“The Facts—the Color!

—the Facts”: The Idea of a Report in American

Print Culture, 1885–1910
Kathy Roberts Forde, Katherine A. Foss

Book History, Volume 15, 2012, pp. 123-151 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/bh.2012.0003

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bh/summary/v015/15.forde.html

Access provided by Princeton University (17 Feb 2014 13:01 GMT)

 “The Facts—the Color!—
the Facts”
!
The Idea of a Report in American Print Culture, 1885–1910*

Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss

In 1974, James Carey published his now famous article, “The Problem of
Journalism History,” encouraging journalism historians to take the cultural
turn, to develop what at the time was missing from their craft and shared
knowledge: a cultural history of journalism. “The central and as yet un-
written history of journalism,” Carey wrote, “is the history of the idea of a
report: its emergence among a certain group of people as a desirable form
of rendering reality, its changing fortunes, definitions and redefinitions over
time.”1 Carey was particularly interested in recovering the historical “con-
sciousness” or “interpretation of reality” embodied in the form of cultural
expression known as the “report.”2 For him, this recovery was the essential
task of a cultural history of journalism.
Andie Tucher has deftly explored the varied responses to Carey’s call and
proposed a number of important questions future scholars might answer
in pursuing “the cultural history of the journalistic report.” She has also
rightly suggested that the term “consciousness”—the “vastness and vague-
ness of the concept”—may have done more to encumber than to encourage
the development of the cultural history of journalism Carey advocated.3
But as Michael Schudson has suggested, Carey’s call for “a history of con-
sciousness, a history of reporting, is the most fervent of his pleas . . . the
most important, and the one most often honored in the breach.”4 Although
we now have at least a partial social history of reporting in the American
context, we do not have much in the way of a history of consciousness as
embodied in the journalistic report and its changing forms over time. “Even

*The authors thank the Graduate Research Partnership Program in the College of Liberal Arts
and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, both at the University of Minnesota,
for funding that supported this study. The authors also thank John Nerone for his critical com-
mentary and guidance.
124 Book History

when you grasp what is clearly a part of the story,” Schudson explains, “it is
a matter of great difficulty to figure out just what these changing forms por-
tend for ‘consciousness.’”5 Carey himself acknowledged the difficulty of the
historical project he advocated, citing “newness” as the primary stumbling
block. A “new problem” requires “unfamiliar sources and procedures,” he
wrote, and a greater generosity “in judging the results” than is usual in the
academy.6
The broad project of this article is to examine American journalism at
one particular moment in the past—the turn of the twentieth century—and
situate it within the larger field of print culture. The narrow project is to dis-
cover what Americans understood an appropriate news report to be in the
period from 1885 to 1910 and how particular social forces and values of the
era shaped these understandings. This study attempts to provide a cultural
history of the report during a particularly important period in American
social life. Print culture expanded radically during this period of rapid and
disorienting social, political, and economic transformation. The content,
forms, and social purposes of all manner of public communication became
the subject of sustained discussion among workers in and observers of the
print marketplace. To understand the resulting notions of what constituted
a “desirable” account of reality in the specific arena of American journal-
ism and the broader print culture is to understand in part what Carey called
“the history of consciousness” of the American people. It is to understand
how ideas about printed communication of the era—not simply the content
of the communication itself or the industrial technologies and practices by
which it was produced—reflected and shaped what Americans took reality
to be. Many historians who discuss Carey’s call for a cultural history of
journalism seem to believe he was asking for a history of the report rather
than a history of the idea of the report. This article foregrounds the idea of
the report rather than the report itself in an attempt to understand what a
group of people across a given period of time understood an appropriate
report of the world to be and why.
As Carey suggested, work on a new problem is exceedingly difficult.
The primary sources used in this study contain challenging contradictions
and lacunae. And while scholars have produced important contributions to
our knowledge about the idea of the journalistic report at the turn of the
twentieth century in America, this knowledge appears in fragments, scat-
tered across a broad range of scholarship and disciplinary perspectives. This
article attempts to synthesize this knowledge and extend it with new his-
torical evidence gathered from the rich discourse about print culture, print
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 125

industries, and print marketplaces contained in several prominent industry

trade publications of the era. These trade publications emerged in the late
nineteenth century as the print industries rapidly expanded: the Journalist
in 1884; Editor and Publisher in 1901, which merged with the Journal-
ist in 1907; and the Writer in 1887.7 They addressed readers—presumably
most of whom were also workers—interested in the newspaper, magazine,
and book industries across all forms of print work, including writing, edit-
ing, publishing, and selling, and across a broad field of genres, from jour-
nalistic writing to imaginative literature. What’s more, the articles in the
journals, some of which were reprints or summaries from other sources,
were written from a range of perspectives. In Editor and Publisher, accord-
ing to Ronald Rodgers, these included “politicians, government officials,
divines, social scientists, reformers, academics, readers, editors, publishers,
and even journalists working in the trenches.”8 Magazines of the day also
analyzed self-reflexively the nature of American journalism and literature,
their characteristic expressive forms, standards, work practices, and social
purposes. This collective discourse, written by and for those engaged in the
print industries of the era, provides a rich site for exploring changing ideas
about what constituted a desirable report of the world in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
Susan Douglas has argued convincingly that media historians can prop-
erly explore the meanings past audiences made of media texts—through the
method of textual analysis—by mapping “the multiple structures of mean-
ings in texts to the multiple structures of meanings in viewers and readers.”9
In her formulation, a historically sensitive and conditioned reading of texts
can help us understand the likely meanings past audiences made of those
texts. In a similar vein, we argue that the producers and close observers
of American print culture and industries at the fin de siècle should not be
viewed as somehow different from ordinary American readers in their ideas
about journalistic reports. They, too, were readers who shared a cultural
common sense, responding to the same widespread social transformations
and the turn to realism and empiricism as ways of knowing and representing
the world. During the period of time reviewed in this article, the American
press had yet to professionalize in the formal and expansive ways it did soon
after; in other words, the disciplinary apparatus of a profession had yet
to set and enforce rigid normative standards on the “loose-jointed thing”
that was journalism.10 We thus view ideas about the appropriate forms and
content of a news report expressed in the trade publications as reflections of
the “consciousness” of American society at the time, not a “consciousness”
126 Book History

somehow unique to insiders in and observers of the print industry who

wrote for the trade publications.
Our review of the trade journal discourse from 1885 to 1910 charts the
rise and passing of a particular discourse about literary work and facticity,
a discourse that reflected differing ideas and intense cultural negotiation
about appropriate representational strategies, prose style, voice, and genre
in print culture, including imaginative and journalistic expression. This dis-
course was responding not only to the material conditions of the print in-
dustry and various ideas about appropriate expressive forms in print culture
but also to transformations in social thought and social organization. In the
late nineteenth century, many forms of news reports coexisted in American
periodicals. These included partisan reports in newspapers and magazines
associated with political parties; educational and story-based reports in the
ethnic press of immigrant communities; the reform-minded, advocacy re-
port of the black press; and the competing styles of report featured in urban
newspapers, such as the sensational narrative reports of the yellow press
and the informational reports of the more “respectable” urban papers.11
In addition, these varied forms of report appeared next to fictional stories
in both magazines and newspapers of the period. Newspapers in particular
were “intertextual printed salad bowls,” Charles Johanningsmeier has not-
ed, mixing news items, advertisements, and fiction on a single page, inviting
readers “to transfer knowledge between various printed items.”12 By the
turn of the twentieth century, a belief in the superiority of the neutral third-
person voiced narrative and facticity as representational strategies domi-
nated print culture, from journalism to imaginative literature to disciplinary
writing. The conflicting positions about literary work, facticity, and empiri-
cism in the late-nineteenth-century trade journal discourse were ultimately
resolved by the gendered project of early professionalization in the sphere
of journalism. As other historians have noted, the idea that a news report
should focus on the presentation of facts without interpretation or opinion
in a neutral third-person voice emerged across the final decades of the nine-
teenth century and became the dominant idea of what a news report should
be across the first decade of the twentieth century.
During this period, a reverence for facts and the scientific method in-
creasingly shaped nearly all aspects of social life, including the production
and reading of journalism and literature. Realism had replaced the romantic
idealism of the early to mid-nineteenth century. A belief that American so-
ciety needed to be ordered rationally on a national scale in order for social
“progress” to be achieved defined the era and its public activity, including
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 127

the ordering and professionalization of the print marketplace of which the

press was a significant part. A new concept of culture entered American
thought patterns, and, as a consequence, a new rigid hierarchy of cultural
forms emerged. What had been a broadly democratic concept of culture in
the early nineteenth century, a sense that the arts were for the appreciation
of a broad range of social classes, both high and low, became the crabbed
notion that artistic expression was the province of the intellectually and
socially elite. In the process, the formerly distinct but fluid genres of litera-
ture and journalism separated into rigidly exclusive categories of public ex-
pression. Literature became highbrow. Journalism became lowbrow.13 Even
lowbrow journalism had its cultural distinctions, the neutral, fact-based
news report being the most respected form of expression and the narrative,
or story, report among the least.

The Expansion of American Print Culture in the

Late Nineteenth Century
In the late nineteenth century, social life in America was in flux. Diverse
social forces—rapid industrialization, increased immigration, the rise of
the corporation and capital markets, the migration of workers from rural
locales to the cities—unmoored America’s nineteenth-century network of
small communities that had ruled themselves and operated according to
prevailing social values of respectability, local authority, and individual au-
tonomy.14 The result was general confusion and bewilderment, a sense that
social life had become unstable and incomprehensible. The job of explaining
America to itself during this time of rapid transformation and disorientation
fell to the burgeoning print industries.
The fundamental reality of the American print marketplace in the 1880s
and 1890s was the dizzying pace of change it was undergoing.15 Literacy
rates across the nation increased; public schools and libraries proliferated,
offering new avenues for education and producing a greater need for printed
materials; immigrants and newly literate African Americans joined the read-
ing public; and the middle class radically expanded.16 Newspapers, maga-
zines, and books comprised the great bulk of reading matter carrying and
shaping the intellectual currents, political commitments, and social attitudes
of the day, with each venue of public expression understood as the product
of a particular industry within what was becoming a national communi-
cation system. More Americans were reading than ever before, and they
128 Book History

were reading more—and more kinds of—material than ever before. The
great bulk of reading material consisted of newspapers. In 1870, circula-
tion stood at around thirty-four newspapers per 100 households. By 1900,
newspapers had almost completely penetrated the American market at nine-
ty-four per 100 households.17 The magazine market also grew rapidly dur-
ing these years as magazines became affordable for middle-class readers and
reform-minded muckraking articles generated increased public interest in
what magazines offered.18 By the 1890s, some magazines had circulations as
high as 250,000. The market grew from 3,500 magazines published in 1885
to 5,100 in 1895.19 Although people read books, especially in cities in the
Northeast, the radical expansion of the periodical market—brought about
in part by cheaper paper and printing processes, better transportation sys-
tems, increased advertising, and an expanded reading public—served as the
primary lever in the late-nineteenth-century’s communication revolution.20

The “Twin Professions” of

Literature and Journalism
New trade publications for the print industries emerged during this expan-
sion. In their first years of publication in the second half of the 1880s, the
Journalist and the Writer primarily attempted to explain the expanding
print marketplace to novice and experienced “literary workers” alike. They
provided news updates on newspapers and magazines around the country;
published profiles of writers, editors, and publishers; commented on con-
temporary novels and imaginative literature; and devoted much ink to pro-
viding practical writing and career advice for writers of all kinds across all
genres and print industries, but with an emphasis on “teaching” general
writers how to be journalists and how the modern newspaper office worked.
All writers—newspaper and magazine reporters and editors, essayists, short
story writers, novelists, and poets alike—were understood by both trade
journals to be involved in “literary” pursuits.21
In the late nineteenth century, the boundaries between the different
industries of the print marketplace, as well as the characteristic forms of
expression attached to each, were fluid and permeable. These boundaries
became noticeably less so as the twentieth century approached. When the
Journalist and the Writer began publication in the 1880s, many writers,
editors, and publishers worked across print industries.22 While writers and
readers certainly understood news and fiction to be different genres, they
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 129

generally did not insist on a firm line of demarcation between the two as
categories either of public communication or of authorship. In other words,
distinctions between what constituted journalism and imaginative literature
existed, but they had yet to ossify in the American consciousness. For ex-
ample, in 1886, its third year of publication, the Journalist identified itself
as the first trade publication for not only “newspaper-men” but also “the
twin professions of literature and journalism.”23 Literature and journalism
were understood to be somewhat differentiated expressive categories, but
more to the point, they were understood to be “twin professions,” socially
recognized modes of cultural expression and bureaucratized production
sharing the same parentage and DNA. The following year, the Writer, a
journal broadly marketed to freelance writers, began publication.24 Its sub-
title declared it to be A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary
Workers, an audience which, from the journal’s content, was understood to
consist more of reporters than of fiction writers and poets, although all were
clearly addressed, often as existing within the same imagined reader and
“literary worker.”25 In their earliest years, then, these industry trade publi-
cations understood the world of American print to be comprised of distinct
genres of public expression, modes of authorship, and forms of industrial
production while paradoxically conceptualizing all as a unified social and
cultural entity called “literature.”
By the 1880s and 1890s, realism had displaced idealism as the domi-
nant mode of American thought and cultural expression, a displacement
reflected in the trade journal discourse. As David E. Shi has noted, the real-
istic sensibility of the era was multifaceted; the terms muckraking, idealism,
naturalism, and romanticism denoted different strains of realistic represen-
tation. Yet what knit these sensibilities together in a unified pattern was a
fixation on “facing facts.”26 This fundamental shift in American thought
patterns infiltrated nearly every aspect of social life and had profound con-
sequences for print and the national communication system it embodied. A
social preference for realism and scientific thought unsettled romantic and
idealist tendencies.27 The Victorian notion that “truth” was located in the
divine or an a priori ideal fragmented against the horrors of the Civil War
and revolutionary new scientific theories, most notably Darwin’s theory of
natural selection and Spencer’s theory of human evolution and perfectibil-
ity.28 A fascination with experience and facts infused American society and
culture, a product of the new faith in, and fervor for, the scientific method
and related scientific discoveries. But realism was more than a belief in the
social importance of documenting facts. It was, Shi has argued, “an effort
130 Book History

to ameliorate the profound social disturbances associated with unparalleled

urban-industrial development.”29
The growing reverence for scientific thought and expression—a reverence
tied to the rise of the professional expert as a key voice in civic disourse
and practice—produced a preference for unadorned language in public ex-
pression.30 As a result, writing style across print culture—in news writing
as well as fiction writing—was a popular subject in the early trade journal
discourse of the 1880s. Many contributors recommended limiting adjec-
tives and overly descriptive language across genres, directing writers to cut
out “‘fine’ or ‘flowery’ passages”31 and to use “[s]imple, clear, short words,
short sentences” in all forms of writing.32 Some emphasized the importance
of description in news reporting while urging the use of “conciseness and
plain English.”33 A widespread emphasis on writing that used “the simplest
and plainest words” was a rejection of the florid style that had character-
ized a broad range of earlier nineteenth-century American writing, including
newspaper prose.34 The term “literary”—its meanings variable and ambigu-
ous in this period—was also often used as shorthand to indicate this now
disfavored prose style. “Throw overboard everything like literary style,” a
contributor to the Writer advised in 1888. “There is no time for it; editors
don’t want it, and readers don’t care for it.”35 In the sphere of newspapers,
other historical forces beyond the rise of realism have been credited with
explaining the change in prose style across the late nineteenth century from
the ornate to the spare, such as the emergence and growth of wire services
and newspaper syndicates in the middle part of the century.36 But only the
rise of realism accounts for the new preference for a spare prose style and
simple diction across all literary genres, including journalistic and imagina-
tive expression.
Beyond a preoccupation with stylistic concerns, the collective discourse
in the trade journals during their first years of publication tracks a grow-
ing attachment to the fact and an increasing disdain for what was viewed
as unscientific commentary or interpretation in the substance and content
of public expression across genres. The new cultural “‘mania for facts’”
shaped the print marketplace as both imaginative literature and journal-
ism attempted to represent the social world as “it really was” through lan-
guage.37 Although this reverence for the empirical shaped the American
press as a fact-finding social enterprise, it did not preordain any given news
form as the “necessary” vehicle for telling the news. It did, however, encour-
age the widespread adoption of news writing conventions closely aligned
with the empirical spirit. Trade journal articles often admonished all news
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 131

workers to present only unembroidered facts: “Hold the mirror to nature,

and furnish readers with a reflection of what really happened or was said.
The man who draws on his imagination for his facts places himself out of
court, for conscience he has none. He is the Judas of the press, who sells
his honor and his influence for a bag of dollars.”38 In 1892, the Journalist
noted that for a decade journalism had increasingly relied on the presenta-
tion of facts and the exclusion of opinion. Reporters had learned that “their
opinions are not facts, that their opinions are not news, and they keep those
opinions to themselves.”39 In a much-heralded series providing supposedly
definitive career advice to would-be reporters, the Journalist insisted that re-
porting facts was the essential purpose of American journalism: “The most
successful journalists are those able to give the facts, the whole facts, and
nothing but the facts, in brief, pithy sentences, the majority of which contain
not more than a dozen words.”40
The friendly, intimate, first-person narrator that characterized many
forms of print expression in the previous era—the narrator who addressed
the reader as “friend” and self-consciously attempted to cultivate moral and
social values in the reading audience—was now a relic. A contributor to the
Writer suggested that news writing demanded “the complete elimination of
the writer’s individuality.” Invoking the realist belief in the importance of
observation in the effort to represent “reality,” he expressed a faith in the
naive empiricism that soon came to dominate both journalistic and imagi-
native writing and practice. “It is essential, then,” he instructed, “to be the
unmoved observer of events; never to be a participant in them; to see things
exactly as they are without regard to possible motives which may have pro-
duced them.”41 The earlier genteel commitment to building character and
transmitting upper and upper-middle-class worldviews evaporated as new
middle class readers diversified the audience and scientific values began to
replace religious values as the ties that bound individuals together in the
public sphere. The new realistic narrator, declining to address the reader,
receded into the background of the story. An article titled “How to Write
a Newspaper Article” declared that “the reporter must sink his personality
out of sight and merge his very identity in that of his paper. So long as he is
a reporter it is an unpardonable sin for him to express his own ideas in his
‘copy.’ His business is to report facts and other people’s opinions.”42 News-
gathering itself was described as a scientific process and news-writing as
scientific in nature. “News should be scientifically secured,” a contributor to
the Journalist wrote in 1894, and “scientific treatment” in the writing of the
news was “essential.”43 It was the emergence of what became the familiar
132 Book History

“objective, detached, removed, impersonal” narrator of both literature and

journalism.44
Although the trade journal discourse in the 1890s generally encouraged
the reporting of facts without opinion, it rarely suggested this approach
was at odds with narrative conventions and colorful, lively storytelling.
Cards hanging on the walls of the city room at the New York World at-
tested to this synthetic conception of news form and function: “Accuracy!
Accuracy! Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The
Color—The Facts!”45 Journalists of the period did not seem to equate the
story form’s subjectivity or the muckraker’s advocacy with “opinion” or
“interpretation.” Many realistic writers, both of news and fiction, employed
plot, character, dialogue, and setting in an attempt to present “life as it re-
ally was.” This story form of reporting was not new to readers in the late
nineteenth century. The penny press papers of the 1830s had made use of
story forms, and Civil War reporting escalated the use of narrative conven-
tions in news reporting.46 The “new journalism” (or “yellow journalism”
in its more extreme manifestations) of many urban newspapers employed
narrative conventions, such as emplotment, characterization, and dialogue,
often blending invention and fact, with little if any sense of concern on the
part of journalists or readers about the fabrication or sensationalizing of
news. This journalism trafficked in human-interest stories, interviews, and
sensational accounts of crime, as well as journalistic stunts, crusades, and
even fakery and humbug.47 The point was to entertain readers and to boost
newspaper circulation—and the new journalism, as practiced notably by
William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New
York World, enjoyed wild success in both efforts.48 Facts, observation, and
experience were understood to be defining elements of a news report at the
same time that sensation and invention were also broadly accepted.
In almost all newspapers of the era, fictional short stories or novels were
published in installments next to news items (a practice continuous with
the penny papers of the 1830s).49 In fact, newspapers during this period
were a major vehicle for fiction reading in America—literary syndicates
provided fiction to almost every daily and weekly newspaper in America
between 1860 and 1900.50 Writers generally moved easily among the news-
paper, magazine, and book publishing industries and across print genres.
Many of the now canonical realist writers of the period—Mark Twain, Walt
Whitman, and Stephen Crane, among others—began their writing careers as
newspaper journalists.51 Readers of the late-nineteenth-century newspaper
thus encountered many different “literary” genres in one publication, yet
what connected these genres was the “mania for facts” of the era.
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 133

Opinion, Facts, and Masculinity

The late-nineteenth-century trade journal discourse about the future of edi-
torials in the American newspaper demonstrated increasing anxiety about
the place of commentary in journalism. The prevailing notion was that the
editorial page would cease to exist, or at the very least be radically trans-
formed as specialists took over the work of editorial writing. The editorial’s
end was attributed to the ascendancy of fact52 and the increasing number
of educated readers, who were “just as competent to form an opinion upon
news that [they have] read as some man or woman sitting in an editorial
chair.”53 Many contemporaries interpreted the increasing specialization of
reportorial work into beats and routine assignments, all managed by the
city editor, to be such a powerful force that fact-based reporting would nec-
essarily displace any and all interpretive journalism in the newspaper. “A
newspaper without an editorial page is among the things of the future,”
one observer stated, “for the reason that the columns of our ponderous
dailies are gradually being surrendered to the reporter and telegraph cor-
respondent.”54 Still others understood the growing emphasis on the role
of facts and scientific observation in newspaper journalism as signifying a
more rigid demarcation in the social functions of the various print industries
and cultural expression of the period: “The signs of the times seem to indi-
cate that the days of the editorial writer are numbered. . . . The reviews, the
magazines, and, to a great extent, the weekly papers are taking the place of
the dailies as formers of political and sociological discussion, and the daily
paper is becoming more and more purely a vehicle for news. This change
has been so gradual and so in consonance with the spirit of the age that it
has hardly been noticed by many newspaper readers and workers.”55
This anxiety about the effects of realism on the practices and forms of
journalism can reasonably be understood, at least in part, as sublimated
anxiety about the passing of overt partisanship in much newspaper jour-
nalism in the final years of the nineteenth century. Under the influence of
early Progressive political reform efforts, political party ties weakened in
the general populace and in the overt commitments of major urban newspa-
pers. Even so, many newspapers were still partisan in nature and practice,
although the rhetoric of facticity, realism, and empiricism dominated discus-
sions of the newspaper trade. Publisher William Randolph Hearst not only
repeatedly ran for public office using his newspaper empire as pulpit, but
he also used his newspapers to make or break other candidates.56 Although
partisan ideology usually colored the editorial pages in large urban newspa-
134 Book History

pers, and often drifted into news reports through the publisher’s or editor’s
policies, the bywords of the day were “neutrality” and “independence.” As
a contributor to the Journalist put it, the “modern” newspaper must “give
the news with fairness and impartiality. . . . Its news columns are not tinged
by partisanship. Its opinions are reserved for the editorial page. It values
truth above popularity.”57 So while editors and publishers possessed and
exercised the authority to express political opinion and interpret the events
of the day, the workaday reporter did not. In this period, newspaper work
evolved along bureaucratic lines with the rise of corporate capitalism in
American life. In the major urban newspapers, the newspaper assignment
schedule and rules for crafting a modern news report emerged as bureau-
cratic disciplinary techniques for managing reporters and producing a daily
cultural commodity for the masses.58 Under the thumb of the editor, Richard
L. Kaplan has argued, the reporter “could no longer speak with the evalu-
ative, aesthetic, or analytical intonations of a particular narrative voice.”59
The reporter’s job was to get the facts.
Underlying the preoccupation with scientific thinking and facts at the
turn of the century—and the concurrent development of a bureaucratic
organization of newspaper production—was the widespread sense that
masculinity was in crisis. “Overcivilization” was one name for what many
believed to be a profound social problem. A variety of social phenomena
led many contemporaries to believe that the middle-class and upper-mid-
dle-class American male had become a degenerate, emasculated, decadent
species. These included the life of leisure wrought by the ascendancy of a
consumer society; the loss of male autonomy in work-life produced by a se-
ries of economic depressions, industrialization, and what Alan Trachtenberg
termed “the incorporation of America”; and the incursion of working-class
men and women into the domains of public life.60 The solution was the turn
to a life of strenuousness, the recapturing of virility through self-reliance
and adventure. For many producers of print culture, that meant embracing
the life of the intrepid reporter, if not as a lifelong career then as a stepping-
stone on the way to a life of letters.61
Contributors to the trade publications in the late nineteenth century re-
peatedly invoked the idea of the news reporter as the manly adventurer
who bravely and calmly ventured forth into an often-terrifying world to
document it for his readers. They appropriated the language and plots of
adventure stories, popular in the imaginative literature of the period, to
describe the reporter’s life. A reporter was “like a soldier” who had “to
take all the risks which may be going in social life—at a fire, a riot, or what
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 135

not, he must take his share of danger with the firemen and the police.” He
was “a man of spirit” who “must be eager to take his part in all the stirring
events of the times, and even to take his life in his hands.”62 The reporter’s
work was one of unrelenting adventure and tests of manliness: “No mine is
too deep for the reporter’s ladder, no enterprise too lofty for the reporter’s
balloon, no territory too vast for him to measure, no waves so turbulent
that the reporter’s lifeboat doesn’t seek to aid the beleaguered crew in vessel
tossed in boiling water.”63 The reporter as the man of all men was an idea so
prevalent in journalistic discourse that it even became the subject of satire
in the same discourse:

Wild and lonely rides into strange, remote places, merry junket-
ings across the continent, dreary sojourns in rioters’ camps or in
the wake of devastating fires and floods, mysterious murders, cel-
ebrated cases in courts, lounging journeys from one watering place
to another, midnight murders, interviews with actors, actresses,
authors, artists, statement, glimpses at all manner of cranks and
experiences with all sorts of grotesque crankeries—always some
new and strange thing, something interesting and often intensely
exciting. . . . Indeed, he is rarely killed or hurt, even in places where
nearly all others come to grief, and the reason for this is simple
enough. Being used to nearly all possible surroundings and condi-
tions, he remains cool and saves his neck where others lose their
wits and their lives. His great anxieties in life are telegraphic wires
and not missing a fact.64

To be a reporter was to learn “true manhood,” “nobility of heart and pur-

pose,” and “self-reliance.”65
This new conception of the manly reporter performed important cultural
work in the new industrial workplace of the newspaper. It provided a manly
identity for all reporters, even those who were confined to the monotony of
the courtroom beat and those whose self-reliance and personal authority
were under constant assault from their editors’ disciplinary gaze. This self-
justifying mythology of the virile reporter inflected late-nineteenth-century
ideas of the news report, too. As the manly independent editorial voice be-
gan to wane in this period with the move from the editor’s newspaper to the
publisher’s newspaper, a new idea about the manly reporter willing to risk
life and limb for the facts—and a related idea about the fact-based report as
a product of strenuous experience—emerged.
136 Book History

The “Journalization” of America

In the last few years of the nineteenth century, a line of demarcation be-
tween journalism and literature emerged. Although a notable fluidity among
expressive forms in print culture had characterized the preceding decades,
voices could now be heard discussing how best to define “news,” how best
to describe the social function of journalism, whether journalism could be
“literary,” whether literature should be “journalistic.” The trade publica-
tions began addressing topics that anticipated the twentieth-century preoc-
cupation with professionalizing journalism and the broader print market-
place and the resulting hardening of genre categories. During this time the
Journalist published an irregular column titled “What Is News?”66 in which
contributors attempted various definitions of a form of public expression
that had previously gone largely undefined. “‘What is news?’” a contributor
asked in 1888. “‘The books do not tell us. What is its annual value? No-
body knows. Journalism has no recognized standard, no apprenticeship, no
prescribed preparation.’” A contributor to the Journalist noted that in 1892
the “question of what is news” was being fervently addressed “in many
journals and magazines.”67 The mere presence of such articles in the trade
publications indicates that what constituted a news report was a significant
and contested subject in the late nineteenth century and that a dominant
idea about what a news report should be had yet to emerge in American
print culture.
The discourse documented in the pages of the press trade journals and
popular magazines demonstrates two paradoxical impulses in the waning
years of the nineteenth-century print marketplace: the inheritance of perme-
able, fluid conceptions of print genres, on the one hand, and the emergence
of a professionalizing tendency toward stark differentiation between genres,
on the other. Contributors to the discourse became preoccupied with dis-
cussing journalism and literature as two distinct realms of endeavor, some-
thing other than the “twin professions” the Journalist had announced them
to be in its early issues. A trenchant debate about the relationship between
journalism and literature emerged, with newspaper and magazine reporters
staking out claims for the status of their respective professions (magazine
writers had largely proclaimed the realm of literature as their domain) and
the correctness of their epistemological claims. In answering criticism from
magazine writers that newspaper journalists were “anti-literary” by their
very newsroom training and habits of writing, and thus unfit to pursue lit-
erary careers, W. B. Chisholm pointed out the great number of American
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 137

“poets, essayists and romancers” who either made the bulk of their living
from journalistic work or worked as journalists before moving on to literary
careers.68 Journalism, in this view, provided emerging writers with finan-
cial stability, adventure, and contact with the social and political realms
of American power.69 In a speech reprinted in the Journalist, the managing
editor of the New York Mail and Express suggested that newspapers of
the future would likely displace magazines and books as the main vehicles
for publishing literature. “It may be true, as some writers still insist, that
journalism and literature have little in common. I do not believe this. The
newspaper of to-morrow is bound to absorb all that is good in literature,
for the reason that the newspaper will be able to pay a great deal more for
good stories, special articles and poems than any other magazine or book
publisher.”70
Professor W. J. Stillman provided a representative lament about the de-
mise of American journalism into a lowbrow form of expression in an 1891
issue of the Atlantic Monthly. “America,” he wrote, “has in fact trans-
formed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the
thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of
contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing, and assimilat-
ing the trivialities of the entire human existence.”71 Grasping on to passing
genteel Victorian ideals, Stillman believed journalism’s new fascination with
facts and the entire terrain of social life was antithetical to the “philosophic
thought” and “spiritual insight” accessible through art or literature.72 Con-
temporary journalism was “a deadly danger” to American morals and high
culture.73 While Stillman voiced a concern popular with the passing guard,
other voices upheld American journalism as a protector of literature, even a
form of literature itself. In an act of self-defense, the Journalist reprinted a
response to Stillman’s Atlantic article, the main point being that newspaper
journalism was responsible for creating a market for magazine and book
literature: “The daily press of the present furnishes to its readers not only
the condensed record of the activities of the world from day to day, but it
also presents the literary products of the best thinkers, the most polished
writers, the most perfect orators of the day. . . . The spread of intelligence
and the cultivation which is absorbed by the reader of the daily press has
enlarged the demand for the better class of periodicals, for those magazines
and books which furnish the best literature.”74
Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896 and transformed
it into the U.S. newspaper of record, found a way to capitalize on these
culture wars by marketing his newspaper as serving the specific information
138 Book History

needs of the elite. He differentiated his journalism from that of the yellow
journals by vigorously promoting an objective-voiced, fact-centered form
of news report that focused on business news and public affairs. His news-
paper would not be Stillman’s lamented compendium of useless trivialities.
The Times quickly became known not only for providing accurate informa-
tion essential to conducting business and participating in public life but also
for promoting and representing social and cultural respectability.75 As the
Times became the most “respectable” New York newspaper, the informa-
tion model of news report became the most “respectable” form of news
report. The same elite that read the New York Times presumably also read
the elite realistic literature of the same period, a fiction that held the objec-
tive, detached narrator as the “aesthetic ideal.”76 As the objective narrator
became the preferred narrative perspective across journalism and literature,
and as a preference for the “fact” and the “real” defined both expressive
forms, it might have seemed that journalism and literature were more alike
than ever before in American print culture. But soon the “twin professions”
would split apart with enduring historical consequences.

The “Twin Professions” Split Apart

The widespread social impulses toward the professionalization of labor and
knowledge that emerged in the late nineteenth century—producing new pro-
fessional organizations of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and others—strength-
ened in the early years of the new century. Broad swaths of Americans com-
mitted themselves to social progress through a variety of reform efforts in an
attempt to provide a rational order to a seemingly disordered society. Such
an approach embraced the rationality of the scientist and the measurability
of the world.77 By the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific values of
rationality and neutrality had permeated American society and its institu-
tions, including the press.78 That journalism took on the values of science
has everything to do with the cultural context of the late nineteenth century.
As part of early efforts to professionalize journalism, reformers tackled the
work practices and cultural products of the American press itself, attempt-
ing to provide standardized methods, conventions, and ethical guidelines for
what many understood to be a press corrupted in its public service role by
big business interests and the residue of nineteenth-century partisanship.79
The print marketplace responded in a range of historically consequential
ways. Journalism education became a major topic and concern; jobs in the
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 139

print marketplace become more defined and specialized; and the partisan
nature of the press in the nineteenth century and the yellow journalism of
the latter decades became increasingly viewed as objects of reform. One
long-lasting result of scientific social thought and the reforming impulse was
the widespread adoption of the idea of the fact-based, neutral report as the
most appropriate mode of representing the world in American journalism.80
The profound influence of this idea in American culture caused journalism
and literature to separate into two distinct and bounded categories of public
expression. The formerly “twin professions” of journalism and literature
split apart.
In the late nineteenth century, existing American universities modernized
and new universities emerged across the nation.81 Although journalism had
been introduced in American higher education in the post–Civil War years,
the era when newspapers became major social institutions, the question of
whether journalism was a profession requiring formal training was hotly
and vigorously debated in the first years of the new century. Before this time,
it was widely assumed that journalism education should take place infor-
mally in an editor’s office. An 1888 article in the Journalist titled “Advice
to Young Writers” claimed that “the best school of writing is a newspaper
office, with intelligence at the head. No other college is possible where the
discipline of rhetoric, of taste, and of knowledge is so effectively applied.”82
But this long-standing view that journalism could not be effectively taught
in a formal educational setting became unsettled in 1903 when Joseph Pu-
litzer announced his proposal to endow a journalism school at Columbia
University. Pulitzer believed that journalism education would help to pro-
fessionalize and dignify journalism, which had previously been treated as a
trade rather than a profession. In August 1903, an article in the Journalist
announced Pulitzer’s endowment: “to establish a practical school of jour-
nalism where a young man who wants to adopt journalism as a profession
will know how to avoid the blue pencil and will be more or less valuable
to his paper from the very start.”83 Although Columbia would not open
the doors of Pulitzer’s school until September 1912, Pulitzer’s endowment
stirred public discussion and consideration of the merits and deficiencies of
a program of higher education in journalism.84
A robust conversation in the trade journals about the value of journal-
ism education ensued in the years following Pulitzer’s announcement. Some
hewed to traditional notions, critiquing the emerging journalism programs.
For example, the editor of Editor and Publisher in a September 1903 article
clearly disagreed with the Pulitzer thesis: “As a journalist, and one who has
had a fair measure of success in his particular line, I am inclined to think it
140 Book History

[journalism] cannot [be taught], and that the only school in which it can be
learned is the school of practical experience.”85 Some supporters believed,
along with Pulitzer, that such programs could help transform the practice of
journalism into a profession with the status and cultural distinction of medi-
cine or law.86 Some, like the founding dean of the Missouri school of Jour-
nalism, believed journalism education would enable Journalism to fulfill the
social role of exposing corruption in political and social life: “Such training
means the dignifying of journalism, the strengthening of the arms of those
in the profession who would strike at iniquity entrenched, the furnishing
of young journalists with equipment for the largest service of the State.” 87
By the 1910s, the debate over journalism education in the trade publica-
tions had quieted; journalism education had become an accepted, although
not required, step in the making of a journalist. The Missouri School of
Journalism had been founded in 1908, and Columbia University’s School
of Journalism opened in 1912. With these strong institutional imprimaturs,
journalism education came into its own.88 A lecture delivered to the Ameri-
can Association of Journalism Teachers by its president, printed in the Edi-
tor and Publisher in 1916, acknowledged this change:

“Nine years ago,” said he [the association’s president], “universities

and newspapermen generally regarded such training as impractica-
ble. To-day this Association is composed of 145 journalism teachers
who are instructing 2,700 students in 46 universities and colleges.
. . . This is due largely to the cooperation of active newspapermen
who have seen in university training a means of accentuating a pro-
fessional consciousness which they have always felt was theirs, but
which has been underestimated and unrecognized by the general
public.”89

When the trade journals wrote about journalism education in the second de-
cade of the new century, it was primarily to discuss the appropriate content
and functions of such education. Karen Roggenkamp has argued that jour-
nalism education in its early years “upheld a rigid line between literature
(or ‘invention’) and journalism (or ‘fact’).”90 The emergence and growth
of journalism higher education in the twentieth century, as well as the con-
tinued professionalization of the academic discipline of literary studies and
its defense of a presumably disappearing liberal culture of high “romantic”
taste, contributed to the ultimate separation of journalism and literature as
distinct and different forms of public expression, professions in the print
marketplace, and academic disciplines.91
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 141

In the early 1900s, the trade journals turned toward other concerns in the
broad effort to professionalize journalism, including news standards, ethics,
and the social functions of the press in American life. What had emerged in
the 1890s as a broad emphasis on the special role of the fact in print culture
at large, and journalistic expression in particular, became a reified aspect
of journalistic expression in the first decade of the new century. Providing
the facts of an event in a neutral, disinterested manner became the essen-
tial aspect of the news report, and the dominant form became the inverted
pyramid style of presenting information. In a 1902 Writer review of a new
instructional book titled Reporting for the Newspapers, the reviewer quotes
the author’s description of a news report’s proper construction: “‘Different
from a play, from a literary story, from any other style of writing, a news
story begins with the news; in other words, the culmination of the story is
put first.’”92 In a 1903 how-to article in the Journalist, the writer advised
novice reporters to:

• Tell your story in the first sentence or first paragraph. Don’t use a
lot of descriptive adjectives, as though you were writing a novel,
and wind up with the real news at the end. Newspaper stories
are written exactly opposite from fiction. The climax must come
first in writing news, last in fiction.

• Tell the facts and stop. Do not make any comment of your own.
That is reserved for the editorial writers.

• Do not send puffs or attempt fine writing.93

A 1904 Editor and Publisher article emphasized both the role of the “5 Ws”
and the exclusion of all interpretation in an appropriate news report: “Every
story should answer the questions ‘What?’ ‘Who?’ Where?’ ‘Why?’ ‘How?’
and should do it in the first paragraph as nearly as possible. . . . Facts, not
words are wanted. . . . Put no editorial comments or debatable statements
into news matter.”94 The results of a 1908 survey of newspaper readers
published in Editor and Publisher indicated that readers preferred facts over
interpretation. “They do not care,” the article proclaimed, “to have a news-
paper serve as interpreter, defender, or advocate of the truth.”95 While the
inclusion of interpretive stories on the reader survey suggested that news-
papers regularly included these types of reports in their pages, the survey
results simply fed the discourse against interpretation. In a follow-up article
to the reader survey, a New York City editor demanded newspaper reform:
142 Book History

“The public is demanding forcibly—‘Give us the real news! We want the

facts! We don’t want interpreters!’”96
Magazines of the era expanded the conversation about the similarities
and differences between journalism and literature beyond readers of the
trade publications to a broader public. Between 1900 and 1906, numerous
articles appeared in the “quality” magazines by well-known writers—in-
cluding journalists Hutchins Hapgood and Julian Hawthorne, public in-
tellectual Gerald Stanley Lee, and literary critic H. W. Boynton—debating
whether journalism could be considered a form of literature. Hawthorne
argued against such a conception, the others for it. Hawthorne’s views came
to prevail in American social life.97 But this critical discourse, with its im-
plicit understanding of journalism and literature as hardened categories of
public expression, suggests just how far the previous century’s holistic un-
derstanding of print culture had unraveled.
The ornamental writing style that had become disfavored in the late
nineteenth century across all forms of print expression became in the early
twentieth almost synonymous with inaccuracy and invention in the realm
of journalism. The difference between journalism and imaginative literature
was perceived to be the former’s necessary presentation of accurate facts in
plain prose. As one trade journal article put it, “Accuracy includes fairness
in presentation, without coloring or exaggeration, clearness of expression.
Accuracy cannot permit of a mingling of fact and fiction, a dressing up of a
few facts with a large and showy ornamentation of imagination. The seeker
for accuracy must love truth for truth’s sake; he must set down facts, not
mere words, not fine writing to cover the nakedness of his information.”98
“Fine writing,” which was apparently permissible in the realm of literature,
was in journalism simply a “smoke screen to hide the absence of facts.”99
Newspapers had fully embraced a spare, uncluttered prose style emphasiz-
ing simple diction and facts, with no invention or embroidery or “fine writ-
ing” allowed.
As noted earlier, the magazine market expanded radically in the last
years of the nineteenth century to include many middle-class readers.100 In
this emerging mass market, many magazines became less “literary” and
more news-oriented, a shift that was part of a larger cultural transforma-
tion termed the “‘journalization’” of the American magazine, as well as of
American thinking and speaking, by one contemporaneous observer.101 As
an article in the Atlantic Monthly made the point in 1900, the simple and
direct prose style of the newspaper, as well as its preoccupation with report-
ing a vast range of diverse and miscellaneous news items, had “invaded” the
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 143

American magazine, which had previously concerned itself with the more
genteel concerns of culture and literature and expressed itself with rhetorical
and “literary” flourishes and argument. In the Progressive Era, Christopher
Wilson has argued, the culture of news reporting infiltrated the expanse of
American print culture.102 Many writers began their careers in newspaper-
ing before moving on to magazine or book writing, and the ideal practices
learned in the newspaper work carried over into other writerly labor. As
Wilson suggests, “A number of critics complained about a ‘tyranny of time-
liness’ which reflected the encroachment of the news ethic into different
forms of American media; some would even argue that the entire culture
had undergone a form of ‘journalization.’”103

Exploring “Objectivity”
As the labor of journalism industrialized across the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and as journalistic labor became increasingly special-
ized, two distinct occupational ideologies emerged. On the one hand, beat
and workaday reporters hewed to an ideology of naive empiricism—a belief
that the presentation of facts based on a close observation of reality pro-
duced an account of the world preferable to any other approach. Focusing
on the gathering and presentation of facts allowed these reporters to claim
an authority in their reports that they actually lacked in their workplace,
where editors held ultimate power. On the other hand, editors embraced
an ideology of “trained judgment”—a belief that facts often required inter-
pretation; that reports presenting facts and those interpreting the meaning
of facts should be segregated; and that editors possessed the educated judg-
ment needed to interpret the facts. “Trained judgment” is a term historians
of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison use in their important book
on the history of the idea and practice of objectivity in science across the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In their narrative, “trained judgment” is
a form of scientific objectivity that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in
reaction against the passive objectivity defining scientific work of an earlier
era. It was the idea that to be objective in scientific work was to exercise
“judgment and intuition.”104 In the arena of journalism, “trained judgment”
belonged to the editor, not the reporter.105
The term “objectivity” did not emerge in journalistic discourse until the
1920s.106 Yet ideas about objectivity characterized the practices and culture
of science and other intellectual work of the late nineteenth century. To be
144 Book History

objective in historical practice in this moment was, Peter Novick has argued,
to be neutral, “rigidly factual and empirical,” and systematic in method. It
was to turn away from older conceptions of history as a literary or artistic
enterprise meant to improve human nature.107 Objectivity as an ideal of
historical practice was thus born in the late nineteenth century when history
professionalized along with the social sciences in the academy. The same
elements that defined historical objectivity also came to define journalism
by the turn of the century.
Michael Schudson has argued that “objectivity” in journalism in the
early twentieth century was not the same thing as the naive empiricism of
the late nineteenth century that informed journalistic practice.108 Neither
was it the same thing as the “trained judgment” editors claimed in the same
period. In Schudson’s formulation, the idea of journalistic “objectivity” did
not emerge until after World War I and did not become widespread until the
1920s. It was articulated and popularized by Walter Lippmann as an anti-
dote to World War I propaganda and its strategic use of facts to manufacture
consent.109 Facts could be manipulated to misrepresent and obfuscate actual
events and issues; in the case of less durable facts, it was often difficult to tell
the difference between so-called facts, on the one hand, and motives, value
judgments, and personal perspective, on the other. The resulting profes-
sional ideal of objectivity in journalism was “a faith in ‘facts,’ a distrust of
‘values,’ and a commitment to their segregation.” Although Schudson does
not emphasize the distinction between values and opinion in his historical
argument, he does make the distinction—and it is an important one. For
Schudson, “values” are “an individual’s conscious or unconscious prefer-
ences for what the world should be.”110 And these values or preferences are
distinct from opinion. To put the matter differently, Schudson does not de-
fine objectivity as the belief in and commitment to the separation of fact and
opinion in journalistic expression. That belief and commitment were a late
nineteenth-century phenomenon, as Schudson’s account fully recognizes.
The historical narrative offered here embraces Schudson’s definition of
journalistic objectivity and supports his account of the rise of the objective
news report in America. In doing so, it necessarily questions other accounts
that define journalistic objectivity differently and locate its emergence in
earlier periods.111 While certain elements of the objective news report were
clearly present in American press discourse and in American press practices
in the late nineteenth century—an emphasis on the presentation of facts,
a commitment to the segregation of facts and opinion, even a sublimated
notion that facts did not speak themselves—there had yet to develop the
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 145

awareness, as Schudson put it, that facts are “human statements about the
world,” not “aspects of the world itself.”112
As previously discussed, the idea that news reports should present facts
divorced from opinion and commentary was widespread in the trade jour-
nal discourse by the end of the nineteenth century. Some late-nineteenth-
century Americans even believed that the presentation of facts on their own
could not produce an intelligible report of the world. Forcing commentary
out of news reports, it was said, presented “a serious obstacle to the lucid
and intelligent presentation of news.” The problem was that “facts stand-
ing alone” were “often misleading unless their significance is explained by a
few words of opinion.”113 Newspapers should not depart from the historic
work of literature, William F. Fowler argued: “The great bulk of literary
effort through all ages has not been to furnish more facts, but to make
more significant those already known.”114 These commentators were not the
naive empiricists that so many of their peers appeared to be. In their view,
facts were not transparent and did not speak for themselves. Their solution,
however, was not the segregation of facts and values that characterized the
rise of the objectivity standard in American journalism in the early twenti-
eth century; it was, rather, the use of interpretation and commentary in a
news report to make meaning of the facts presented. To put the matter in
the terms Schudson has forwarded in his work, the trade journal discourse
of the late nineteenth century does not reflect the awareness that facts might
be colored by conscious or unconscious values or “preferences for what the
world should be.” As Schudson has argued, this awareness did not emerge
until the 1920s.

Conclusion
From 1885 to 1910, scientific modes of thought and democratic reform
impulses came to deeply characterize American social institutions and print
culture. As the trade journal discourse during this period demonstrates, the
first several years of the twentieth century emerged as a moment of signifi-
cant transformation in the popular idea of what constituted a news report.
The informational form of news report that was part, but only one part, of
a rich stew of forms that comprised the late-nineteenth-century terrain of
journalism had become the dominant idea of what constituted the most “de-
sirable form of rendering reality.”115 These years also marked the emergence
of a debate about formal journalism education that would continue across
146 Book History

the next decade until such education had become formally institutional-
ized. This debate increasingly emphasized the difference between journalis-
tic genres and work and the genres and work of imaginative, or “literary,”
writers in print culture at large. By this time, too, it had been noted that the
entire realm of print communication had been profoundly influenced by the
idea of the fact-based, neutral news report.
Today we are experiencing another communication revolution that may
constitute our own era’s turning point in print culture. American journalism
is transforming. Structural changes in the institutional press abound: the
fragmentation of the news audience, the proliferation of news outlets be-
yond the legacy press, the collapse of the advertising-based business model,
and the dizzying innovation of news production and delivery technologies.
Exactly how these changes will reshape American journalism is unclear, but
they are unsettling the traditional news paradigm, including the twentieth-
century conception of what constituted a news report.
Although objectivity emerged as a kind of scientific technique meant to
scrutinize and verify facts and truth claims, to segregate facts from cultural
biases or values, it often became in twentieth-century journalistic practice
the naive empiricism of the late nineteenth century.116 It is no wonder that so
many scholars have defined and historicized “objectivity” in journalism in
such disparate ways. For much of the twentieth century, American journal-
ism has been preoccupied with “the fact,” the inverted pyramid form, and
objectivity (or at least naive empiricism) as the essential elements of a news
report.
And so we return to James Carey to conclude. Carey asked communica-
tion scholars to make the cultural turn toward what he termed a “ritual
view of communication.” Communication as ritual, he wrote, “is directed
not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance
of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representa-
tion of shared beliefs.”117 Twenty-first century American journalism contin-
ues to reinvent itself as our communication technologies, society, political
culture, and economy reinvent themselves, too. What will become a desir-
able account of the world—the dominant idea or ideas of a report—in this
new dispensation? How will our society’s shared beliefs shape these ideas
about the ideal report? As we encounter these changes, it seems wise to
remember that the history of American journalism tells us that the idea of
a news report at any given moment is culturally and socially conditioned.
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 147

Notes

1. James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1 (1974):

5.
2. Ibid., 27.
3. Andie Tucher, “Notes on a Cultural History of Reporting,” Cultural Studies 23(2)
(March 2009): 290. David Paul Nord has also discussed Carey’s plea for a cultural history
of journalism. See, for example, “A Plea for Journalism History,” Journalism History 15(1)
(Spring 1988): 8–15; and “James Carey and Journalism History: A Remembrance,” Journalism
History 32(3) (Fall 2006): 122–127.
4. Michael Schudson, “The Problem of Journalism History, 1996,” in James Carey: A
Critical Reader, ed. E. S. Munson and C. A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 79–85, 80.
5. Ibid., 81.
6. “‘Putting the World at Peril’: A Conversation with James W. Carey,” in Munson and
Warren, James Carey, 95–116. See also Tucher, “Notes on a Cultural History,” 291, for an-
other discussion of Carey’s comments on the difficulty of new work on the “cultural history of
reporting.”
7. Frank Luther Mott, the celebrated magazine historian, identified the Writer as the
most important of the periodicals addressing beginning writers and the Journalist as “an in-
valuable record of the newspaper events and personalities” in the 1880s and 1890s. According
to Mott, Editor and Publisher eventually absorbed many of the trade periodicals in the field
of journalism, including the Fourth Estate, Newspaperdom, and the Journalist. See Frank Lu-
ther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1885-1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
1957), 142, 243. For interesting studies of the role of the trade press in the professionalization
of American journalism and the creation of ethical standards, see Mary M. Cronin, “Trade
Press Roles in Promoting Journalistic Professionalism, 1884–1917,” Journal of Mass Media
Ethics 8(4) (1993): 227–238; Patrick Lee Plaisance, “A Gang of Pecksniffs Grow Up: The Evo-
lution of Journalism Ethics Discourse in The Journalist and Editor and Publisher,” Journalism
Studies 6(4) (2005): 479–491.
8. Ronald R. Rodgers, “‘Journalism Is a Loose-Jointed Thing’: A Content Analysis of
Editor & Publisher’s Discussion of Journalistic Conduct Prior to the Canons of Journalism,
1901–1922,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 22(1) (2007): 66–82, 72.
9. Susan Douglas, “Does Textual Analysis Tell Us Anything About Past Audiences?” in
Explorations in Communication and History, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2008),
66–72, 29.
10. Stephen A. Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism,” Journalism History
24(4) (1998/99): 157–158; Rodgers, “‘Journalism Is a Loose-Jointed Thing,’” 76.
11. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspa-
pers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 88–90; Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Politi-
cal Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 259–260; Patrick
Washburn, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2006).
12. Charles Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role
of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4, 17,
198.
13. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 223–231.
14. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement
in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 3–39; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for
Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 4–5.
148 Book History

15. James L. W. West, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 43.
16. See Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Pro-
gressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 12. See also Barbara Hochman, Get-
ting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 30.
17. Starr, Creation of the Media, 252.
18. Ibid., 261–62; Hochman, Getting at the Author, 103; John Tebbel and Mary Ellen
Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 67–68.
19. By the time the Audit Bureau of Circulation was established in 1914, a number of
magazines had circulations of more than one million. Tebbel and Zuckerman, Magazine in
America, 68–69.
20. Starr, Creation of the Media, 252.
21. “Useful Hints to Young Writers,” Journalist 1(17) (July 12, 1884): 17.
22. See, for example, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imagi-
native Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
23. “About Ourselves,” Journalist 3(1) (March 27, 1886): 8.
24. Robin Gallagher, “Magazine Trade Press,” in History of the Mass Media in the United
States: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret A. Blanchard (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
1998), 345–346.
25. Writer 1(1) (April 1887): 1.
26. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4–7.
27. Schudson, Discovering the News, 71–75.
28. Shi, Facing Facts, 66–70.
29. Ibid., 100.
30. For an excellent discussion of nineteenth century debates over language in popular
speech and print culture, see Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular
Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
31. Mona Fargher Purdy, “Old Advice for New Writers,” Writer, 4(4) (April 1890): 103.
See also “Spare the Adjectives!” Journalist 3(109) (May 22, 1886): 8.
32. H. L. Richards Jr., “The Importance of Style in Newspaper Work,” Writer 2(10) (Oc-
tober 1888): 243.
33. A. A. Fowle, “How to Get into Print,” Writer 1(1) (April 1887): 9; See also F. R. Bur-
ton, “Descriptive Writing,” Writer 1(5) (August 1887): 81–82.
34. “Advice to Young Writers,” Journalist 7(10) (May 26, 1888): 14. Andie Tucher has
described the experience of reading newspapers of the Gilded Age as akin to being “plunged
into wildernesses, even jungles, of luxuriant prose and hothouse verbiage positively byzantine
in its splendor.” Andie Tucher, “In Search of Jenkins: Taste, Style, and Credibility in Gilded-
Age Journalism,” Journalism History 27(2) (2001): 53.
35. H. L. Richards Jr., “The Importance of Style in Newspaper Work,” Writer 2(10) (Oc-
tober 1888): 242.
36. See, for example, James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Tele-
graph,” in Communication as Culture, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 155-177, orgin-
ally published in Prospects 8 (1983): 303-325. Carey argued that the telegraph “made prose
lean and unadorned and led to a journalism without the luxury of detail and analysis,” 163.
37. Shi, Facing Facts, 66; Thomas B. Connery, “A Third Way to Tell the Story: American
Literary Journalism at the Turn of the Century,” in Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Cen-
tury, ed. Norman Sims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–20, 4.
38. “That Ideal Newspaper!” Journalist 11(8) (May 10, 1890):2-3.
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 149

39. A.B., “On the Ethics of Newspaper Men,” Journalist 14(22) (August 13, 1992): 11.
40. T. Campbell Copeland, “The Ladder of Journalism: How to Climb It,” Journalist
9(17) (July 13, 1889): 12.
41. Frank H. Pope, “Descriptive Writing,” Writer 1(5) (August 1887): 81–82.
42. Edwin L. Shuman, “How to Write a Newspaper Article,” Journalist 1(23) (August 18,
1894): 7.
43. James Wyllys Dixon, “News Writers,” Journalist 19(9) (May 12, 1894): 6.
44. Hochman, Getting at the Author, 2.
45. Schudson, Discovering the New, 78.
46. Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 89–92.
47. Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in
Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univer-
sity Press, 2005), xiv.
48. Schudson, Discovering the News, 91–95; John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the
New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 66. In The Year That Defined
American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 2006), W. Jo-
seph Campbell distinguishes Hearst’s form of yellow journalism from Pulitzer’s, characterizing
the New York Journal’s reporting as a “journalism of action” (27–29).
49. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 92.
50. Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace, 2.
51. Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, 3.
52. See “The Coming Newspaper,” Journalist 14(22), (February 13, 1892):, 2; “The Mod-
ern Newspaper,” Journalist 8(10) (November 24, 1888): 11; “The Editorial Writer,” Journalist
11(8) (May 10, 1890): 8.
53. “Coming Newspaper.”
54. “Modern Newspaper.”
55. “Editorial Writer.”
56. Michael Schudson, “Persistence of Vision: Partisan Journalism in the Mainstream
Press,” in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Pub-
lishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 143; Thomas C. Leonard, The Power
of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 215.
57. “Modern Journalism,” Journalist 6(20) (February 4, 1888): 12.
58. Richard L. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism: The Transformation of the
Daily Press,” in Kaestle and Radway, Print in Motion, 133–135; John Nerone and Kevin G.
Barnhurst, “U.S. Newspaper Types, the Newsroom, and the Division of Labor, 1750–2000,”
Journalism Studies 4(4) (2003): 445; Wilson, Labor of Words, 28–30; Schudson, Discovering
the News, 77–81.
59. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 117.
60. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded
Age (1983; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Shi, Facing Facts, 214; Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–
1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12–13; Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in
America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 52.
61. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 136–137.
62. “Journalism in Peace and War,” Editor and Publisher 6(15) (December 31, 1887): 6.
63. “Howard on Reporters: The Greatest Living Reporter Writes of the Guild,” Journalist
14(20) (January 30, 1892): 2.
64. “The American Reporter: His Worth, Enterprise and Rewards, Told By One Who
Knows,” Journalist 16(4)(October 8, 1892): 11 (reprinted from the New York World). The
150 Book History

quoted passage appears to be an “after Jenkins” style of report poking fun at other report-
ers’ characterizations of their line of work as especially dangerous and manly. See Tucher, “In
Search of Jenkins,” 50.
65. “What a Journalistic Training Does for a Young Man,” Editor and Publisher 1(14)
(September 28, 1901): 4.
66. For examples, see Eugene M. Camp, “What Is News?” Journalist 7(9) (May 19,
1888): 14; America, “What Is News?” Journalist 8(7) (November 3, 1888): 11; John Palmer
Gavit, “What Is News? A Manual for Newspaper Reporters and Correspondents,” Journalist
15(8) (April 30, 1892): 12–14; Ike Le Veen, “What Is News?” Journalist 15(26) (September
10, 1892): 7; Frank Lane Carter, “What Is News?” Journalist 33(21) (September 12, 1903):
329 (excerpted from an article titled “Joseph Pulitzer” printed in the September 1903 issue of
Everybody’s).
67. Ike le Veen, “What Is News?” Journalist, September 10, 1892, 7.
68. W. B. Chisholm, “Is It Anti-Literary?” Journalist 13(12) (June 13, 1891): 3.
69. Wilson, Labor of Words, 38.
70. “The Coming Newspaper,” Journalist 14(22) (February 13, 1892): 3.
71. W. J. Stillman, “Journalism and Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1891, 689.
72. Ibid., 692.
73. Ibid., 693.
74. “Newspapers and Literature,” Journalist 14(21) (February 6, 1892): 4.
75. Schudson, Discovering the News, 110–112.
76. Hochman, Getting at the Author, 26.
77. Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of
American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 1, 323;
Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Sci-
ence Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Il-
linois Press, 1977); Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 51.
78. Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, rev.
ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995), 86.
79. Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–
1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 140–141.
80. Schudson, Discovering the News, 152–154.
81. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 14–15, 159.
82. “Advice to Young Writers,” Journalist 7(10) (May 26, 1888): 14.
83. “A Real School of Journalism,” Journalist 33(18) (August 1903): 274. See also Joseph
Pulitzer, “The College of Journalism,” North American Review 178 (1904): 641-680.
84. James Boylan, Pulitzer’s School: Columbia University’s School of Journalism, 1903–
2003 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 12–20.
85. “Can It Be Taught?” Editor and Publisher 3(11) (September 5, 1903): 4.
86. “Teaching Journalism,” Editor and Publisher 5(32) (January 27, 1906): 4; “School Is
Needed,” Editor and Publisher 3(49) (May 28, 1904): 4.
87. Walter Williams, “Journalism Schools,” Editor and Publisher 8(27) (January 2, 1909):
5.
88. Tom Dickson, Mass Media Education in Transition: Preparing for the 21st Century
(Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 3–24; Boylan, Pulitzer’s School, 22–31.
89. “Journalism Teachers Meet in Lawrence,” Editor and Publisher 48(46) (April 22,
1916): 1430.
90. Roggenkamp, Narrating the News, 121.
91. David R. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870–1990: A Curricular His-
tory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 166–168; John C. Hartsock, A
 “The Facts—the Color!—the Facts” 151

History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Am-
herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 217.
92. William H. Hills, “Reporting for the Newspapers,” Writer, January 1902, 4.
93. “Useful and Concise,” Journalist 32(21) (March 14, 1903): 263.
94. “Instructions to Reporters,” Editor and Publisher 3(44) (April 23, 1904): 4.
95. “Readers Want Facts,” Editor and Publisher 8(13) (September 26, 1908): 1.
96. “More About Reforming Newspapers,” Editor and Publisher, October 10, 1908, 4.
97. Hutchins Hapgood, “A New Form of Literature,” Bookman 21 (1905): 424–447; Ju-
lian Hawthorne, “Journalism the Destroyer of Literature,” Critic 48 (1906): 166–171; Gerald
Stanley Lee, “Journalism as a Basis for Literature,” Atlantic, February 1900, 231–237; H. W.
Boynton, “The Literary Aspect of Journalism,” Atlantic June 1904, 845–851. For discussions
of this discourse, see Hartsock, History of American Literary Journalism, 38–39, 222–223.
98. J. S. Meyers, “The Importance of Accuracy in Writing,” Writer 25(5) (May 1913):
65–67.
99. “Write Plainly, Let Readers Add the Frills,” Editor and Publisher 58(44) (March 27,
1926): 42.
100. Tebbel and Zuckerman, Magazine in America, 66–67.
101. Arthur Reed Kimball, “The Invasion of Journalism,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1990,
120.
102. Wilson, Labor of Words, 38.
103. Ibid.
104. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2007),
307.
105. Nerone and Barnhurst, “U.S. Newspaper Types,” 443–445.
106. Schudson, Discovering the News, 6.
107. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 37–40.
108. Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 81–83;
Schudson, Discovering the News, 6.
109. Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transac-
tion, 1995); Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922; repr., New York: Free Press, 1997).
110. Schudson, Discovering the News, 6; Schudson, Sociology of News, 85.
111. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press, 166–167; David T. Z. Mindich, Just the
Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1998); Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Com-
mercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). Richard Kaplan has
argued that objective journalism arose after the turn of the twentieth century due to political
change. In his historical narrative, both the rise of the commercial press and, most significant,
the decline of party politics in American public life suggested to newspaper owners that a
neutral, detached, fact-based approach to the news made more financial sense than a partisan
approach. This argument is important and persuasive. Yet news owners’ decisions to adopt an
objective form of news report were shaped not only by political and economic imperatives but
also by a changing social and cultural environment.
112. Schudson, Discovering the News, 6.
113. S. S. Kingdon, “Should Reporters Express Opinion?” Writer 2(2) (February 1888):
29.
114. William F. Fowler, “Character in Journalism,” Writer 2(1) (January 1888): 6.
115. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” 5.
116. Jeremy Iggers, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 66.
117. James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Communication as Cul-
ture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1989), 18.