After six years of the Journalism History podcast, the hosts and selected guests reflect on the importance of this podcast and journalism history in this series finale.
Transcript
Mike Sweeney: I realized what a crucial and central role that journalism played in our understanding as a country. What it is that we have to decide on, what it is that we have to realize is the conversation that takes place.
Teri Finneman: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.
I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.
Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.
Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Teri Finneman: (00:43) And together, we are professional media historians guiding you though our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available at journalism-history.org/podcast. This episode is sponsored by Lehigh University’s Department of Journalism and Communication, inspiring the future makers.
(01:04) Why does Journalism History matter? It’s how we’ve ended every episode the last six years. And today, it’s how we’re ending the show.
I started this podcast over six years ago with the support of Mike Sweeney, whose voice you heard open this episode. Mike has since died. But his legacy, much like this show’s, will go on for much longer.
In 2018, there was concern in the field of journalism history that people no longer thought we mattered. Drones. Virtual reality. Snapchat. Big data. Science journalism. Now AI……..journalism programs across the country jumped on the latest fads. History of journalism classes? Not important, so they said.
But over 150 original and bonus shows later, all of you, our fans in over 100 countries, have shown that’s not true. (02:04) Journalism history does matter and is absolutely critical to not only today’s working journalists but to a global understanding of how things were and how things could be.On this show, you’ve learned more about the big names – Pulitzer. Hearst. Nellie Bly. Ernie Pyle. But we were always committed to the second half of our slogan: Ripping out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told. We dove into the history of deaf printers. Black public relations practitioners ignored in textbooks. The role of newspapers in lynchings. The history of food journalism. What happened AFTER the Titanic sank. The stories were endless. And, with the help of the other hosts, it’s been an honor to share them with you.
Nick Hirshon: (03:00) Historians aren’t known for being ahead of the curve. There is so much to explore about the past that many of us prefer to stay there. We pull ourselves out of the archives every so often to present at conferences and promote articles and books. But we’re happiest in the early stages of our research, the treasure hunt—combing through old newspapers, dusting off letters and memorabilia in a library somewhere, off on our own adventures to find information about notable people and events that others have missed.
Journalism historians, of course, can’t just stick their heads in antiquity. We’re professors too, and it’s our responsibility to help students who want to become reporters stay on top of current events and introduce them to emerging tools of the trade—social media, smart phone apps, artificial intelligence. They need to learn how to use these tools to promote their work and stand out amid the cacophony of media.
(04:05) That’s what struck me when I was approached in 2018 about hosting the Journalism History podcast. All authors write to be read. Lots of journalism historians, including myself, are former reporters. Some of us spent years writing for large audiences – in my case, more than 500,000 readers of the New York Daily News. But now we publish in academic journals that comparatively few people even know exist. Journalism History is one of them. We’re excited about the work we do and think it’s important. This podcast let us share that with the general public on a platform much more popular than a paywalled library database.
I’ve always thought a lot about preserving the past. But that was especially top of mind when the podcast launched in 2018. (05:00) In a 14-month span, I had lost both of my parents. My mom died first, in October 2016, and in the aftermath, my uncle hunted down an oral history she’d done years earlier and shared it with me. My dad was diagnosed with cancer a few months later, and I arranged for him to record an oral history too. He would be gone less than a year after that interview. I will never see them again. But I find it reassuring to know their voices, their stories, aren’t lost to time.
With the Journalism History podcast coming to an end, I’ve been reflecting on the last six years of episodes. Looking back has been emotional. I recorded my first interview for this podcast in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, during the annual conference of the American Journalism Historians Association. It was the first and last time I ever conducted an interview for this podcast in person; all the others were online. (06:02) It’s also the last in-depth conversation I ever had with the guest for that episode – the graduate director who saw me through my Ph.D. program at Ohio University, and one of the country’s most notable media historians, Dr. Mike Sweeney. We spent some time on the podcast talking about his latest research project, but we also went into the work he loved—his thoughts on the pursuit of historical knowledge and what makes a good teacher. He died two years ago, in 2022. I hope we captured a small piece of who he was.
That was the third episode of this podcast. Now we’re up to almost 150.
Ken Ward: (06:46) The first episode of the podcast that I hosted dropped March 17, 2020, just a few days after my university at the time announced in was closing its campus due to COVID. I wasn’t about to record with the on-board mic on my computer—after all, it wasn’t as though the world was crumbling around me, I still had standards—so my wife and I cobbled together our first podcast studio in the back of the house. Though it’s moved with me to a new room and a new job in a different state, I’m still recording on that same rig right now.
Even though I started with the podcast shortly before COVID hit—I was interviewed on the show in June of ’19 and recorded my first hosted show in January of ‘20—the tenuousness of that time, the unsettledness, the mild to moderate chaos, has always pervaded the show to me. In my experience, that’s kind of the nature of all media work, at least the exciting kind. You’re trying to juggle all these people who you depend who have their own things going on while making a product that is, at least to a degree, performative, bringing all the anxieties of public performance into play, to make a thing that you hope people will enjoy without ever really knowing whether they do.
(08:05) Part of that chaotic feeling I associate with the show undoubtedly comes from the time I became invested in it, but it extends even earlier. I’d been working on a media history podcast idea of my own in 2017 after conversations I’d had with a few colleagues that suggested there was interest. I’d lined up the guest for the pilot—Matt Cecil, who I wound up interviewing for this podcast three years later. Then, in 2018, I was just starting my first tenure-track job—more unsettledness. And then the Journalism History podcast debuted in October. The little bit of pressure to get a media history podcast out vented off, and I assumed, certainly with some disappointment, that I’d missed the boat.
And then, sometime in late 2019, came the invitation from Teri to host an episode. Which led to more hosting, and then I started doing our technical production, and finally taking over as showrunner last year. (09:08) The podcast chaos that became a regular part of my life during COVID just stayed chaos right through the end, some 65 episodes in all that I had a hand in.
But despite the chaos, this show has been worth the effort the whole time because out of everything I do under the scholarship column of what we, as academics, do, I know that this show is the most impactful. The downloads show it. Thanks to the brilliant ideas of the guests on this show and the hard work of my colleagues, this show has carried important, fascinating stories to an audience with such breadth. The podcast is assigned in classrooms. It’s listened to during commutes. It’s shared on social media. And so, in spite of the chaos, I’m immensely grateful to have gotten to be a part of it.
(10:02) And so with my co-hosts I turn, one last time, to that question we pose to every guest on the show, to highlight a last few brilliant ideas before heading out the door.
The first of these is as much a warning to researchers as it is a celebration of journalism history, but I think it’s important. On the show, Andie Tucher reminded us that the historical media products we study are just as fallible as the journalism of today.
Andie Tucher: (10:30) Journalism is often a source for historians and they need to know how to read it. It astonishes me, all the time, that anyone can look at the front page of the New York Times and say, “Well, this is biased, and this is not true, and this was true yesterday but not today,” and everybody can be a critic of today’s New York Times. But the minute it goes on microfilm or becomes digitized or its paper starts to yellow, it becomes a primary source and people often lose that critical eye. One of my favorite examples there is, is the interview. In the 19th century, interviews were seen as completely fakeable. Many journalists said, blithely and, and cheerfully, “I always fake interviews, ’cause I can’t get people to tell me what I want them to tell me.” But any historian who looks back to the 19th century and tries to use an interview in a newspaper as a source, as a historical trustworthy source could be really, really sorry [laughs], because it often – they need to understand how truth worked and what the expectations for truth were in newspapers of various eras. It wasn’t always exactly as it is today.
Ken Ward: (11:38) To Jon Marshall, journalism history is about knowing—both in terms of what we know and how we know it.
Jon Marshall: (11:46) If we think about it, what people know about the world around them beyond their own personal observations or their own personal conversations, comes from media including journalism. It’s – it’s how we know things about what’s going on about government and politics to our entertainment and culture and – and sports and any other kind of information that we get: whether it’s from TV or radio or social media or – or – or the web or magazines or newspapers. We’re getting a lot of our information about what we know about the world from the media. And so, if we’re going to understand how the media is shaping our perceptions of reality both through information and sometimes increasingly through misinformation now, we – we need to understand how we got here, how it became this way. What – what were the forces that – that – that shaped the media world that we got to today? And I firmly believe if we’re going to clearly navigate the way that the media presents itself today, we need to study media history to give us an effective map for how we got here to – to increase that understanding.
Ken Ward: (13:04) Meanwhile, the past is very much alive to Paula Hunt. In fact, she says it’s the resonance of the past today that gives journalism history much of its meaning.
Paula Hunt: (13:14) Journalism history isn’t just about the past or what happened in the past or who the primary actors were in the past. But it’s about a relationship between the past and the present. And I think that engaging in the complexities of the past really challenges us to think not just about journalism but the social and political and economic and technological and religious environment in which journalism is created. And I think this kind of engagement helps us with a deeper understanding of the past, and how that past presents itself today. When you know journalism history, you learn how it’s been central to American history and culture; you know what sets American history apart from other countries. And I think, importantly, you know, in today’s journalism landscape, you look at our history and it kind of gives us some clues as to how we should move forward. I mean, when it was declared that the internet would kill journalism, we only have to think about the same thing was said about the telegraph, radio, and television when they came onto the scene, and journalism is still here.
Nick Hirshon: (14:24) Author Lisa Napoli came on the show to discuss her book on four women who transformed journalism through their work for National Public Radio. I interviewed her at a time when the pandemic kept us from communicating face to face, and anxiously awaiting news on the worst public health crisis in a century. As we all sat at home, we relied on journalists to answer the most basic of questions – when the world would return to normal. In her answer, Lisa focused on the importance of understanding how journalists shape the information we receive.
Lisa Napoli: (15:00) It shocks me that everybody, scholar or not, doesn’t see the importance of understanding the context of how we communicate. The media are as important as anything in our society. Ah, look at where we are in our world today. It’s, it’s – it would be impossible to imagine this world, and I’ve tried to, if you go back and look at the 1918 pandemic and the historical period, then imagining that without radio, without television or widespread radio at least, it’s such an important force that it is so clearly obvious to me that we need to study how we got where we are.
Nick Hirshon: (15:43) In 2024, I interviewed Travis Vogan about his book on ESPN, the network that became a sports media empire by turning the NFL Draft and NCAA men’s basketball tournaments into television spectacles. When I asked Travis why journalism history matters, he went beyond sports. He described how the promotion and suppression of news over the years helps us understand the evolution of society.
Travis Vogan: (16:10) We have this idea that we live in a democracy where differences of opinions are fostered and encouraged, and we see constantly over the course of our history folks trying to quash that kind of free discourse, folks trying to limit that sort of discourse, trying to punish people who are speaking out, and journalism has played, you know, an important role in trying to preserve this sort of democratic society and the free exchange of ideas. But it’s also played an interesting role in kind of partnering with some of those entities that are trying to quash it as well. And so, I think if you pay attention to journalism, you’re able to, over time, you’re able to kind of trace the process and pitfalls of the democratic experience in a really interesting way. And I don’t think there’s any better way to—I’m obviously biased—to study, you know, American society than to pay attention to journalism and all the transformations that it’s gone through over the years, whether they’re political, whether they’re technological, whether they’re cultural, etc. It’s invaluable, I think.
Nick Hirshon: (17:27) In 2020, I interviewed Chris Daly, a historian at Boston University who has written about the infamous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. As journalism professors, we are concerned about the state of the industry that we study, and where our students hope to get jobs. Newspapers are shuttering everywhere. Those that have survived are slumping along with fewer readers. But our work as historians isn’t merely academic. It can help inform the future of our business.
Chris Daly: (17:57) You know, with every passing month, we are now seeing the very unwelcome, you know, destruction of a lot of local journalism around the country. The newspaper that serves the small town and the medium-sized city is cratering in a way that is really, I dare say, unprecedented. So, you know, we have to look to the history of journalism to ask why is that so? I think it can help us answer that question. It can help us answer related questions. What kinds of experiments might be productive at this time? What has been tried before and failed?
Teri Finneman: (18:43) Kathy Forde said journalism history affects everyone whether they realize it or not.
Kathy Forde: (18:50) Journalism is – it’s the way by which most of us learn about the world around us. It’s the way most of us learn about public affairs, the way we learn about culture. It’s the way we learn about public policy and foreign affairs. It’s the way by which we know the world. And so if that’s true, then journalism is a force in all of our lives. And it has been in our present lives and it was in the past. And if we’re going to understand our present moment, we also need to look to the past.
Teri Finneman: (19:26) Jinx Broussard emphasized the importance of lifting marginalized voices in historical narratives.Jinx Broussard: (19:33) In my view, we have to tell the history of media, and we have to include those who have been marginalized as well as those who have garnered a lot of visibility. And so, I think it matters so that we can continue to elevate, to inform, to convey information, I know that’s redundant about the media, and make sure that it’s not just his story or their story, but all of our stories.
Teri Finneman: (20:13) Autumn Linford said every aspect of journalism itself connects to history.
Autumn Linford: (20:18) Everything that we do is tied to our past. If you want to talk about media law, if you want to talk about media ethics, the basic structure of a news article, the way we treat our sources, basic AP style, it’s all tied to media history. It’s media history that shapes who we are and what we do as journalists. So to me, if you appreciate journalism, if you think it’s important, then you have to appreciate its history, too.
Teri Finneman: (20:50) We’ve had so many wonderful guests it makes it hard to end the show. We’ve lasted as many episodes or more as MacGyver. The West Wing. The Dukes of Hazzard and Young Sheldon.
There’s much more work to be done in the field of journalism history. The story is far from over. It’s just the chapter here that’s ending.
All of our show’s episodes will remain live for new audiences to discover a love of journalism history in the weeks and months to come.
I want to thank the show’s hosts – Nick, Ken and Will – for their work over the years. Maybe, one day down the road, the studio light will come back on.
But for now, for the final time, in the words of Edward R. Murrow……
Ken Ward: (21:39) Good night, and good luck.
Nick Hirshon: Good night, and good luck.
Teri Finneman: Good night, and good luck.
Journalism History journal 