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As the penny press was getting started in cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, a thousand miles to the west Chicago's early newspapers followed a different path. The party papers of Chicago in the years from the city's founding in 1833 to the Great Fire in 1871 grew to incorporate elements more typically associated with the penny press even as penny papers that started there during the period failed. Chicago's party press by the 1850s and 1860s had begun to shed its formal ties to political patrons as journalists served larger and more diverse audiences, both earlier than has been thought and in more sophisticated ways than has previously been described. Also briefly examined in the article is the possible development in this period of the "scoop" by Chicago's post-Civil War journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article aims to raise a number of themes which will feature significantly through this special issue. The output of 19th-century journalists has been drawn upon extensively by historians in their exploration of political, social, economic and increasingly cultural areas of inquiry, both in urban and rural districts. However, in recent years, there has been relatively little attention paid to the provincial press itself. The article traces the development of the provincial press from the “scissors and paste” approach of the 18th century to the development of an increasingly locally orientated and politically partisan local press during the first half of the 19th century. Consideration will be paid to the perceived influence of the provincial press, the management and ownership of the provincial newspaper, and newspaper rivalries. It will be suggested that the heyday of the 19th-century provincial press can be located in the 30-year period after 1855. The impact of “new journalism” in the provincial press during the final years of the century will be briefly considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an analysis of news conventions used by 19th-century American newspapers, I show that the news of this time period took much the same form. Across geography, size of paper, and kind of paper (associational, commercial, partisan), newspapers shared the same conventions. I explain this uniformity in terms of James Carey's notion that the news expresses a form of public life. In this case, I argue that 19th-century news expressed a form of public life that was deeply imbued with values of association, affiliation, and partisanship. As newspapers expressed these values, they ritually reinforced a particular image of public life. I argue that this cultural approach to news conventions accounts for the available evidence in ways that may help the field move beyond functionalist explanations of news. In so doing, it opens new directions for understanding the relationship between news generally, and the public life in which it is situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an account of being a Soviet journalist before and during glasnost. Soviet reporters' weapons are still the pen and the notebook--the cost of a personal computer is about the same as a reporter's lifetime salary. It was not a big deal to me when Mikhail Gorbachev, the godfather of glasnost, recently asked the Congress of People's Deputies for a moratorium on the new press law which the same Congress had accepted only half a year ago. If you read ten different newspapers of the Brezhnev era, you would have found no difference: they all had the same mother. Pravda sometimes publishes articles that absolutely contradict Gorbachev's speeches, although Gorbachev is still the general secretary of the party that he has almost dismantled. Three years ago the same Ogonyok, with Vitali Korotich as the editor, published the truth about Adilov--that he took bribes and shared money with the first party secretary of Uzbekistan, that he had personally killed more than ten people (it is not possible to know the exact number--too much time has passed).

This article discusses the increase of investigative journalism in the Soviet Union. The Soviet press has discovered the delights of the expose. It was also uncertain who had arranged for the tanks to be exported, and why, although the prime minister himself seemed to be involved in the deal, as was a joint state-private cooperative known as Automation-Science-Technology (with the Russian acronym ANT). Novoe Vremya correspondent Boris Balkarei tried to sort out the roles of Soviet government and party officials, ANT cooperative leaders, and a mysterious Sudanese businessman, who later sued the magazine for libel in a Russian court. Although Soviet TV and radio generally have continued to shy away from aggressive questioning of the government and party on national security and foreign policy stories, numerous newspapers and magazines took their lead from Ogonyok.

A content analysis of opinion editorial (Op-Ed) articles published in the Washington Post and The New York Times between 1999 and 2003 was used to assess source and issue stand diversity on three salient issues. The study revealed that editors in both newspapers allowed only limited diversity in its source selection and issue stand on the discussion of gay marriages, affirmative action and the death penalty. The authors identify the lack of diversity as inconsistent with the original stated purpose of the Op-Ed as a forum for the articulation of diverse viewpoints on salient issues and call upon future studies to further examine diversity of sources and issue stands in Op-Ed pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the proposition that modern techniques of popular newspaper campaigning—on topical issues which are morally-charged but of indirect relevance to newspaper readerships—were pioneered by the late 19th-century provincial newspaper press, and most notably W. T. Stead in his early career as editor of the Northern Echo . The Bulgarian atrocities agitation of 1876, in which Stead played a leading role, was a hugely important and influential example, but is by no means unique. Freed from the shackles of metropolitan news production where journalistic innovation was hampered by a proprietorial and editorial preoccupation with elite concerns and, typically, merely recording and commenting on parliamentary affairs, Stead was able to exploit latent demand for a wider range of news material which meshed sensational detail with a strongly moral call for action. An important related theme is the strong link between radical newspapermen and the now forgotten world of provincial nonconformity. Through Stead and others—notably C. P. Scott and the Manchester Guardian —provincial nonconformity found a new way of articulating its concerns which in due course reached a wider audience. The influence of nonconformist belief and patterns of worship on the evolution of journalism repays close examination, not least because Stead—and others like him—went on to school so many other prominent journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are several fundamental reasons why the state should not involve itself in the regulation of the press. However, there are also more practical reasons why self-regulation can be a preferable alternative, benefiting journalists and the public alike. It is flexible, non-bureaucratic and highly effective at delivering practical solutions to problems. Ultimately, self-regulation can raise standards and provide effective redress to those who are wronged by the press. But it does so by working with journalists, not against them. What follows is an examination and analysis of the origins and practices of the press regulatory bodies of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, together with an exploration of current issues and solutions adopted, and the identification of future issues deriving from convergence, accountability and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Sand's newspaper publishing activities - from their inception in 1841 to their decline at the end of the Second Republic - deserve recognition within the history of the press. Hitherto neglected writings are analysed as a hybrid form of literary journalism according to some definitions of the genre provided by Norman Sims. This permits a focus on Sand's 'flights of imagination', articles written under pseudonyms and in the voices of fictional characters, created as a tool for idealistic political education. The now classic Benedict Anderson paradigm of 'imagined communities' is used to contextualise Sand's use of the vernacular and helps to position her contribution towards the use of newspapers as a vehicle for the communication of democratic and progressive ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article confronts the antirealist analysis of news journalism by introducing a realist perspective based on an application and an extension of some of John Searle's ideas on the subject. This realist point of view proposes two original hypotheses, namely that news is formally based on a prior reality and that this prerequisite reality is ultimately a given reality. Defending the first hypothesis is the idea that news is intentional in that it represents a state of affairs in a mind-to-world direction of fit. The second hypothesis argues that the social reality on which news is essentially based is almost always constructed from a brute reality through a process of iteration. The article then proposes a typology of journalistic brute facts: natural phenomena, biological facts, non-intentional mental facts, human accidents, selective actions, continuous behaviours, tendencies, dispositions, and other natural propensities and, finally, verbal manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores journalistic quoting practices as an interface between written and oral modes of communication, or between text and talk. Examining both the prescriptive and performative dimensions of journalistic quoting across media, the article demonstrates that when quoting, journalists do not adopt modes of communication relative to the medium being employed but instead creatively mix and meld text and talk, regardless of the medium. The article suggests that this invocation of both modes of communication renders a distinction between text and talk invalid in contemporary news discourse. It further suggests that the cogency of news presentation might depend on the interchangeability of both modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]