In the early nineteenth century, critics believed the press was destroying social structure--eroding law and order and the institutions of the family, religion, and education. To counter these effects they advocated, among other things, eradicating Sunday newspapers and "subversive" content such as news of crime, sex, and sporting events. Dicken-Garcia traces the relationship between societal values and the press coverage of issues and events. Setting out to tame the press by understanding it, she argues, critics had begun to dissect it. In the process, they articulated the rudiments of journalistic theory, and proposed what issues should be addressed by journalists, what functions should be undertaken, and what standards should be imposed.

This research examines journalism ethics to answer the questions of whether we still need journalism ethics in the twenty-first century, if it is possible to exercise journalistic standards of work and, if so, on what values should these ethics be based in a world much different from that which existed when the first journalism codes of ethics were formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To distil the motivations and essence of the early journalistic standards of work, the book discusses the function of media in a democracy and the formation of mass media during the first industrial revolution, as well as its consequential change in journalists’ locus of control and how journalists self-identified. The sudden creation of mass media pushed some journalists to create ethical principles which would guide the newly empowered press, an effort which culminated in the creation of the first national code of journalistic ethics in 1923. The book closely examines the elements of the 1923 “Canons of Journalism”, finding them to contain timeless values, despite their original application to now dated technology. It highlights the basic elements and applies them to media today, in a way that interfaces with new technology without abandoning the essential components of equipping citizens for representative governance.

This collection of important new research in 19th-century media history represents some salient, recent developments in the field. Taking as its theme, the ways the media serves to define identities - national, ethnic, professional, gender, and textual, the volume addresses serials in the UK, the US, and Australia. High culture rubs shoulders with the popular press, text with image, feminist periodicals and masculine, gay, and domestic serials. Theory and history combine in research by scholars of international repute.

A comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.

This annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century British periodicals, complete with a detailed subject index, reveals how Victorian commentaries on journalism shaped the discourse on the origins and contemporary character of the domestic, imperial and foreign press. Drawn from a wide range of publications representing diverse political, economic, religious, social and literary views, this book contains over 4,500 entries, and features extracts from over forty nineteenth-century periodicals. The articles cataloged offer a thorough and influential analysis of their journalistic milieu, presenting statistics on sales and descriptions of advertising, passing judgment on space allocations, pinpointing different readerships, and identifying individuals who engaged with the press either exclusively or occasionally. Most importantly, the bibliography demonstrates that columnists routinely articulated ideas about the purpose of the press, yet rarely recognized the illogic of prioritizing public good and private profit simultaneously, thus highlighting implicitly a universal characteristic of journalism: its fractious, ambiguous, conflicting behavior.

This work focuses on the principal trends and chief personnel essential to journalistic development in each country, and incorporates analysis of how each countrys journalists influenced, or were influenced by, journalists from outside its borders.

News consumers made cynical by sensationalist banners--"AMERICA STRIKES BACK," "THE TERROR OF ANTHRAX"--and lurid leads might be surprised to learn that in 1690, the newspaper Publick Occurrences gossiped about the sexual indiscretions of French royalty or seasoned the story of missing children by adding that "barbarous Indians were lurking about" before the disappearance. Surprising, too, might be the media's steady adherence to, if continual tugging at, its philosophical and ethical moorings. These 39 essays, written and edited by the nation's leading professors of journalism, cover the theory and practice of print, radio, and TV news reporting. Politics and partisanship, press and the government, gender and the press corps, presidential coverage, war reportage, technology and news gathering, sensationalism: each subject is treated individually. Appropriate for interested lay persons, students, professors and reporters. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

This book argues that dueling should be looked at as a fundamental part of the history of journalism. By examining the nineteenth century Code Duello, the accepted standards under which a duel is conducted, the author explores the causes of combative responses involving journalists. Each chapter examines an aspect of the practice from the nineteenth century through the present, including the connections between the ritualized aggression of the past and the feuding among blog journalists today. A comprehensive bibliography as well as an overview of accepted practices under the Code of Honor as faced by nineteenth century journalists are provided.

The Year that Defined American Journalism explores the succession of remarkable and decisive moments in American journalism during 1897 – a year of significant transition that helped redefine the profession and shape its modern contours. This defining year featured a momentous clash of paradigms pitting the activism of William Randolph Hearst's participatory 'journalism of action' against the detached, fact-based antithesis of activist journalism, as represented by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, and an eccentric experiment in literary journalism pursued by Lincoln Steffens at the New York Commercial-Advertiser. Resolution of the three-sided clash of paradigms would take years and result ultimately in the ascendancy of the Times' counter-activist model, which remains the defining standard for mainstream American journalism. The Year That Defined American Journalism introduces the year-study methodology to mass communications research and enriches our understanding of a pivotal moment in media history.

This first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in America studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time—the worldwide system of timekeeping by which we all live. The book describes the contributions of the railroad industry, university astronomers, clockmakers, and civil and electrical engineers.