Volume 52, No. 2, Summer, 2026. In this issue we celebrate 250 years of US independence, with the winning essay from our 2025/2026 Essay Competition, Independence, Incarcerated: Prison Journalism, Abolitionist Critique, and Commemorating the “Bicentennial Behind Bars” by Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute Fellow Dr. Thomas Cryer. We also have our runners up – Reconciling Founding-Era Contradictions: Copyright, Free Speech, and the Rhetoric of Originalism by Dr. Jason Guthrie (Associate Professor at Clayton University) and The Sinews of Colonial Hypocrisy: Indigenous Unfreedom in Newspaper Advertisements in 1776 by Anjali DasSarma (PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania) – and our honourary mention, The Missing Freedom: The Absence of Freedom of the Press in the Australian Constitution by Benjamin Richards (PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne).
This issue also contains our editor’s note from editor Perry Parks on the theme, 250 Years of US Independence – A Critical Look and three research articles from Robin Hoecker, Alexis Haskell and Niamh Sammon. We also have three reviews of the latest books in our discipline, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, Histories of Digital Journalism: The Interplay of Technology, Society and Culture and The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History
Essay abstracts
The Sinews of Colonial Hypocrisy: Indigenous Unfreedom in Newspaper Advertisements in 1776
In 1776, Indigenous freedom seekers Sim, William, and Margaret escaped the enslavement or unfreedom forced upon them by colonists. Advertisements announcing their departures and rewards for their capture were published in The Constitutional Gazette, The Connecticut Courant, and The Pennsylvania Evening Post—the same year that these papers celebrated the “freedom” of American independence. This essay queries our conception of freedom in 1776 by explicating narrative hypocrisies in newspapers and by questioning the contexts in which they were produced and disseminated. How do we read these advertisements against the sanctimonious articles fighting for equality? What might these advertisements tell us about relations of power, rhetorical dispossession, and capitalism in the newspaper in 1776?
Reconciling Founding-Era Contradictions: Copyright, Free Speech, and the Rhetoric of Originalism
There is an apparent logical contradiction between the American founders including provision for restrictive copyrights in the US Constitution on the one hand, while enshrining free speech and freedom of the press in the First Amendment on the other. In this essay, I argue that utilizing available primary source evidence from the founders helps us to avoid making broad, speculative assumptions about their intent and can instead suggest a more pragmatic approach to reconciling legal contradictions when they arise.
The Missing Freedom: The Absence of Freedom of the Press in the Australian Constitution
Ben Richards
Australia remains the only major constitutional democracy without an enshrined right to freedom of the press. This essay explores why the Australian Constitution was drafted without any constitutional right to freedom of the press. It examines debates from the 1890s Constitutional Conventions, alongside the history of British democratic traditions that shaped the framers’ perspectives. It argues that a reliance on British legal and constitutional traditions led to the absence of any charter of rights, including protections of the press and speech. While Australian journalists enjoy an “implied freedom of political communication,” the Fourth Estate operates in an uncertain environment with no constitutional shield against government interference or other constraints on reporting essential for a healthy democracy.
Independence, Incarcerated: Prison Journalism, Abolitionist Critique, and Commemorating the “Bicentennial Behind Bars”
Thomas Cryer
This essay examines how 1970s US prison journalists leveraged memories of America’s Revolutionary beginnings to radically contest its unactualized promises of liberty and equality, culminating in the celebration of 1976’s “Bicentennial behind bars.” Amid years of protest and promise, incarcerated writers utilized prison journalism to interrogate the stark dissonance between America’s revolutionary ideals and their lived realities of incarceration. Drawing on a nationwide corpus from Reveal Digital’s American Prison Newspaper Collection, this study approaches these publications as critical counter-publics, demonstrating how they invoked America’s past to expose the contradictions of its democracy, declare solidarity with global revolutionary struggles, and demand the actualization of America’s revolutionary promises on behalf of marginalized populations.
Article abstracts
The Progressive Era is tied to muckraking and photography, particularly Jacob Riis’ images of New York’s crowded tenements. Jane Addams and reformers at Hull House were giants of Progressive Era politics; however, little has been written about how they used visuals in their work. This study looks at two illustrated books produced by Hull House at the turn of the twentieth century to see how the reformers combined text and images to document substandard housing in Chicago. These projects strategically used illustrations and photography, garnering coverage in newspapers with large visual spreads. In addition to showing problems, they also provide visual evidence of solutions: playgrounds, parks, sidewalks, and childcare. This differentiated their work from Riis, who produced more depravity-focused images in his work on housing. Hull House had many connections to Riis, and these projects are explicitly in conversation with Riis’ work. This study connects Hull House to the history of photography and social reform.
The New York Times has officially published its crossword puzzle since February 15, 1942. The puzzle is an American institution, generating a community of crossword aficionados, friends, and, most importantly, subscribers. It may be surprising, then, to learn that the Times was two decades late to the party. The history of the crossword—and the American public’s fascination with the puzzle—dates back to 1913 at the New York World. While most newspapers were printing crosswords by the 1920s, The New York Times was a noted holdout. Not only that, but the newspaper covered crosswords in those early years with a marked condescension. Through a careful reading of The New York Times’ historical coverage and editorials, archival materials, and secondary histories, this article documents the Times’ institutional attitude change toward crosswords from the 1924 “crossword craze” to the Times’ first official crossword in 1942. This evolving conception of taste, audience engagement needs, and the support from a particularly puzzling publisher facilitated the introduction of The New York Times crossword. Further, this background challenges institutional discourses that audience engagement is a “new” response to the internet age or financial precarity.
Framing Europe: The Impact of Boris Johnson’s Journalism on Media Depictions of the European Union
A number of important studies point to the central role that Britain’s former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, played in the success of the referendum campaign to leave the European Union in 2016. But long before Johnson became a politician, he may have helped sway British public opinion against Europe, as a journalist with the right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper. Following the Brexit referendum result, commentators accused Johnson of using his platform as the newspaper’s Brussels correspondent in the 1990s to write misleading articles and peddle lies about the EU. However, there has been little analysis of Johnson’s journalism on Europe, and how his approach may have impacted upon media coverage of the EU. This paper presents a detailed framing analysis of Johnson’s work from 1989 to 1994, as well as interviews with elite sources, that suggest Johnson’s journalism from Brussels influenced media discourse on Europe. Using a constructionist framing analysis, this paper argues that his work deftly mined and amplified several British cultural pre-dispositions. The most significant was a deep distrust of any external jurisdiction that threatened British parliamentary power. The threat to sovereignty posed by the EU emerges as the major frame in Johnson’s journalism.
book reviews
Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Major League Baseball’s last-ditch attempt to ban women from locker rooms came in the fifth inning of the first game of the World Series on October 11, 1977, when commissioner Bowie Kuhn sent an aide to tell Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludkte she was barred from entering the team clubhouse. More than just one journalist’s access was at stake. The locker room had stood as both a literal and symbolic boundary of inclusion—a space reserved for those recognized as “real” sports reporters. In other words, men.
Histories of Digital Journalism: The Interplay of Technology, Society and Culture
In this ambitious collection of chapters on the present (and future) of the media history of digital journalism, editors Tamas Tofalvy and Igor Vobič have curated an impressive, must-read book that will be of interest to scholars who care about the interplay of the past and present. Tofalvy, an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Communication at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Vobič, a professor at the Department of Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, may not be as familiar to American academics as they should be, but they display an adroit grasp of what matters to the field of media history (aka journalism or communication history), and lead a stable of thoughtful authors, including John Nerone, who contributes an especially fine conclusion that ties the collection together.
The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History
The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History is a tour-de-force of historical scholarship. While this may seem a bold statement for an edited reader, hear me out. It is not your dissertation chair’s history book. In many ways, it reflects the current state of journalism history. As Perry Parks says of journalism textbooks in this volume, it serves as an “epistemic marker” (p. 62), and one that I particularly appreciate. Yes, for example, there’s mention of the Zenger trial, Joseph Pulitzer, and the Hutchins Commission. But so too is there an examination of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (a key legal decision for student journalism), Ethel Payne (known as the “First Lady of the Black press”), and the importance of community radio. There are chapters on Filipina/o/x American journalism, women in business journalism, and the historical role of moral courage in pursuing truth. Such contributions do not simply add “diversity” to journalism history. Instead, they constitute a giant step toward Catherine Covert’s call (via Carolyn Kitch in this volume) to broaden the field into a cultural history. In other words, they are a move to make the field a more honest and rich engagement with the past, not just focusing on big names and what happened, but also examining how folks created meaning and negotiated their specific circumstances. Especially in the age of AI, this is a more human approach to history, one that traces the sinews and pulsations of everyday life, inclusively drawing connections between journalism and all manners of social institutions and lived experiences.
Journalism History journal 