recalling that bad day. Allison Gilbert, co-editor, conceived the idea by journaling her experience while covering the […]

Early newspapers were not the most organized. Facts, the most important part of a news story, were often burried deep in a story and difficult to find. The inverted pyramid changed that completely and made things much easier on the reader. American journalists found that telegraphs could be unreliable. They developed a system of transmitting […]

There are three sections in this chapter. The first is called “Losing Faith in the Democratic Market Society.” Basically, this section talked about how people did not have a good feeling about how well democracy was going to work. Some people felt like a dictatorship might be better because, as Nicholas Murray Butler put it, dictatorship “appears […]

In Chapter 5 of Michael Schudson book titled “ Discovering the News”, Schudson discusses the use and criticism of objectivity in  the 1960s, and the two criticisms journalism dealt with in the 1960s . The chapter begins by stating that objectivity was heavily criticized and abused from journalists, reporters, and readers. Journalists thought that objective […]