Reviews

W. Joseph Campbell (2006) The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms.

Routledge, New York. 317 pages. ISBN: 0415977037. £16.99 paperback.

According to some accounts, there were two kinds of journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. George Newnes wrote to W. T. Stead on the dissolution of their collaboration on the Review of Reviews:

'There is one kind of journalism which directs the affairs of nations; it makes and unmakes cabinets; it upsets governments, builds up Navies and does many other great things. It is magnificent. This is your journalism. There is another kind of journalism which has no such great ambition. It is content to plod on, year on year, giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to crowds of hardworking people, craving for a little fun and amusement. It is quite humble and unpretentious. This is my kind of journalism' (Friedrichs, 1911: 116-117).

Campbell in this thorough and absorbing book begins with the claim that there were at least three: the fact-based journalism of Ochs' New York Times, the journalism of action best exemplified by Hearst's New York Journal and the literary 'anti-journalistic' journalism of Steffens' New York Commercial Advertiser. The book claims that the decisive alignments of journalism can be traced to the key year of 1897 and proceeds to provide an exhaustive account of the events of that year from the perspective of the three newspapers.

The main premise for such a concentration is that there has been until now a 'methodological deficit' in journalism and mass communication studies which has ignored the year-long view. To be fair, this is not exactly a methodological norm in most other fields apart from the examples he cites and there are sound reasons why journalism studies needs approaches which extricate it from snapshots confined to the present or, in this case, narrow views of the past. The concentration on one year in the evolution of norms journalism, for all its superficial historical attraction, leads us into a paradoxically ahistorical consideration of journalism. For instance, can it really be claimed that the demise of Hearst's model of activist journalism made way for the triumph of fact-based journalism after over a century of subsequent popularisation in all formats of journalism and the intense debates about tabloidisation across news media? What of the continued trend towards activist sensationalist tabloid journalism within American newspapers which have produced such commentaries as Jazz Journalism (1938) and the contemporary I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby (2001). The standards and cultural expectations which resonate around the year 1897 continue to define and reshape journalism despite a century of technological and political change and remain central to contemporary debate e.g., (Singer 2007). A snapshot methodology for all its intensity and detail tends to eclipse these continuities from the past and their impact on the future.

Much of the early part of the book views the developments of that year through a wide range of elite and popular newspapers. It provides an admirable account of the year and some of its key issues but remains an extremely general overview of the era and does nothing to contribute to the main thesis of the book. These early chapters are too descriptive to match the analytical ambition of the book and once again raise doubts about the sustainability of this form of analysis.

The book does, however, have its merits. It is well illustrated and this gives the reader a strong sense of the visual impact of the journalism of the time. Another of its strengths is the way in which it recuperates Hearst from the demonisation he often suffers in much critical literature. Heart's reputation is revised and his achievements substantiated. He is presented as an astute and innovative performer at a vital conjunction of journalism's evolution, in many ways creating the parameters of journalistic practice as a lively and socially resonant cultural product. The three competing paradigms are well described with a good amount of detail particularly on the interchanges between the three main newspapers but there is less on the structure of language and the differences in techniques of the three styles which would have been more persuasive of the overall thesis that this was a battle for the shape and mission of journalism. One consequence of this lack of stylistic analysis is that the distinctions between the three paradigms in these chapters, as elsewhere in the book, often revert back to differences in personality between the three different proprietors. There is too much concentration on the personalities of 1897 with a tendency to present them as if it they were the primary agents of journalistic change rather than playing a part in complementing broader social, cultural and economic shifts.

There is a great deal of general cultural, social and economic context but a lack of cross-referencing to mainstream academic accounts of these themes which means that discussions of women, poverty, technological progress, social class, for example, all tend to be two-dimensional and the model of Ochs' journalism emerges as being possessed with an almost teleological force.

Editorially, I have some concerns over the shape and structure of the book. The timeline, preface and introduction are all repetitive and their details are repeated at various points of the narrative. It is as if there is not actually enough to fill a book and one is constantly aware of a feeling of déjà vu and that the book has emerged from a particularly satisfying but brief journal article (2004). In a book of just over two hundred pages it seems excessive to add over a hundred pages of notes especially when these notes themselves tend to reflect the repetitiveness of the narrative itself.

As in another contemporary book on the journalism of the period (Spencer, 2007), the recuperation of the merits of the past seems to be inspired by a cultural impatience with the news media of the present. When Spencer writes of the '…troubled, even depressing façade of contemporary journalism' (p.195) he is surely complicit in the kind of dismissal of popular trends within current journalism that have dogged Hearst's reputation. It is a shame that in a book which does so much in attempting to enrich our understanding of the contribution of popular journalism to broader cultural patterns that this appreciation lies locked in a nostalgic regard and cannot bring itself to consider the strengths and the challenges of contemporary variants.

Martin Conboy, University of Sheffield.

References

Bessie, S. (1938) Jazz Journalism, New York: Dutton.

Campbell, W. J. (2004) "American Journalism's Exceptional Year." Journalism History 30 (1), Winter, pp. 190-200.

Friedrichs, H. (1911) The Life of Sir George Newnes. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Singer J. (2007) "Contested Autonomy: Professional and popular claims on journalistic norms", Journalism Studies, 8 (1) February, pp. 78-95.

Sloan, B. (2001) I Watched A Wild Hog Eat My Baby: A colourful history of tabloids and their cultural impact, New York: Prometheus.

Spencer, D. R. (2007) The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power, Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press.