Michael Schudson

The rise of contextual journalism, 1950s–2000s

Many journalists and other observers remember the 1960s as a watershed moment in American journalism. Do they remember correctly? This essay reviews relevant empirical studies on how US newspapers have changed since the 1950s. There is strong existing evidence that journalists have come to present themselves as more aggressive, that news stories have grown longer, and that journalists are less willing to have politicians and other government officials frame stories and more likely to advance analysis and context on their own. Based on content analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this study finds that the growth in ‘contextual reporting’ has been enormous – from under 10 percent in all three newspapers in 1955 to about 40 percent in 2003; ‘conventional’ news stories on the front page declined from 80–90 percent in all three papers to about 50 percent in all three papers in the same period. What this study calls ‘contextual reporting’ has not been widely recognized (unlike, say, investigative reporting) as a distinctive news genre or news style and this article urges that it receive more attention.

What sorts of things are thingy? And what sorts of thinginess are there? Notes on stuff and social construction

Actor-network theory may help sociological studies of communication to see some things that would have been harder to see without it. It is useful and important in calling attention to the ways that “things” and not only persons can be actors (or “actants”) in the human social world. Still, it may be the peculiar hubris of the scientific laboratory that led to the presumption that things do not act in human affairs. In social criticism and in common sense, we have long known that they do. And we know also that some “things” are more “thingy” than others – obdurate, with a kind of independent agency. Hardware is more thingy than software but both are “things.” Actor–network theory (ANT) raises important questions about the place of things in social life – it does not in itself provide answers.

Fourteen or Fifteen Generations: News as a Cultural Form and Journalism as a Historical Formation

Aperennial issue for historians is to determine for the topic at hand the relative importance of change and continuity and where on the calendar to locate turning points or times of transition. Different thinkers take different positions on these matters, but professional historians typically are more interested to focus on and seek to explain change than continuity. In contrast, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, distinguished journalists, eloquent interpreters of American journalism, and leaders in their profession, emphasize continuity in the history of American journalism. They stake this claim in their influential book The Elements of Journalism. They begin by associating themselves with Jim Carey’s view that, as they paraphrase it, holds that “in the end journalism simply means carrying on and amplifying the conversation of people themselves.”1 There is an abiding and somehow comforting element of truth in this. But Kovach and Rosenstiel then add that this definition has “held so consistent through history, and proven so deeply ingrained in the thinking of those who produce news through the ages, that it is in little doubt.”2 In fact, they continue, “the basic standards of newsworthiness have varied very little throughout history.” That is the assertion I dispute here. They go on to approvingly quote Mitchell Stephens’s generalization, “The basic topics with which . . . news accounts have been concerned, and the basic standards by which they evaluate newsworthiness, seem to have varied very little. Humans have exchanged a similar mix of news with a consistency throughout history and cultures that makes interest in this news seem inevitable, if not innate.”3 If this is right, there is nothing new under the sun—nothing, at any rate, of much import, nothing that touches on journalism’s fundamentals.

Walter Lippmann’s Ghost: An Interview With Michael Schudson

An esteemed scholar conducts an enlightening examination of the enduring issues of the press as a democratic institution, the professionalization of the journalist, journalism schools, liberalism, and science. This imagined one-on-one conversation with Walter Lippmann is lightly humorous yet offers important insights on the accountability of the government by the press in days gone by and on the accountability of the press to the public in our digital age.

Second Thoughts: Schudson on Schudson

I am so grateful to Marcel Broersma for proposing my name to the University of Groningen for an honorary degree in 2014. On that special occasion—the 400th anniversary of the university’s founding—he went further to organize with Chris Peters a conference built around my work. The contributions in this special issue of Journalism Studies were first presented there. I am grateful also to Bob Franklin for dedicating many pages of Journalism Studies to these papers. And I am very grateful indeed to the care that my colleagues in both Europe and the United States have taken with my words. That some of these colleagues are former students of mine makes this occasion even more splendid. It is a great gift that several of these papers restate my arguments more eloquently and reformulate themmore aptly than I did myself. I can’t take on all the provocative points raised in these papers and, the truth is, I don’t need to, since they all speak so well for themselves. But I will take this opportunity to comment on a few issues. One is my relative neglect of technology and economics in understanding the production and significance of journalism—or, to turn that around, to reflect on what might be the costs in my culture-centered approach. Second, can my early work on journalism be understood as an exercise in the sociology of knowledge? Third, what is to be gained, if anything, for journalism studies by my ventures into a broader political history, particularly in The Good Citizen (Schudson 1998) and The Rise of the Right to Know (Schudson 2015)? And finally, what praise or blame should be attached to my style or sensibility, particularly to my “optimism”—if optimism it is?