Svennik Høyer and Horst Pöttker (eds.)

owards the turn of the 19th century, newspapers in the US wereexpanding more rapidly than elsewhere. Was it this burgeoning market,
which inspired journalism to reinvent itself into a ‘new’ and different
kind of texts: clearer, fact oriented and without any obvious ideologicalbias? Or were also broader cultural currents at work?

This anthology is one of a few, which compares the developments ofnews journalism cross-nationally. The creation of a ‘news paradigm’ in
US is traced from its beginnings up to the present; its varying impacts
on European journalism is discussed and documented for England
during the 1880s and 1890s, in Scandinavia between the 1870s andthe present, in Germany before and after 1945, and in Central/EasternEurope before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Diffusion of the News Paradigm 1850-2000 Svennik Høyer & Horst Pöttker (eds.)T

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Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik
Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp LaukJohn Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan
S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan
Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik
Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst
Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G.
Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno
Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John
Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harland S.
Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz- Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker
Michael Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst- Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki
Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka
Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf- Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan
S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan
Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik
Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst
Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G.
Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno
Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John
Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S.
Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz- Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker
Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst- Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki
Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka
Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf
Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina
Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup- Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael
Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber -Diffusion of theNews Paradigm
1850-2000

NORDICOM

Diffusion of the News Paradigm
1850-2000

Diffusion of theNews Paradigm
1850-2000
Svennik Høyer and Horst Pöttker (eds.)

NORDICOM

Diffusion of the News Paradigm 1850-2000
Editors: Svennik Høyer and Horst Pöttker
Language editor: Marcus Denton© Editorial matters and selections, the editors; articles, individual
contributors; Nordicom (with one exception, see page 34)

ISBN 91-89471-30-X

Published by:
Nordicom
Göteborg University
Box 713
SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG
SwedenCover by: Roger Palmqvist
Printed by: Grafikerna Livréna i Kungälv AB, Sweden, 2005

Contents

Preface7

Svennik Høyer
The Idea of the Book. Introduction

9

The Anglo-American Background
Michael Schudson
The Emergence of the Objectivity Norm in American Journalism

19

Harlan S. Stensaas
The Rise of the News Paradigm. A Review of the Scientific Literature

37

Horst Pöttker
The News Pyramid and its Origin from the American Journalism in
the 19th Century. A Professional Approach and an Empirical Inquiry

51

Svennik Høyer
Old and New Journalism in The London Press. The 1880s and 1890s

65

Scandinavia
Svennik Høyer
The Rise and Fall of The Scandinavian Party Press

75

Jan Ekecrantz
News Paradigms, Political Power and Cultural Contexts in20th Century Sweden

93

Søren Kolstrup
Telling the News. Danish Newspapers 1873-1941/2000

105

Svennik Høyer & John Nonseid
The Half-hearted Modernisation of Norwegian Journalism 1908-1940 123

Germany
Horst Pöttker
Comments on the German Tradition of News Journalism

139

Rudolf Stöber
Journalism Paradigms Before 1945

147

Bernd Blöbaum
German Journalism after 1945. Reporting Instead of Influencing

157

5Central and Eastern Europe
Epp Lauk
The Antithesis of the Anglo-American News Paradigm.
News Practices in Soviet Journalism

169

Halliki Harro-Loit
Historical Development of the News Format in Estonia 1920-1990

185

Jukka Pietiläinen
From Participating to Informing. The Transition of Journalism
in the Russian Regional Press

199

Katharina Hadamik
Between East and West or Simply “Made in Poland”?
The Many Different Styles of Today’s Polish Journalism

211

Alternative Perspectives
Hanno Hardt
The Industrialization of News. The American Experience

227

Kevin G. Barnhurst
News Ideology in The Twentieth Century

239

Horst Pöttker
Epilogue. Perspectives on the Development of the News Paradigm.
The Quest for Autonomy

263

Bibliography

273

Author index

293

Subject index299

About the Authors309

6Preface

Media history is much more than a collection of chronological narratives set
within national borders. As a social system media has several sustaining parts,
at the same time different and interdependent. Some of these parts are international in origin while some are truly nationally or regionally unique intheir development. Thus media history internationally can serve as a laboratory to help detect the impact of political ideologies and other traditions,which influence journalism as a textual genre. It is in this spirit the following
chapters have been written, collected and edited.
This anthology is topically centred on the news paradigm: its origin anddiffusion over more than a century. It also contrasts the news paradigm withsome of its opposites in journalism history. Even when contributors varymethodologically – essays and empirically based overviews intermingle withsystematic content analyses – they have the forms, the qualities and thesubstance of journalism in mind as a guiding principle.
In this volume what was old and new journalism in the United States andBritain at the turn of the 19th century is compared to the multi party press in
Scandinavia, which developed separately from the news paradigm for long
periods. In other chapters the press in Central and Eastern Europe before
and after the fall of German and Soviet totalitarianism are compared. In theiraftermaths traits of the original news paradigm are found.
These analyses make it evident that the news paradigm, cross-nationallyand historically, is introduced and realised in quite different periods. Therefore a simple cause and effect relationship is difficult to demonstrate. But
even though, enough traces are left to discern an intermittent diffusion crossnationally. There are clearly certain conditions, which we associate with open
societies and freedom of expression, which favour the realisation of a news
paradigm and of more journalistic autonomy in general.
While the authors in the first four sections are mainly preoccupied withthe relations between the press and political systems, and their interpenetrations, the three authors in our last section give more specific ideas for what
drives developments in journalism. Hanno Hardt emphasises the importance7

PREFACEof the media industries in disciplining journalists. Horst Pöttker proposes, as
an alternative explanation, the more general modernising trend towards
differentiation into specialities and sub-specialities, which combines the
economic, the political and the professional aspects. As in other sectors ofsociety, the drive towards an institutional autonomy is mainly organised by
the media themselves, and by the esprit de corps of journalists. Kevin Barnhurst
demonstrates this trend towards more autonomy in a series of remarkable
content analyses of US media. News stories have been widened in scope
topically, over the years they have become less personalised and more attentive to social conditions and processes. Stories have been longer and news
media have been more self-sufficient both for information and comments.
Further details in this rich and multifarious mosaic are wanted, of course,
and we eagerly look for more findings in the future.
As always, book projects cannot be realised without considerable interest and money invested by more than the authors. We want to extend many
deep felt thanks to our respective universities for providing overheads forthe project. Department of Media and Communication at the University ofOslo has in addition given support for language editing, coding, and travels
and provided office space for a retired professor while coordinating andediting this book. We are also indebted to Stiftung Pressehaus NRZ in Essen
and to Heinrich Meyer for money to language editing. We are thankful to
the Foundation for Free Speech in Oslo, which supported the printing of
the book. Svennik Høyer wants to thank the Norwegian Academy of Sciences for a general grant some years ago to develop comparative studies ofjournalism, of which this is an example. The chapter by Michael Schudson,
page 19, was reprinted without charge from Journalism by the permissionof Sage Publications Ltd. Without all our sponsors the project could not havetaken off.
We want especially to acknowledge our indebtedness to the language
editor Marcus Denton for a splendid job, which extended both his honorarium and normal patience. Tirelessly he has hunted not only for grammatical
oddities, bad syntax and curious choices of words. His pursuit often revealed
inconsistencies, which he very politely helped to heal. Our publisher Dr.
Ulla Carlsson, Director of Nordicom, took the initiative to realise this bookand we are thankful for her enduring patience and encouraging interest overmore than two years.

Oslo and Dortmund in May 2005

Svennik Høyer

8

Horst Pöttker

The Idea of the Book
Introduction
Svennik Høyer

The ‘new American journalism’, as it was called in Europe, appeared in small
steps and great leaps during more than fifty years from the 1860s. The combined conditions of politics and economy, which made a neutral description of social and political conflicts a journalistic routine, were present in
the US at the beginning of the 20th century. But it had a long way to go on
European soil where freedom of expression was rare outside Great Britain
in the 19th century.
This collection of articles is dedicated to some of the key ideas behind
this ‘new American journalism’, which gave both journalists and newspapers
a new position in society. Some authors are concerned with the genesis ofjournalism as a distinct modern literary form connected to the ideas of objectivity, some describe how parts of the American journalism spread tovarious European countries, and others are interested in how new journalistic procedures collided with political ideas.
In the following chapters the ‘news paradigm’ will be analysed from threedifferent angles. First as an object to be studied in its own right, secondly as amindset to be compared to contrasting ideas of journalism and finally the news
paradigm serves as a basis for analytical methods for certain elements like the‘interview’ and ‘the inverted pyramid’. By such methods numerical values canbe attached to important elements of the ‘news paradigm’ which in turn canserve as an index of changing journalistic styles in different countries.
It requires a large time scale to detect changes in basic qualities, and it
raises important methodological questions as well. How you can retrieve facts– i.e. being journalistically active – is also a question of political norms of
who can ask whom for what? The various cultural environments that news
texts are put into may influence their shape and contents. But even if thesequalities are not independent of the political culture in which news is practised they are not logically connected either. Basic forms of journalism havebeen shared among journalists of different nationalities. Over time the technology, the techniques, the thinking and the way of presenting news has
crossed borders.

9SVENNIK HØYER

The key question then seems to be – is the news paradigm in 1900 thesame as the paradigms observed in year 2000? There is sufficient historicaldetail, we will argue, to trace the presence or absence of a news paradigm.
In the following chapters we face these problems by a combination of
simplifications and identification. Newspaper articles are simplified by categorising their surface rather than the hidden structures of their messages.
The coding of thousands of newspaper texts in this volume regularly focus
on one or more features of news stories: their general topics, their length,
their narrative structure, the presence of a ‘voice’ by journalists etc. The mental
pre-textual procedures and social interactions are observed indirectly e.g.
by the use of interviews as the basis for the news text. The focus is regularly
on how journalists process news, and less on what they write. By emphasising the formal features more than the content we can more easily observe
how standard qualities of journalism are spread, or disappear, in different
political and historical environments.
In the following two sections we will comment on the various components,
which are included in the ‘news paradigm’ as a way of defining this concept.

The News Paradigm
In his famous book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Thomas Kuhn
(1962) introduced the term ‘paradigm’ into the philosophy of science, bywhich he intended more than a new name for theories. ‘Paradigm’ refers
more widely to a shared mindset among researchers about the nature of things
and their basic properties. Alternatively paradigms infer relationships between
phenomena at a higher level of abstraction, as in the Big Bang Theory inastronomy. Such theories are also called macro hypotheses, which function
as axiomatic and self-evident premises for generating new hypotheses of alesser order, later to be tested. When evidence based knowledge becomes
contradictory scientists systematically search among their basic assumptions
to find a new paradigm, which puts things in a more consistent order.
Conceived as a norm-based mindset the concept of ‘paradigm’ can fruitfully
be used in the study of news. To write a story journalists follow a sequence ofdecisions using various criteria for the selection of events, rules and methods
to establish the necessary facts as raw material for their story as well as applying strategies for the presentation. It is important for journalists to have theirselected events accepted as ‘news’ by colleagues as well as by their public,e.g. by attributions of facts to experts and of opinions to important decisionmakers. Finally the journalists must follow rules for composition when they
write up a story, which makes it easy for the public to recognise as news.
The news paradigm consists of five basic elements, as demonstrated in
Figure 1 below. We have listed the more or less overt pre-textual and textual operations as organic parts in the news making process by journalists.

10THE IDEA OF THE BOOK

Figure 1. Elements of the News Paradigm
The

Event

Ideally, a ‘newsworthy’ event ought to begin and end between deadlines. The 24-hour news sequence came gradually with wired news.
News Value Factors… are a number of criteria for what are newsworthy, which varies
over time, with political systems and with journalistic cultures.
The

News

Interview… is a method of cross-examining information sources who are expected to answer, not to ask questions. Asymmetrical turn taking is usual
between partners, with the public as a silent third party.
The Inverted pyramid… is a narrative structure for news stories. Headlines and intro answer thequestions: Who, where, when, why and how? The latest and most important news is put first in the story, details come later. Chronologies, as arule, are turned upside down.
Journalistic Objectivity… is an overarching idea of accuracy, balance and fairness or neutrality. Demonstrated by the use of multiple sources of information representing different interests or points of view.

The EventAn event comprises actors, a situation, linkages and a time frame. The mostimportant ingredients are the time frame and certain actions within given
situations. Something of interest must recently have happened somewhere,
which the audience is unaware of and curious to know about. The time frame
has historically been influenced by transport and other communication means.
The 24 hours news sequence was for instance clearly conditioned by thetelegraph network and by regular wire services.
Before journalists can establish an event as news they must possess anunderstanding of how society in general works, of where important ‘events’normally take place. The choice of important sources of information in news
stories is often obvious from their position and location in society. In fact
the news paradigm contains many hidden premises on normalcy, and is often
silent about what is left out by the ‘news grid’.
Sources of information are selected in large parts by the institutional structure of society. Available sources with a telephone – ‘experts’ and decisionmakers in central institutional networks – are repeatedly used addresses ofwhere to find ‘authoritative’ facts. In addition the overriding editorial idea of
the audience, which their media is talking to, and the corresponding product-idea, will influence the kind of events for which reporters are looking.

11

SVENNIK HØYER

News Value Factors
An example of the early notion of popular journalism is the following quotefrom one of its pioneers in the 1830s. Henry Benjamin Day, editor of New
York Sun, expressed his idea of news in the April 4th 1835 issue:
News, properly so called, to be interesting to the public, must generally tellof wars and fightings, of deeds of death, and blood, of wounds and heresies,of broken heads, broken hearts and broken bones, of accidents by fire or flood,a field of possessions ravaged, property purloined, wrongs inflicted, rights
unavenged, reputations assailed, feelings embittered, and oppressions exercised by nations, communities or individuals.1

The New York Sun was a typical downmarket publication for its time, without respect for elite values. But apparently, it was also inventing techniques
similar to the approaching ‘news paradigm’. Upmarket and more serious
newspapers could learn from this unconventional journalism.
News value factors, like the ones highlighted by Henry Benjamin Day,are neither complete nor universal. Most of the news criteria used by regular mass media today are in some way bound to their geographical position
and the interests of their respective audiences.

The News Interview
The news interview is a tool journalists use to retrieve information frominformation sources and does not necessarily appear in the text as questions
and answers. Nils Gunnar Nilsson (1971) maintains that reporters learned toask pointed questions while observing courtroom cross-examinations. By thistoken it is likely that the interview was introduced somewhere in the 1830s
along with police reports in the tabloids. However, there is no agreementon this. It is also maintained that an interview appeared for the first time asa conversation in the more upmarket New York Herald 1859, but it took somedecades before it was institutionalised as a regular routine. Michael Schudsonin this volume proposes the following progression. Interviewing, all but unknown in 1865, had become a common activity for reporters in the 1870s
and 1880s, was widely practised by 1900 and was a mainstay of American
journalism by World War I.

The Inverted Pyramid
An important part of the news paradigm is how journalists tell and present
their news. There are several formulas for newspapers texts, some forgotten
but many still vividly alive. By the use of a so called ‘inverted pyramid’ for-12THE IDEA OF THE BOOK

mula, news of the latest event is put first, followed by details on context andcircumstances, ending with a string of prior events relevant to the main story.
This way of telling a story is distinctly journalistic and not according the ageold formula of oral tales. By putting conclusions first, the natural chronologyof the story is put on its head, ruining both suspense and implied causation.
According to professional legend the ‘inverted pyramid’ as a formulae forstory composition was inadvertently invented during the American Civil War
from faulty telegraph connections, which forced journalists to put the mostessential facts of military actions at the beginning of their report. However,David T. Z. Mindich (1998) dated the beginning of this story to start with thepress release of Lincoln’s murder in 1865, when the Civil War ended. Harland
S. Stensaas in this volume maintains that the inverted pyramid was commonlyused only in the 1890s. Inger Lindstedt (1998) found the first textbook mention of it in Edwin L. Shuman’s Steps into Journalism from 1894. In this collection altogether six chapters trace the diffusion of an ‘inverted pyramid’ infive countries over variable periods of time.

Journalistic Objectivity
The emergence of a new ‘objective journalism’ in the US during the latterpart of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th is sometimes explained
as a result of cultural changes in American society. According to Mindich(1998: 95-112), the mentality of social life in America changed from a dominant religious paradigm to a scientific one between the 1830s and 1870s.
Part of this transformation was an increased realism in politics, in art andfiction, which in turn inspired a ‘naive empiricism’ in journalism based on
the idea of irrefutable facts.
The traditional interpretations of how American newspapers left the ‘Dark
Ages of Partisan Journalism’ and became politically independent emphasise
how the combination of increased readership and booming revenues fromadvertising freed publishers from their bondage to politicians (Mott, 1942:167180). This involved a redefinition of the role of journalists, which took decades to change. Dicken-Garcia (1989) points out that during the 19th century
American editors were often left alone to cope with rapidly shifting ideological winds, and thus vulnerable to the judgements and opinions by others. Commitments to politics became a personal business relationship between
editors and printers, on the one hand, and politicians on the other, who could
reward a favourable press treatment with government printing contracts andexclusive information.
Michael Schudson maintains in this volume that ‘objectivity’ became theshared professional norm only in the 1920s, and is supported by Streckfuss(1990: 974) and by Stensaas in this volume. Searching all published proceedings from the American Society of Newspaper Editors between 1923 and 1930
Streckfuss could not find any mention of the term ‘objectivity’ before 1928,

13

SVENNIK HØYER

though ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’ and similar terms were used before that. At
this point it is enough to conclude that by the 1920s ‘objectivity’ had become a second name for a new and fact oriented journalism in the US. It
marked the end of a gradual progress towards an overriding idea of ‘objectivity’, which started about sixty years earlier and comprised a set of converging genres and journalistic methods, which we call ‘the news paradigm’(Høyer 2002).
As the number of channels for general news information has increased
during the last three or four decades, conventional ‘objectivity’ has been moredifficult to pursue for the individual journalist. Not only has the deadline forreleasing news become floating, and the expected completeness of a reported
story more difficult to satisfy, in the same process the responsibility of being‘objective’ has diminished for each channel. The empathy of reporters when
covering various beats has also become relevant aspects of many stories.
While much in news have become continuous or evolving stories the taskof striking a balance and filling in essential details has been given over tothe recipients. This development is reflected in the code of ethics, which
was adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists in the US in 1996. It
did not mention ‘objectivity’ at all, while the previous code from 1987 askedfor ‘objectivity’ as well as accuracy as part of a professional performance ofjournalists (Ettema and Glasser 1998: 9).

Diffusion of Culture
Journalism is culturally and socially dependent. News must be adapted to
cultural forms to be easy to understand, while journalists must operate according to professional norms, in order to make their routines socially acceptable. The interview, for example, gave the initiative to journalists when
they collected news on behalf of the general public. But interviews require
co-operation from regular sources of information – sources that were used
to approaching the editor when and if they wanted anything to be known inpublic. In Europe, more accustomed to an elite press, the American type ofinterview was considered an invasion of privacy.
The diffusion of cultural ideas is an underlying theme to this book. Long
before ‘globalisation’ became a catchword, ideas, styles and fashions etc.
originating from abroad were imported and domesticated by ‘adopting cultures’ under the false impression of being local inventions. Diffusion is anormal, often an unseen, process, which evolves at an uneven speed between
nations. To trace and explain cultural diffusion therefore has its particular
problems as when an old idea is recreated into several national variants, which
continue to change and through continuations often become hazy.
The idea of diffusion, which is most common in the communication sciences, is rather one-dimensional in its preoccupation with how identical

14

THE IDEA OF THE BOOK

innovations are diffused within social groups over time (Rogers 1962). Ideas
are rarely identical in different environments and adoption is rarely a passive reception, but rather an interchange, which results in a hybrid of new
and old ideas, or between international trends and national customs. Understanding more of the autonomy of an ‘adopting culture’, it will be easier toexplain the entwined trajectories between an original idea and adopting
cultures. Adaptation is dependent both on given normative contrasts between
the original idea and the adopting cultures at the outset, and on how normative convergence occurs later on.
When diffusion takes up to one and half centuries, as we suggest in ourtitle, it is likely that the ideas of journalism are changed considerably throughadaptations. Still, traditional procedures may remain unchanged for long
periods, only to be abandoned under certain combinations of conditions, as
was the case in Scandinavia.
The diffusion of a new journalism to Europe in the beginning became
difficult mainly because the national norms of journalism and censorshipdiffered too much from the American. At the turn of the 19th century press
freedom in the US had a long tradition and became clearly defined in theFirst Amendment to its Constitution in 1791. In Europe, on the other side,
there were variable forms of authoritarian centralism, censorship and government control of the press for decades to come.
After a century of wars and revolutions on the European continent, thepolitical development at the end of the 20th century points more in an American direction with an increasing number of democratic elections. On thisbackground the succession of countries adopting various parts of the American
inspired journalism seems to follow a clear logic: England came first, thenprobably Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia. Germany followed suit in
the 1950s and the Central Eastern-European press during the 1990s. A common political factor, which favoured this development, was the emerging
democracy and freedom of speech. If we then add emerging capitalism inmedia economics we see a configuration of conditions, which inspires lessformal interpenetration between media and political institutions, and moreof a ‘news paradigm’ in journalism.

Our Points of Departure
When we designed this anthology our intentions were that it should be bothcomparative and diachronic, that it should contain overviews as well as moredetailed case studies. We feel that our contributors have met these intentions well.
Our design, however, required pragmatism. We could not hold on to aconsistent theoretical framework without giving undue restrictions to theauthors. Explanations and interpretations had to remain an open field for

15

SVENNIK HØYER

investigations. The approach taken by most authors in this volume are pragmatic or eclectic. Explanations suggested in the following chapters are varied but usually combine two or three tenets from more established schoolsof interpretation in media research. Technology, media capitalism and political culture (press freedom, democracy or the opposite) interfere both in
the creation and in the diffusion of the ‘news paradigm’. In addition the inertia
of old routines, which the diffusion of the news paradigm meets, gives someevidence to the existence of alternative cultures of journalism.
Our point of departure for the international comparisons in this book is
the following suppositions or hypotheses.
• The ‘news paradigm’ is not universal and does not thrive in all environments: it has its roots in historically given social conditions wherewide differences of ideas and cultural values were tolerated.
• During polarised conflicts and under dictatorial conditions where consensual objectivity and journalistic autonomy is not respected, we willfind few manifestations of ‘the news paradigm’.
• Diffusion of the ‘news paradigm’ is encouraged when the original conditions for its invention – especially freedom of speech – are met. When
political systems change in this direction it is likely that manifestationsof ‘the news paradigm’ will appear more frequently.
• The diffusion of the news paradigm does not follow a linear cause andeffect relationship. The original causal agent may not be present, but
the model may still be recreated or adopted from journalism abroadwhere the news paradigm is practised.
News agencies alone are often said to influence a development towards a
standardisation in international news journalism by using a detached andbalanced manner of reporting. This connection between international andnational news reporting is not always found, as we shall learn later on. Indeed ‘the inverted pyramid’ is much more typical for news-wires than forthe journalism, which newspapers produce by their own reporters. In periods other forms of reporting dominated national journalism.
By formulating our hypotheses in such a provocatively crude and simple
manner as above, we gladly look forward to a continuing scholarly debate
on these matters. Our intention is simply to invite more comparative studies
in journalism.

Note
1.

16

Quoted from: Huntzicker, William E. (1999:14-15). The Popular Press, 1833-1865. Westport,
Connecticut, Greenwood Press.

The Anglo-American BackgroundThe Emergence of the Objectivity Normin American Journalism*
Michael Schudson

Introduction“Objectivity” is the chief occupational value of American journalism and thenorm that historically and still today distinguishes U.S. journalism from thedominant model of continental European journalism (Donsbach 1995, 1730).1 “Objectivity” is at once a moral ideal, a set of reporting and editing
practices, and an observable pattern of news writing. Its presence can therefore be identified by several measures: (a) journalists’ express allegiance tothe norm – in speeches, conferences, formal codes of professional ethics,
textbooks in journalism education, debates and discussions in professional
journals, and scientific surveys of journalists’ opinions; (b) ethnographers’
observations of journalists at work and the occupational routines to which
they adhere; (c) content analysis of the texts of newspapers and news broadcasts that measure the degree of impersonality and non-partisanship in news
stories; and (d) resistance displayed by adherents to the norm when it isopenly challenged or criticized (Tuchman 1972, 660-679).2
The objectivity norm guides journalists to separate facts from values andto report only the facts. Objective reporting is supposed to be cool, rather
than emotional, in tone. Objective reporting takes pains to represent fairly
each leading side in a political controversy. According to the objectivity norm,
journalists’ job consists of reporting something called “news” without commenting on it, slanting it, or shaping its formulation in any way. The valueof objectivity is upheld specifically against partisan journalism in whichnewspapers are the declared allies or agents of political parties and theirreporting of news is an element of partisan struggle. Partisan journalists, like
objective journalists, typically reject inaccuracy, lying, and misinformation,
but partisan journalists do not hesitate to present information from the perspective of a particular party or faction.
Where did the objectivity norm come from? It was not always a norm in
American journalism. It has a history. It has a point of origin. Specifying thatpoint of origin, identifying its sources, and locating it in particular journalists

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or news organizations is not easy. Many matters are in dispute. Some authors
would say that objectivity emerged at the point where newspaper proprietors saw opportunities for commercial success and were therefore willing tobid farewell to political party underwriters. They have stressed that the increasingly lucrative market for newspapers in the late nineteenth century led
publishers to seek out readers across political parties and so forced them toabandon strident political partisanship. Others have argued that technological change, specifically the invention of the telegraph, placed a premium on
economy of style, brought about reporting habits that stressed bare-bones
factuality rather than discursive commentary, and so gave rise to an ethic ofobjectivity (Emery and Emery 1996, 185).3
However, the process by which a practice generates a norm is rarely
explored. In my view, the position that the wide distribution of social behaviour naturally and normally gives rise to a norm prescribing that behaviour and attributing moral force to its observation skips over a necessary step.

What Causes a Norm to be Articulated?
Explaining the articulation of a norm is part of explaining the norm. If, say,incest is naturally repellent, and so the avoidance of incest is widely distributed, why should an incest taboo arise? If behaviour is already in place, what
additional work does an articulated norm accomplish? If technology madeobjectivity an inevitable practice or if economic self-interest of newspapers
made objectivity the obvious best choice, what purpose was served bymoralizing a practice that would have survived regardless?
Norms are moral prescriptions for social behaviour. They are “obligations”
rather than “regularities,” to borrow Robert Cooter’s distinction (Cooter 1988,
587).4 “Norm” can also refer to prevalent patterns of behaviour (generally
speaking, leading government officials in the United States, if married, do
not have sex with their office interns), but the focus here is the emergenceof morally potent prescriptions about what should be prevalent behaviour(leading government officials, if married, should not have sex with officeinterns). Could it be that a prevalent pattern of behaviour gives rise to moral
norms? Do widely distributed social practices for some reason ooze prescriptive rules that insist on the prevalent pattern? Perhaps widespread-ness contributes to prescriptive-ness. But many habits are widespread that have noprescriptive force. Most people like to eat ice cream but no one insists thatthose who do not like it have failed to live up to a morally important requirement. Most people watch several hours of television a day, but no one
believes that they should; if anything, TV-viewing receives moral disapprovalin general public discussion.
One of the distinctive features of norms as prescriptive rules, rather thannorms as prevalent practices, is that they are self-consciously articulated. What

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circumstances lead people or institutions to become self-conscious about theirpatterns of behaviour and to articulate them in the form of moral norms?
At least four conditions encourage the articulation of norms. Two of these
we might think of as Durkheimian, having to do with horizontal solidarity
or group identity, two are Weberian, concerning hierarchical social control
across an organization at one point in time or across generations over time.
The first Durkheimian condition is that the articulation of moral norms is
encouraged by forms of ritual solidarity that call on a group or institution tocelebrate itself, to honour its members, to recognize the introduction of new
members of the group or the passing of old ones or the induction of fully
adult or assimilated new members to higher status in the group. Thus births,
confirmations, funerals, retirements, annual meetings, awards banquets, andother such events provide occasions for speech in which speakers are often
called upon to state explicitly, and as moral rules, the ways of the group.
A second Durkheimian condition is more outward looking than inward
looking: cultural contact and conflict can provoke the articulation of norms
inside the group. Here the prescription that “the way we do things” is “theway one should do things” is a function of a kind of group egoism, a way ofdefining the group in relation to other groups. This may lead groups to claim
independence or separation from other groups, but equally it may prod them
to claim affiliation with other groups.
A Weberian condition for the articulation of norms arises in any institutional setting so large that socialization or enculturation cannot take placeinformally. Wherever people must be handled in batches and trained in theways of the group, there will be a kind of pedagogical economy in saying
out loud what the prescribed rules of behaviour are. Where the ways of thegroup must be handed down from one generation to the next –where, inother words, some form of schooling is necessary – the teaching generation
will benefit from formulating rules of general applicability and rules withmoral force. These rules will be of great use to the learning generation, too,in providing certainty about how to behave under inherently ambiguous
conditions. The pedagogical imperative for the articulation of norms often
leads to an overly rigid or absolute statement of norms and the overlearningof norms on the part of the students. Thus children overlearn gender-appropriate behaviours and are sometimes unwilling to tolerate variation in behaviours that to adults seem innocuous. Bureaucrats, likewise, overlearn rules
and may take their own rules too seriously.
A second Weberian condition arises less from the need to pass on organizational culture in a large institution than from the need of superiors to control subordinates in a complex organization. Superiors may wish to be freefrom normative constraints to act with their best discretion, but they would
like their subordinates to be constrained by rules. Here political control
encourages the emergence of formalized norms.
These four social conditions prompt the rhetorical formalization of norms.
Each of them offers a set of reasons for speech or for the codification into

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speech or writing of implicit norms. Both needs for social cohesion (theDurkheimian conditions) and needs for social control (the Weberian conditions) can generate articulate moral norms.
Let me turn now to the history of the objectivity norm in American journalism to see whether this theoretical framework proves of some empirical use.

The Business Neutrality of Colonial Printers
In colonial American journalism, printers testified to a concern for fairness
in order to shed responsibility for what appeared in their pages. BenjaminFranklin insisted in his “Apology for Printers” (1731) that the printer was justthat – one who prints – not one who edits, exercises judgment, or agrees
with each opinion in his pages. “Printers are educated in the Belief that when
Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage ofbeing heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play,the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve
all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side
they are of the Question in Dispute.” In the same passage, however, Franklin
also declares that newspaper contributions must exhibit good taste and refrain from character assassination. Clearly, he exercised editorial judgmentseven as he denied he was doing so (Franklin 1989, 172–73).
Franklin’s “Apology” is not only a mess of contradictions but a very rareeffort on the part of a printer to defend his behaviour at all. Colonial newspaper proprietors had little theory of the press and little occasion to articulate a rationale. Printers ran their newspapers with little consistent purposeor principle. They saw themselves as tradesmen, not learned professionals.
At first, colonial printers did not imagine their newspapers to be either political instruments or professional agencies of newsgathering. None of theearly papers reached out to collect news; they printed what came to them.
Colonial printers, more than their London brethren, were public figures –running the post office, serving as clerks for the government, and printing
the laws – but they were first of all businessmen.
In the first half century of American journalism, there was little indication that the newspaper would become a central forum for political discourse. Colonial printers avoided controversy when they could, preached
the printer’s neutrality when they had to, and printed primarily foreign news
because it afforded local readers and local authorities no grounds for grumbling. Foreign news came primarily from the London press and looked out
at the world from an English Protestant perspective; although there werecolonists from Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere, theoverwhelming majority were from England and no doubt found Londoninflected news interesting, perhaps reassuring, but rarely controversial. The
preponderance of foreign news was overwhelming. Out of a sample of 1900

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items that Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette printed from 1728 to 1765, only
34 touched on politics in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania (Clark and Wetherell
1989, 292).
As conflict with England heated up after 1765, politics entered the press
and “fairness” went by the board. It became more troublesome for printers
to be neutral than to be partisan; nearly everyone felt compelled to take sides.
The newspaper began its long career as the mouthpiece of political parties
and factions. Patriots had no tolerance for the pro-British press, and the newstates passed and enforced treason and sedition statutes in the 1770s and1780s. By the time of the state-by-state debates over ratification of the Constitution in 1787-88, Federalists, those leaders who supported a strong national government, dominated the press and squeezed Anti-federalists outof public debate. In Pennsylvania, leading papers tended not to report Antifederalist speeches at the ratification convention. When unusual newspapers
in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston sought to report views on both sides,
Federalists stopped their subscriptions and forced the papers to end theirattempt at even-handedness (Main 1961).
Some of the nation’s founders believed outspoken political criticism waswell justified so long as they were fighting a monarchy for their independence, but that open critique of a duly elected republican government could
be legitimately curtailed. Samuel Adams, the famed Boston agitator in the
struggle for independence, changed his views on political action once republican government was established. This great advocate of open talk,committees of correspondence, an outspoken press, and voluntary associations of citizens now opposed all hint of public associations and public criticism that operated outside the regular channels of government (Maier 1980).
As one contemporary observed, it did no harm for writers to mislead thepeople when the people were powerless, but “To mislead the judgement of
the people, where they have all power, must produce the greatest possible
mischief” (Buel 1980, 86).5 The Sedition Act of 1798 forbade criticism of thegovernment. As many as one out of four editors of oppositional papers werebrought up on charges under this law. This move went one step further thanmany Americans of the day were willing to go. Federalist propaganda notwithstanding, Thomas Jefferson won the Presidency in 1800, the Sedition
Act expired, and party opposition began to be grudgingly accepted.
In this era, no norm of objectivity appeared. The printer’s neutrality was
supported in a rhetorical setting in which admission of partisanship or preferences would have invited trouble. Neutrality was prudential counsel, nota moral norm. In any event, all of this referred only to what the printer would
print, none of it touched on what a printer might write. What writing there
was tended not to be “reporting”, as we would think of it today, but commentary. The occupational preconditions for a modern concept of objectivity simply did not exist. So when political partisans made demands on printers, there was no defence against them, no ideological resources to counterpoise the integrity of journalists against the corruption of party, even in a

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day when the legitimacy of parties was much in doubt. A language of occupational virtue for journalists had not yet developed.

Partisan Predictability and Stenographic Fairnessth

In 19 century journalism, editors came to take great pride in the speed andaccuracy of the news they provided. With the introduction in the 1830s of
the rotary press and soon the steam-powered press, amid an expanding urban
economy on the Eastern seaboard, and in the rush of enthusiasm for Jacksonian democracy, commercial competition heated up among city newspapers.
A new breed of “penny papers” hired newsboys to hawk copies on the street,and editors competed for a wider readership and increasingly sought out
local news – of politics, crime, and high society. This newly aggressive commercialism in journalism was an important precondition for modern notionsof objectivity or fairness, but, at first, it fostered only a narrow concept ofstenographic fairness. The papers grew increasingly boastful about the speed
and accuracy of their newsgathering, but editors found this perfectly consistent with political partisanship and their choosing to cover only the
speeches or rallies of the party they favoured. It was equally consistent, in
their eyes, for reporters to go over speeches with sympathetic politicians toimprove, in printed form, on the oral presentation. Into the 1870s and 1880s,
Washington correspondents routinely supplemented their newspaper income
by clerking for the very Congressional committees they wrote about. They
often lived at the same boarding houses as Congressmen, and the boarding
houses tended to divide along party lines (Ritchie 1991, 60–63).6
As late as the 1890s, when a standard Republican paper covered a presidential election, it not only deplored and derided Democratic candidates ineditorials but also often just neglected to mention them in the news. In thedays before public opinion polling, the size of partisan rallies was taken asa proxy for likely electoral results. Republican rallies would be described,
as “monster meetings” while Democratic rallies were often not covered atall. And in the Democratic papers, of course, it was just the reverse.

Journalism as an Occupational Culture
Partisanship ran deep in nineteenth century American journalism. Popular
historians of journalism like to quote the paragraph in Adolph Ochs’ statement of purpose on taking over the New York Times in 1896, about how thepaper would give the news “impartially, without fear or favour, regardlessof any party, sect or interest involved”. They invariably fail to quote the next
paragraph which laid out Ochs’ commitment to sound money, tariff reform,

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low taxes, and limited government. Ochs took these principles seriously
enough to march, along with top editors of his paper, in the parade for the“Gold Democratic” ticket in 1896 (Davis 1921, 218). “Objectivity” was far
from an established practice or ideal in the 1890s.
Partisanship endured, but reporters came increasingly to enjoy a cultureof their own independent of political parties. They developed their own
mythologies (revelling in their intimacy with the urban underworld), theirown clubs and watering holes, and their own professional practices. Interviewing, for instance, had become a common activity for reporters in the1870s and 1880s. In the antebellum years, reporters talked with public officials but did not refer to these conversations in print. Politicians and diplomats dropped by the newspaper offices but could feel secure, as one reporter recalled, that their confidences “were regarded as inviolate”. President Lincoln often spoke with reporters informally but no reporter ever quoted
him directly. No president submitted to an interview before Andrew Johnson
in 1868, but by the 1880s the interview was a well accepted and institutionalised “media event”, an occasion created by journalists from which they could
then craft a story. This new style of journalistic intervention did not erase
partisanship but it did presage reporters’ new dedication to a sense of craft,and new location in an occupational culture with its own rules, its own rewards, and its own esprit (Schudson 1995, 72–93).7
Interviewing was a practice oriented more to pleasing an audience of news
consumers than to parroting or promoting a party line. Newspapers had
become big businesses by the 1880s, with towering downtown buildings,
scores of reporters, splashy sponsorship of civic festivals, and pages of advertising from the newly burgeoning department stores. The papers vastly
expanded their readership in this growing marketplace; increasing numbersof papers counted their circulation in the hundreds of thousands. Accordingly, reporters writing news came to focus more on making stories, less on
promoting parties. Newspapers were becoming highly profitable businesses.
Circulation leapt forward while the cost of production plummeted with wood
pulp as a new source of paper and mechanical typesetting a new laboursaving device. Advertising revenue surpassed subscription fees as the primary source of income as the papers courted new audiences (particularly
women). The increasingly commercial orientation of the newspaper certainly
helped sustain the innovation of interviewing.
The idea of interviewing “took like wildfire”, wrote Atlanta reporter Henry
Grady (1879). What one would like to know, of course, is why. One would
also like to know why it took like wildfire in the United States but not in
Europe. It would be two more generations before European reporters began to adopt what was by then standard practice in the United States. In
Britain, journalists began to accept the interview after 1900, often throughAmerican tutelage. American correspondents by their example taught Europeans that their own elites would submit to interviews. This education accelerated during World War I. One American reporter recalled that his as-

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signment to interview European heads of state in 1909 seemed “ridiculous
and impossible” (and he failed at it) but twenty years later it was easy, theinterview was no longer “a shocking innovation to the rulers of Europe”.
(Abbot, 1933, 270)
The rapid diffusion of interviewing among American journalists seems tohave been unaccompanied by any ideological rationale. It fit effortlessly intoa journalism that was already fact-centred and news-centred rather thandevoted primarily to political commentary or preoccupied with literary aspirations. It did not give rise to the objectivity norm but was one of the growing
number of practices that identified journalists as a distinct occupational groupwith distinct patterns of behaviour. The growing corporate coherence of thatoccupational group, generating a demand both for social cohesion and occupational pride, on the one hand, and internal social control, on the other,would by the 1920s eventuate in a self-conscious ethic of objectivity.

Alternative Perspectives on Late 19th Century Journalism
One of the most stubborn beliefs in journalism history is that “objectivity”
became the common practice in journalism in the late nineteenth century
after and because (a) the telegraph put a premium on a terse, factual style(b) the wire services required value-free reporting to serve clients of various political allegiances and (c) newspapers in general found profit in winning over both Democratic and Republican readers. None of these views offers
any response to the question of how a reporting practice might have become a norm with moral force.
The case for the decisive role of the telegraph is made well by Donald L.
Shaw. His study of Wisconsin newspapers from 1852 to 1916 found a decline in news bias over the period, as general accounts would have led him
to expect. But Shaw finds a particularly sharp decline between 1880 and 1884,a period in which there was a leap from 47% to 89% in the proportion ofwire-based stories in Wisconsin newspapers’ coverage of the presidential
campaign. Later, and more slowly, non-wire news also showed declining
bias, a fact that Shaw attributes to reporters’ learning to imitate wire service
style (Shaw 1971, 64-86; Shaw 1967, 3-12, 31; Shaw 1968, 326-329).
Shaw’s quantitative study is reinforced, more allusively, by James Carey’s“Technology and Ideology”, a justly famous essay brimming with ideas. Careyargues that the telegraph required regional twang to be removed from alanguage that would now be available everywhere; that it turned the correspondent who analysed news into a stringer who just relayed facts; and thatthe high cost of telegraphic transmission forced journalistic prose to become“lean and unadorned” (Carey 1989, 211).
The logic of Shaw’s and Carey’s argument seems at first glance unassailable and there is genuine satisfaction in finding so complex a social change

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as a shift in literary style and normative orientation to be so neatly explained.
But that is exactly the temptation of economic and technological reductionismthat must be resisted.
The beauty in this explanation is only skin deep. In this case, there arethree problems. First, it explains a new social practice (in this case, a newliterary style), not a new moral norm. It thus simply refuses to face the realquestion. What is at issue is not only a new style of prose but the self-conscious articulation of rules with moral force that direct how that prose shallbe written and provide a standard of condemnation when the writing does
not measure up. Here the technological-economic explanations by themselves
do not help at all.
Second, the explanation is based on limited data, including data not easily bent to the overall argument. Carey’s work is apparently entirely impressionistic. As for Shaw’s, it has some curious features if it is to be a basis fora technologically determinist argument. Between 1852, when Wisconsin
newspapers used no wire service stories in campaign coverage, and 1880,
when half of the stories originated with wire services, there was no decrease
in measured bias (actually, there was a small increase) (Shaw 1967, 6). Why
should this increase from zero to 47% in the proportion of wire stories haveproduced no decrease in bias when the increase from 47% to 89% in thenext four years led to a dramatic drop in news bias? (Shaw also finds a fairly
steep increase in news bias from 1888 to 1892; only after that is there is a
steadier decline. This is another anomaly that does not fit Shaw’s explanation.) This makes no sense if the constraints of telegraphy necessarily force
or at least have a very close affinity to a new prose style.
Third, neither Carey nor Shaw gives close consideration to alternative
hypotheses. One hypothesis I advance in “Discovering the News” (l978) isthat professional allegiance to a separation of facts and values awaited, first,
the rising status and independence of reporters relative to their employers,a change in journalism that developed gradually between the 1870s and WorldWar I, and secondly the emergence of serious professional discussion about“objectivity”, which came only after World War I. Only with these developments did the social organizational and intellectual foundations arise for
institutionalising a set of journalistic practices to give “objectivity” force(Schudson 1978). Subsequent work confirms my original point that a selfconscious, articulate ideology of objectivity can be dated to the 1920s(Streckfuss 1990, 973-983).
In fact, most newspapers remained deeply partisan until the end of thenineteenth century. In places like Wisconsin, the vast majority of these papers were Republican. That might have made 1884 an unusual year, because
many of the most prominent Republican papers in the country (including
papers like the New York Evening Post, the Boston Herald, and the Springfield
Republican) abandoned Republican standard-bearer James G. Blaine. It isquite possible that the 1880-1884 decline in news bias on which Shaw builds
his argument had more to do with the unusual nature of the 1884 campaign

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when issues of the personal integrity or corruption of the candidates, rather
than party loyalty, played an unusually important role (King 1992, 185-187).
The notion that the move from partisanship to objectivity was economicallymotivated is widely believed but nowhere justified. The leading textbook in
the history of journalism puts it this way: “Offering the appearance of fairness was important to owners and editors trying to gain their share of a growing readership and the resulting advertising revenues” (Emery, Emery, andRoberts 1996, 181). But was it? Readership was growing so rapidly in thelate nineteenth century – from 3.5 million daily newspaper readers in 1880
to 33 million in 1920 – a great variety of journalistic styles were economically rewarding. Very likely the most lucrative option was strident partisanship. Certainly this characterized circulation leaders of the day like William
Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World
Heated political campaigns and the newspapers’ ardent participation in themwere circulation-builders, not circulation-losers (King 1992, 396-398, 467-468).
Another factor in the eventual triumph of a professional journalism is thatthe very concept of politics changed from 1880 to 1920 under the impact of
Mugwump and Progressive reforms. Liberal reformers began to criticize party
loyalty. They promoted new forms of electoral campaigning, urging an “educational” campaign with more pamphlets and fewer parades. Newspapers
at the same time became more willing to take an independent stance. By
1890, a quarter of daily newspapers in Northern states, where the reformmovement was most advanced, claimed independence of party.
By 1896, a reform known as the Australian ballot had swept the country,
changing forever the way Americans went to the polls. Until the 1890s,
American election days were organized to the last detail by the competing
political parties. The state did not prepare a ballot; rather, the parties printed
up their own tickets and distributed them to voters near the polls. The voter
then did not need to mark the ballot in any way; in fact the voter did notneed to be literate. He just took the ticket from the party worker and deposited it in the ballot box. The act of voting was thus an act of affiliation witha partisan cause (Schudson 1998, 168-174).8
The Australian ballot symbolized a different understanding. Now the state
prepared a ballot that listed candidates of all contending parties. The voter
received the ballot from an election clerk and, in the privacy of the voting
booth, marked the ballot, choosing the candidates from one or several parties as he wished. Voting was now a performance oriented to an ideal of
objectivity, a model of rational choice, if you will. An increasingly strident
rhetoric prevailed, condemning the corruption of parties and the need forforms of governing that transcended party politics. Civil service reform, taking off in this same era, promoted this rhetoric powerfully in many nations
around the world. In the American case, however, and in those other nations that adopted ballot reform, there was not only a verbal rhetoric but
also a kind of performative rhetoric in which millions of people acted out asocial practice that incorporated a new model of objectivity.

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With the adoption of the Australian ballot, civil service reform, corrupt
practices acts, voter registration laws, the initiative and referendum, thepopular primary, the direct election of senators, and non-partisan municipal
elections, politics began to be seen as an administrative science that required
experts. Voting came to be seen as an activity in which voters make choices
among programs and candidates, not one in which they loyally turn out in
ritual solidarity to their party. This new understanding of politics helped transform a rabidly partisan press into an institution differentiated from the parties, with journalists more likely to see themselves as journalists, or as writers,
rather than as political hangers-on (McGerr 1986).9

Modern Objectivity
What we might call modern analytical and procedural fairness dates to the1920s. Analytical fairness had no secure place until journalists as an occupational group developed loyalties more to their audiences and to themselves
as an occupational community than to their publishers or their publishers’
favoured political parties. At this point journalists also came to articulate rulesof the journalistic road more often and more consistently. The general manager of the Associated Press, Kent Cooper, announced his creed in l925: “Thejournalist who deals in facts diligently developed and intelligently presented
exalts his profession, and his stories need never be colourless or dull”(Gramling 1940, 314). Newspaper editors formed their own national professional association for the first time in 1922-23, the American Society of Newspaper Editors. At their opening convention, they adopted a Code of Ethics
or “Canons of Journalism” that included a principle of “Sincerity, Truthfulness, Accuracy” and another of “Impartiality”, the latter including the declaration, “News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind” (Pratte
1995, 206).
This newly articulate fairness doctrine was related to the sheer growth innewsgathering; rules of objectivity enabled editors to keep lowly reporters
in check, although they had less control over high-flying foreign correspondents. Objectivity as ideology was a kind of industrial discipline; a Weberian
condition was at work. At the same time, objectivity seemed a natural andprogressive ideology for an aspiring occupational group at a moment whenscience was god, efficiency was cherished, and increasingly prominent elites
judged partisanship a vestige of the tribal nineteenth century (Purcell 1973)10Here Durkheimian affiliation was a factor promoting the articulation of a normof objectivity.
Another Durkheimian condition was also at stake: journalists not only
sought to affiliate with the prestige of science, efficiency, and Progressive
reform but they sought to disaffiliate from the public relations specialists andpropagandists who were suddenly all around them. Journalists had rejected

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parties only to find their newfound independence besieged by a squadronof information mercenaries available for hire by government, business, politicians, and others. Early in the twentieth century, efforts multiplied by businessmen and government agencies to place favourable stories about themselves in the press. A new “profession” of public relations emerged and got
a great boost from President Woodrow Wilson’s attempt in World War I touse public relations to sell the war to the American public. The war stimulated popular public relations campaigns for war bonds, the Red Cross, theSalvation Army, and the Y.M.C.A. By 1920, one journalism critic noted, there
were nearly a thousand “bureaus of propaganda” in Washington modelledon the war experience. (Irwin, 1923, 27) Figures circulated among journalists that 50 or 60 percent of stories even in the New York Times were inspiredby press agents. The publicity agent, philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1929,“is perhaps the most significant symbol of our present social life” (Dewey
1930, 43; Schudson 1978, 121-159).11
Journalists grew self-conscious about the manipulability of informationin the propaganda age. They felt a need to close ranks and assert their collective integrity in the face of their close encounter with the publicity agents’
unembarrassed effort to use information (or misinformation) to promote
special interests. When Joseph Pulitzer endowed the School of Journalism
at Columbia (in 1904 although classes did not begin until 19l3), he declaredthat he wanted to “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession”.
(Pulitzer, 1904, 657) By the 1920s, it seemed to at least some of the more
intellectual-minded advocates of journalistic professionalism, that this meanta scrupulous adherence to scientific ideals. “There is but one kind of unity
possible in a world as diverse as ours”, Walter Lippmann wrote. “It is unityof method, rather than of aim; the unity of the disciplined experiment”. He
wanted to upgrade the professional dignity of journalists and provide training for them “in which the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal” (Lippmann
1920, 67, 82).
Nothing was more threatening to this ideal than the work of public-relations. “Many reporters today are little more than intellectual mendicants”,
complained political scientist Peter Odegard in 1930, “who go from one
publicity agent or press bureau to another seeking ‘handouts’” (Odegard 1930,132). Just before World War I, New York newspaper editor Don Seitz assembled a list of 1400 press agents for the American Newspaper Publishers
Association, distributed the list to ANPA members, and urged them not to
accept material for publication from any of them. But this was a losing battle and by 1926 he complained that the Pulitzer School of Journalism “turns
out far more of these parasites than it does reporters” (Seitz 1926, 209-210 at210).12At this time – the 1920s – the objectivity norm became a fully formulated
occupational ideal, part of a professional project or mission. Far more thana set of craft rules to fend off libel suits or a set of constraints to help editors
keep tabs on their underlings, objectivity was finally a moral code. It was30THE EMERGENCE OF THE OBJECTIVITY NORM IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM

asserted in the journalism textbooks as well as in codes of ethics of professional associations. By the 1930s, publishers would use the objectivity norm
as a weapon against unionisation in the newsroom, insisting that a reporter
who joined the Newspaper Guild could not be objective. The Weberian
condition of social control inside the organization gave publishers reason topromote the objectivity norm even if they had done little or nothing to invent it (Schudson 1978, 156-157).
The relevance of this Weberian condition may be better recognized by
the observation that the further a reporter is from the home office, the greaterthat reporter’s freedom to violate objectivity norms. Foreign correspondents
are treated more as independent experts, free to make judgments, less as
employees to be supervised. In truth, they cannot be supervised nor do editors
often have the knowledge to second-guess them. For that matter, readers do
not normally have the background to fill in a context to make bare facts
comprehensible.
Others – notably sports reporters – are exempt from rules of objectivity
on different grounds. All journalism is ethnocentric, giving more attention tonational news than foreign news. Where news organizations cater to local
rather than national audiences, as is decidedly the case in the American press,
they are ethnocentric with respect to their own city or region. In the rarecases in which an American news organization is designed with a national
audience in mind – USA Today, for instance – sports reporting operates byan objectivity norm, but ordinarily sports reporters openly favour local teams.
If a Chicago newspaper provided coverage for a visiting basketball team as
sympathetic as it provides the hometown Chicago Bulls, the act would beunderstood as treachery, as if The Times of London had treated press releases
from Hitler’s Germany with the same deference as those from 10 Downing
Street.
From the perspective of the local news institution, the triumphs and defeats of the local team are examined from a stance that presumes enthusiastic backing of the team. The home team is within what Daniel Hallin has
called the “sphere of consensus” in journalism, a domain in which the rulesof objective reporting do not hold (Hallin 1986, 116-117). Journalism is acomplex social and discursive domain. American newspapers are involved
not only in reporting conflicts and competitions with professional detachment but also contribute to establishing a local community identity. Not infrequently, in the nineteenth century, newspapers were founded in order todraw attention to and increase the real estate values of frontier towns. Thisbooster spirit survives and colours the American press, but in reporting
political news, American journalism embraced the objectivity norm.
At the very moment that journalists claimed objectivity as their ideal, theyalso recognized its limits. In the 1930s there was a vogue for what contemporaries called “interpretive journalism”. Leading journalists and journalism
educators insisted that the world had grown increasingly complex and needed
to be not only reported but also explained. The political columnists, like Walter

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MICHAEL SCHUDSON

Lippmann, David Lawrence, Frank Kent, and Mark Sullivan, came into theirown in this era. Journalists insisted that their task was to help readers not
only to know but to understand. They took it for granted by that point that
understanding had nothing to do with party or partisan sentiment. In thisrespect, even interpretive forms of journalism paid homage to non-partisanship.
Was this progress, a professional press taking over from party hacks? Not
everyone was so sure. If the change brought a new dispassion to news coverage, it also opened the way to making entertainment rather than politicalcoherence a chief criterion of journalism. Speaker of the House “Uncle” Joe
Cannon objected: “I believe we had better publicity when the party press
was the rule and the so-called independent press the exception, than wehave now. The correspondents in the press gallery then felt their responsibility for reporting the proceedings of Congress. Then men representing
papers in sympathy with the party in power were alert to present the record
their party was making so that the people would know its accomplishments,
and those representing the opposition party were eager to expose any failures on the part of the Administration.” In the independent press, in contrast, serious discussion of legislation gave way to entertainment: “The cutof a Congressman’s whiskers or his clothes is a better subject for a humaninterest story than what he says in debate” (Cannon and Busbey 1927, 295).
News, Joseph Cannon mourned in 1927, had replaced legislative publicity.
What had really happened is that journalists had become their own interpretive community, writing to one another and not to parties or partisans,determined to distinguish their work from that of press agents, eager to passon to younger journalists and to celebrate in themselves an ethic and an
integrity in keeping with the broader culture’s acclaim for science and nonpartisanship.

Conclusion
Journalists live in the public eye. They are not insulated from public scrutiny – they do not have recondite language, fancy technology, mirrors andmysteries to shield them from the public. There are strong reasons for journalists to seek moral norms that appeal to the public in order to protect
themselves from criticism, embarrassment, or law suits and to endow theiroccupation with an identity they can count as worthy. But the practical utility of having some norms does not explain why this norm, the objectivity
norm, came to dominate.
A variety of norms are capable of achieving the ends of providing public
support and insulation from criticism. Journalists in Germany, China, Cuba
or Argentina work with norms that differ from the objectivity norm. To understand the emergence of a norm historically, it is necessary to understand32

THE EMERGENCE OF THE OBJECTIVITY NORM IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM

not only the general social conditions that provide incentives for groups toadopt some norm but also the specific cultural circumstances that lead themto adopt a specific norm. Strategic uses for normativity help explain why
journalists have norms at all. Durkheimian and Weberian conditions promoted
the generation of a new norm in American journalism, but these components
do not explain why journalists selected the particular norm they did. The
latter problem requires understanding the cultural environment of American
journalists early in the twentieth century and the ideas, concepts, and values that they had access to, found appealing, and could convey convincingly to themselves and others.
With that problem in mind, I return to the question of why European
journalism did not initially develop the norm of objectivity and, when later
they came to accept it, did so with less fervour than Americans. Some of thesociological conditions that affected journalistic norms in America were absent
or less pronounced in Europe. The desire of journalists to distinguish themselves from public relations practitioners was absent in Europe because public
relations developed later and less extensively in Europe. Moreover, the growing anti-partisan nature of American political culture intensified in the Progressive years and went much further than efforts to contain party corruptionin Europe. In America, a civil service tradition had to be invented and emerged
as the result of a political movement; in Europe, a degree of bureaucratic
autonomy, legitimacy, and professionalism could be taken for granted, so
there was less reason for European civil servants to ideologize themselves
the way American reformers did. The ideological virtues of a journalistic
divorce from party, so readily portrayed in America against this reform background, had no comparable political ballast in European journalism.
It may also be that the cultural space that could be occupied by objectivity as a professional value in American journalism was already occupied inEuropean journalism. European journalists already understood themselvesin a publicly successful way – as high literary creators and cosmopolitan
political thinkers. They did not have the down-and-dirty sense of themselves
as labourers whose standing in the world required upgrading as American
journalists did. If there was to be upgrading, in any event, it was to a literaryrather than professional ideal.
This is much too global a generalization about the many different formsof European journalism, but there is a good case that it applies very well at
least to the French experience. Jean Chalaby has argued that British andAmerican journalism experienced a “unique discursive revolution” and became information and fact-centred in the mid-nineteenth century, but Frenchjournalism did not. Until late in that century, when leading British and American newspapers employed numerous foreign correspondents, the Frenchpress drew most of its foreign news straight from the London papers. The
French were much less concerned than the British and Americans to draw aline between facts and commentary in the news. French journalism and othercontinental traditions of journalism did not participate in the “unique discur-

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MICHAEL SCHUDSON

sive revolution” that characterized British and American journalism – and sowould not come around to an objectivity-oriented journalism until many
decades after the Americans and, even then, less fully (Chalaby 1996, p. 313)
Chalaby explains that French journalism could not partake of the AngloAmerican discursive revolution because it was dominated by literary figuresand literary aspirations.
It would be wonderful to find a person, a moment, an incident that gavebirth to the objectivity norm in American journalism and then to simply trace
the mechanisms of diffusion from newspaper to newspaper, and from American newspapers to world journalism, but there is no magic moment. The
social conditions that made possible, desirable, and convenient the occupational practices that are now understood as objective reporting emerged during
the late nineteenth century in ways that did not initially produce a strong,
self-conscious articulation of the objectivity norm. At the point when the norm
became clearly articulated – in the 1920s – it was already operating in thedaily activities of American journalists. It is easier to explain the articulationof the norm, arising from the Durkheimian and Weberian conditions I havesketched, than to establish exactly which features of the American culturallandscape and the changing social conditions of the late nineteenth century
were most vital in preparing the soil for it. What is clear is that the moral
norm American journalists live by in their professional lives, use as a meansof social control and social identity, and accept as the most legitimate grounds
for attributing praise and blame is a norm that took root first, and most deeply,
in this journalism and not in others across the Atlantic.

Notes
1.

2.

Donsbach conducted a survey to compare German, Swedish, Italian, British, and American journalists. He found Americans “still uphold norms of objectivity, fairness and neutrality”. They do so more than their European counterparts who are much more likely to
say that it is important for them to “champion particular values and ideas”. Differences innorms seem also matched in diffferences in the social organization of work: only a sixthof American journalists who say their primary function is reporting or editing also acknowledge spending some time writing commentary, while for German journalists thefigure is over 60 percent and for Italians and British reporters and editors about half
acknowledge spending time in commentary. See also Donsbach and Klett (1993, 53-83)
and Chalaby (1996, 303-326).
On newsroom practices, the landmark work is Tuchman (1972, 660-679). On journalistic
defenses of objectivity against its critics, the two chief moments came in the l960s in
response to “new journalism” and New Left critiques of journalism and in the l990s in
response to the movement for “public” or “civic” journalism. The former is summarizedin Schudson (1978, 160-94) and many of the latter defenses are cited and discussed in
Schudson (1998, 132-49).

* Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications LTD from “The objectivity normin American journalism” by Michael Schudson, Journalism Vol. 2 no. 2/2001.

34

THE EMERGENCE OF THE OBJECTIVITY NORM IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM

3.

The eighth edition of the leading journalism history textbook (1996) emphasizes both
explanations but also acknowledges growing uncertainty about their validity. See Emeryand Emery (1996, 185).
4. McAdams (l997, 38l) defines a norm as “a decentralized behavioral standard that individuals feel obligated to follow.” This definition is meant to distinguish general social
norms from law, the latter being a highly centralized and authoritative standard backed,
at least in principle, by force. I think law is a particular kind of norm rather than something altogether different from it.
5. Buel quoting Pennsylvania jurist Alexander Addison. On Addison, see also Rosenberg(1984, 399-417).
6. For historical materials not otherwise footnoted, I draw primarily on Schudson (1978).
7. I draw here on a much fuller account of the history of the newspaper interview in Schudson(1995, 72-93).
8. The symbolic and substantive importance of ballot reform is emphasized in Schudson(1998, 168-174).
9. See especially McGerr (1986).
10. Purcell discusses lucidly the general prestige of objectivist or “scientific naturalist”
understandings of science and social science in the l920s.
11. The history of public relations is not well developed. The material here comes from
Schudson (1978, 121-159).
12. See also Hanna (1920, 398-399); Michael (1935); Gruening (1931); Bent (1927); and Kelly(1935, 307-318) for other critiques of press agentry.

35

The Rise of the News Paradigm
A Review of the Scientific Literature
Harlan S. Stensaas

Some Characteristics of the News Paradigm
At the core of the news paradigm is the notion of “objectivity”, conventionallydefined as the apparent value-free impartial reporting of observable or verifiable factual data from a detached, impersonal point of view. Objectivity iscentral in the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. First
adopted in 1926 and revised in 1973; the code states that journalists are
required “to perform with intelligence, objectivity, accuracy, and fairness.”
The code further requires “clear distinction between news reports and expressions of opinion” and that “News reports should be free of opinion orbias and represent all sides of an issue.”
Two other aspects are included in the modern news paradigm: the attribution of facts to expert opinions and the inverted pyramid structure in writing
up the story. The notion of attribution is related, of course, to objectivity. It
allows the reporter to present ideas and opinions related to events without
the reporter’s becoming part of the news. Attribution is, ideally, made to“authoritative” sources that are named in the news story. But many reports
use passive attribution, unnamed sources, or confidential sources. The inverted pyramid is a utilitarian form that highlights the main facts while also
facilitating page makeup.
The notion of objectivity has come to be regarded as the central ethicalissue of American journalism. Most professional journalists responding to an
open-ended questionnaire concerning their perceptions of professional ethics tended to equate ethics with objective news reporting (Mills, 1983). The
word “objectivity” did not appear in the three-item questionnaire but wasperceived as the principal ethical problem by most professionals. Studies suchas Mills’, together with the codes of ethics, would seem to indicate that professional journalists accepted objectivity as a value and believed objectivity
possible, even though some have called it a “myth” (Hager, 1982), “obsolete”(Smith, 1980), a “semantic will-o’the-wisp” (Shilen, 1955), a “strategic ritual”(Tuchman, 1972), and even “irresponsible” (Glasser, 1984).

37

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

Early Criticism of the Press
Outside the profession, public officials and the public appear to have adopted
the view that any journalism that is non-objective must necessarily be contrary
to the public interest and perhaps immoral. Strong criticism from Vice President
Spiro Agnew in 1969 and 1970 questioned the objectivity of the press andseemed to strike a responsive chord in much of the public. Targeting conservative and anti-war newspapers and network commentators, he called for a “wallof separation” between news and comment (Emery & Emery, 1988: 502).
Such criticism has a long history. Among 14 charges against the American
newspaper press brought by Wilmer (1859) in what Mott (1950: 311) called“the first book devoted wholly to criticism of the American Press” were thatthe papers published misleading reports, withheld useful information,practiced Tory-ism and villainous deceptions. Wilmer, a former editor, expected unbiased news reports as the legitimate obligation of the newspaper
press of the mid-1800s. Muckrakers of the early twentieth century raised
similar charges. Upton Sinclair (1919: 222) complained that the press wascontrolled by big business:
Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision, we define Journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

Birkhead (1984: 6) connects the phenomena of the muckraker to industrialization, as the newspaper also underwent technological development:
The press was perhaps a model of an industry in technological transformation
moving toward a new social role. Muckraking was the technique of exposure,
the revelation of facts upon which to build an illuminated, if not enlightened,
reality. More broadly, progressivism called for decision-making information and,at the subjective level, uniform expressions of value to nurture an integrated
culture. The means of modern journalism were well suited to the motives of
the reformers who undertook to establish the morality of the new century.

In the post World War I era, Lippmann (1920: 49-51) declared that the war
raised serious questions about quality of information provided to mass audiences. He believed newspapers should be conduits of information:
The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumour, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and thetask of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly
offices in a democracy. (p. 47)

And further: “The health of society depends upon the quality of the information it receives” (Lippmann 1922: 80). In a later volume Lippmann (1922:

38

THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

226) made sharp distinction between news and truth, saying that news
signalises an event while truth brings to light hidden facts and sets them in
relation to one another.
In the 1930s New Deal era, then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes(1939: vii-ix) challenged the “objective point of view and fairness” of themetropolitan newspaper press, making specific reference to the Canons ofJournalism of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He charges thatthe papers violated the canons by misrepresenting, distorting, colouring, andlying in the news reports. The concept of objective news reporting also
appears in early news writing textbooks (Ross 1911) and in the earliest major
academic treatise on journalistic ethics (Crawford 1924: 17-18). Ross’s chapter on “The Writer’s Viewpoint” details his concept of objective reporting:
The viewpoint of the news writer must be that of the unprejudiced, but alert,
observer. He must approach his story with a mind open to the facts and hemust record the facts unvarnished by his own preferences and opinions.
Comment on the news of the day is the function of the editorial columns. It
has no place in the news story.

Ross (1911: 18) uses the word “objective” in a checklist of qualities of theideal news story: “It is written from an impersonal, objective viewpoint”.
Crawford (1924: 99), after devoting two of his 12 chapters to “Deficienciesof the Press,” follows with three chapters on “The Principle of Objectivity
Applied.” He begins his first objectivity chapter:In the foregoing chapters, it may be pointed out, there has been laid down asomewhat elaborate philosophy of journalism, a philosophy which presents
objectivity in the dissemination of facts as the primary ideal of the press. Now,
granted that every one theoretically agrees with this philosophy and would
like, moreover, to see it carried out in actual practice, how is this to be accomplished? . . That newspapers generally are moving gradually toward thegoal that has been presented, however, there can be little doubt. Nor can it
be doubted that still more progress would be made were the ideal of objectivity more tenaciously and realistically held by journalists. The advance madein the natural sciences since they abandoned the chiefly speculative andadopted the investigative method is evidence of what may be accomplishedin a human institution even against the most implacable opposition.

A Chronology for the News Paradigm
Origins of the news paradigm that centre on objectivity are widely debated.
Some have noted that colonial printers pledged to report the news factually,
truthfully, and impartially but were soon forced into other modes by condi-

39

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

tions of the times (Shilen 1955; Bradley 1985). Impartiality is not the sameas objectivity (Bradley 1985), though it serves the same purpose of protecting the newspaper’s credibility with its readers. An objective report mustnecessarily be impartial, but an impartial report need not remain detached
and impersonal, nor need it report only verifiable data.
Attempts to render faithful accounts of events may be found in earliest
journalism. Emery and Emery (1988: 51) point to James Rivington, the Tory
editor of the 1770s, as an example of “an objectivity that was not the standardof his era”. But when and why did objective reporting come to be the accepted
standard of good practice for American journalists? On this, views are widely
divergent and evidence is minimal. The telegraph and press associations may
have influenced it (Shaw, 1967; Carey, 1981), it may have been a responseto chaos in the international scene before World War II (Smith, 1980), it could
have risen to serve the needs of a commercial newspaper press in the mid1800s (Schiller 1979, 1981), or perhaps it was a defence against propaganda,
news management, and public relations after World War I (Schudson 1978).
Blankenburg and Walden (1977) found economy as a possible rationale forobjective reporting, and Kaul (1986: 52) suggests that it emerged along withprofessionalism to accommodate changes in the marketplace, a result ofstrategy by publishers to “accommodate journalists’ status ambitions whilesubverting their economic claims”. But Korn (1984) questioned whether journalistic ethics were possible and Black and Barney (1985) advanced credible arguments that codes of ethics are inappropriate for journalism.
Although the legitimacy of objectivity as a news ethic was already being
questioned in the 1950s (Shilen, 1955), it came under increased attack inthe 1970s and 1980s (Tuchman 1972, 1978; Smith, 1980; Hager 1982; Glasser,1984) and while much was found wanting, no one proposed a satisfactory
replacement (Christians 1977; Korn 1984). Schudson (1984: 30) proposedthat the news media had adopted “a kind of schizophrenia ... to act as ifclassical democracy were possible, and simultaneously to work as if a large,
informed and involved electorate were not possible” But that solution is lessthan satisfactory because, as Kaul and McKerns (1985) point out, this is “arole that defines normality as a mental pathology.”

A Content Analysis of the Inverted Pyramid 1865-1954
Although some writers trace objective news reporting to the penny press ofthe 1830s, there is general agreement that it grew and developed sometime
between the Civil War, along with the introduction of the telegraph, and WorldWar II, a span of nearly 100 years (Carey 1981; Schiller 1979, 1981; Schudson
1978; Smith 1980).
To gather empirical data concerning the origins of the modern news paradigm, I investigated three aspects of objective news reporting in selected
U.S. daily newspapers (Stensaas 1987). First, I explored the time frame for40

THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

the development and standardization of objectivity as a news form. Secondly,
objective news reports were studied in relationship to their origin as wire
news versus non-wire news and as published in New York newspapers
compared to other newspapers. Finally, I investigated the relationshipbetween objective news reporting, inverted pyramid format, and the practice of citing authoritative sources.
Content analysis was used to describe objectively, systematically, andquantitatively the general news reports of six representative dailies between
the years 1865 and 1954 in terms of qualities related to objective reporting
and to plot changes in the reports over time. The selected newspapers were(a) in continuous publications during the 90-year period, (b) well-known atleast to the extent of receiving more than passing mention in journalism
histories, and (c) divergent in location by geographic region. Continuous
publication and notability were regarded as evidence of leadership and influence and thus the content selected from those papers would reflect practices of successful American journalism (Stensaas 1987: 44).
The newspapers included a Northern metropolitan daily, the Chicago
Tribune, which began publishing in 1849; a prestigious Southern daily, theAtlanta Constitution, which began in 1868; a West Coast daily, the San Francisco Examiner, which began in 1865; a prominent regional daily, the New
Orleans Times-Picayune, which began in 1837; and two New York City
newspapers, the New York Times which began in 1851, and the New York
Tribune which began in 1841 and became the New York Herald-Tribune in
1924. It ceased publication in 1966.
Using the time period extending from the post-Civil War era to the postWorld War II era, the study used five 10-year periods spaced evenly overthe 90-year period. Studying every other 10-year period permitted plotting
measures across time. The periods were 1865-1874, 1885-1895, 1905-1914,
1925-1934, and 1945-1954 (Stensaas 1987: 46).
Results of the investigation indicate that objective news reports were being
published in 1865-1874 but most reports were non-objective. In 1884-1895
about half the reports were objective, but chi-square tests indicated that thetwo periods did not differ statistically. By 1905-1914 about two-thirds of thereports were objective. In 1925-1934 and in 1945-1954 about 80% of thereports was objective.
Thus, objective reporting was present at the beginning of the study, butbegan to increase cumulatively in the 1880s and continued to rise until after
1934 when it remained at about 80%. As a standard reporting method, objective reporting was well established after the 1880s, reached its peak in
the late 1920s and early 1930s and remained standard after that (Stensaas
1987: 70).
Frequency distributions and chi-square tests indicated that objectivity,
inverted pyramid, and the use of authoritative sources are related and increase through time during the period of the study. Both inverted pyramid
and authoritative sources were rare in the 1865-1885 period and both were41

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

nearly universal after 1925. Based on the data, the general standard news
report, after 1905, was an objective report written in inverted pyramid format and citing authoritative sources for the information (Stensaas 1987: 72).
There were no significant differences in news reports received by wire compared to non-wire reports, nor were there differences between reports in
New York City newspapers and other dailies (Stensaas 1987: 71).

A Question of Determinants
Many have suggested reasons or causes for the rise of the standard news
paradigm in American journalistic practice. Shaw (1967) and Carey (1969,1981) suggested technology, especially the rise of telegraph and wire services, as a cause. Others have cited international chaos, and the rise of professional persuaders who used propaganda, news management, and public
relations (Schudson 1978; Smith 1980). Other proposed causes include theneeds of a commercial press (Schiller 1979, 1981), the rise of professionalism and changes in the marketplace (Carey 1969; Janowitz 1975; Kaul 1986),
and the rise of positivistic science (Janowitz 1975; McKerns 1978; Schiller
1979). These five causes – technology, professional persuaders, commercialpress, professionalization, and the rise of science – are the main themes. Some
writers ascribe more than one “cause.” The author would propose another:a basic shift in Western culture that may best be labelled “Secularisation.”
These six propositions are discussed below.

Technology
The argument for technology centres mainly on the rise of telegraph and its
use in transmitting news. Because the wire services served newspapers of
all political persuasions and needed to avoid alienating customers (clients)“writers became skilled at constructing non-partisan, i.e., ‘objective’ accountsof events” (Carey 1969: 33).
Shaw (1967: 3-4) noted that between 1880 and 1890 America became
industrialized and a number of inventions shaped the modern newspaper.
He lists improvements in presses, the linotype, auto-plate, colour printing,halftones, rotogravure, telephone, typewriter, automobile, and “continued
improvement in telegraph procedures”. He attributed a sharp drop in biased
presidential campaign news in Wisconsin daily newspapers between 1880
and 1884 to increased use of unbiased telegraph news, and suggested tentatively that local reporters “learned to write more unbiased news copy from
imitating the relatively unbiased style of wire news” (Shaw 1967: 31).
Schudson (1978: 4-5) believes it “just as likely, or more likely, that newspapers would take the availability of wire service news as license to con-

42

THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

centrate on different kinds of reporting”. Why, he asks, “should a practice,obviously important to the survival of the institution of the wire service,
become a guiding ideal of institutions not subject to the same constraints?”
But the author’s study cited above found no difference in news from wire
services compared to locally generated news. This would seem to maketelegraph a moot point in the discussion of cause.

Professional Persuaders
The rise of propaganda and professional persuaders during and after WorldWar I has been proposed as a cause (Schudson 1978: 134-144; Smith, 1980:
61). The argument is that objectivity was a response to or a defence against
propaganda, press agents, and public relations.
Objectivity was partly a response to the chaos in the international politicalsphere; it fostered the collection of information on the basis of a special diction, which restricted the definition of a statement to that which could beassented to by all... . It was the remnant of reality left behind when the reader
had been protected from the one-sided truths of the press agent and the doubleedged truths of the politician. It was the ideology of an age that had grown to
distrust democracy, which had seemed to fall both politically and economically in the 1930s. (Smith, 1980: 61)

Schudson (1978: 122) indicates that a distrust of facts was the root of objectivity as an ideology; “It was not the final expression of a belief in facts but
the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could
not be trusted.” and further, “Public relations were one of two key developments which made journalists suspicious of facts and ready to doubt the naïve
empiricism of the 1890s. The other development was wartime propaganda”(Schudson 1978: 141).
But the rise of the objective news report was well underway before WorldWar I and the rise of public relations and propaganda. The modern paradigm, then, preceded the rise of the persuaders. Perhaps the objective nature of news lent itself to the goals of the persuaders. They may have foundthe news easier to manipulate in its seemingly detached formula.

Commercial Press
The rise of a commercial press is cited as a cause for objective reporting.
Two arguments arise for this: First, the marketing task required a wide anddiverse audience and support of advertisers. This precluded partisanshipbecause a neutral “objective” report would be acceptable to all. Schiller (1981)
says, “As a business, the newspaper’s foremost task was to sell itself and,43

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

through its efforts, other products” (p. 15). To justify itself, the commercialpress staked a “pre-emptive claim ... to the defence of natural rights and publicgood” and that was “the enduring foundation upon which the structure ofnews objectivity was built” (p. 75). The other argument is that objectivity
simply facilitated production in a growing news operation:
To select, collect, write, refine, and collate this multiplying series of accounts,
newspapers staffed themselves with an increasingly complex bureaucracy,
comprised of reporters, copyeditors, editors, and circulation and advertisingsales personnel. The division of labour within the newsroom in turn nurtured
an emergent profession of journalism whose members were intent on enhancing journalists’ status and pay.
A profound and vital aspect of this transformation of news creation was
the progressive development of “objectivity” as the overarching norm guiding
the construction and evaluation of news accounts. (Schiller, 1979, pp. 46-47)

This second argument, that objectivity provided a cheaper means of collecting and transmitting news, is also supported by Blankenburg and Walden(1977: 591-592) who suggested that “objectivity befitted concise, interesting,non-partisan news accounts that expediently reduced transmission costs andattracted readers”. In one sense, this is an argument for a technological cause.
It seems obvious that the modern news paradigm would be useful to thecommercial press, and it may have flourished in that setting. However, it isdifficult to accept the rise of commercial press as a cause. The Penny Press
arose in the early 1830s, but as late as 1865-1874 most news reports were
non-objective (Stensaas, 1987: 57-58).

Professionalization
Another proposition is that objectivity resulted from the professionalizationof journalism. Janowitz (1975: 618) attributes this activity to his “gatekeeper”
model:
Since World War I, journalists have come more and more to consider themselves
as professionals and to search for an appropriate professional model. The initial efforts were to fashion journalism into a field, similar to medicine, where
the journalist would develop his technical expertise and also a sense of professional responsibility ... Under the gatekeeper concept of professionalism, thejournalist encountered institutional pressures and personal limitations in searchingfor objectivity and separating fact from opinion. But to the extent that he thoughtof himself as a professional or hoped to make journalism into a profession, he
had little doubt about standards of performance, although there was much debate
about their clarity and how to apply them.

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THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

Kaul (1986: 47-55) noted: “professionalization represents the ideologicalreorganization of work that ran parallel to marketplace reconfiguration” andthat objectivity “emerged as an ideological corollary to commercial non-competition.”
Carey (1969: 33) placed objectivity ahead of professionalism: “It is important to recognise that the canons of objective reporting turn the journalist into a professional communicator; from an independent observer and critic
to a relatively passive link in a communication chain that records the passing scene for audiences”.
Objectivity and journalistic professionalism are certainly connected. But
again, the time sequence seems to rule out this proposition as a cause. Professionalism by nature involves organized societies or associations. In newspaper journalism, the earliest of these may have been the American Newspaper Publishers Association, founded in 1887, but this was primarily a tradeorganization composed of people in managerial positions interested primarily in business management (Emery and Emery 1988: 577). Sigma Delta Chi
was founded as a collegiate organization in 1909 but did not adopt a codeof ethics until 1926. About half of the news report was objective as early as
1884-1895 and two-thirds by 1905-1914 (Stensaas 1987: 57-58). Clearly, thepractice of objectivity preceded professionalism.

Cultural Contexts for a ‘New Journalism’
The Rise of Science
Several writers have attributed journalistic objectivity in whole or in part to
the rise of the scientific method (Janowitz 1975; McKerns 1978; Schiller 1979).
This view is that the positivistic method of observing and reporting wereborrowed from science and applied to news reporting. Janowitz (1975: 618619) cites this as the origins of the objective gatekeeper model which hedates from World War I:... this image of the journalist sought to apply the canons of the scientific method
to increase his objectivity and enhance his effective performance. The model
was reinforced in part by the increased prestige of the academic social researcher and it assumed that, through the application of intellectually based
techniques, objective and valid results could be obtained ... It represented thebelief that the scientific method was productive in various sections of society
and that it had broad substantive and cultural relevance for the journalist.

McKerns (1978: 50) ascribes the same cause, but dates it to about 1900:
Around the turn of the century journalists, impressed with the scientific method
and its adoption as a modus operandi by professionals in the fields outside of45

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

the pure sciences, operationalized truth in terms of objectivity, a seemingly
more tangible goal, and made its attainment dependant upon working values
such as accuracy, fairness, balance and comprehensiveness. These values
became means to the end, i.e., truth as objectivity.

Schiller (1979: 49) holds the commercial press as the cause, but believes
objectivity was “nurtured” by the rise of science:
News objectivity was nurtured by the climate of “Baconianism” pervading
contemporary American science and, through its scientific deference to fact,
the commercial newspaper stood aloof from the progressive relativization
which eventually affected other modes of thought.

Scientific method and news objectivity have in common the impartial, detached collection of factual data. A fundamental difference exists: scientificmethod requires the drawing of conclusions from the facts collected; journalistic reporting stops before drawing conclusions, leaving it up to the reader
to decide the meaning and application of the facts. That being the case,“nurtured” is a well-chosen word.

Secularisation
But the root cause for the rise of this journalistic phenomenon is likely lessimmediate and more fundamental than those discussed above. It results instead from a basic shift in Western culture and thought, which came about
within the same time frame. The labyrinth of names and labels for this shift
muddies the issue – modernism, rationalism, humanism, post-Christian. The
late Francis Schaeffer (1988: 15) called it a “line of despair” and Lears (Fox
& Lears 1983: 6) refers to the “secularisation of liberal Protestantism”.
“Secularisation” is a particularly good word because it gets to the heart ofthe matter – a shift from values to neutral non-values. The point is that until
the closing decades of the nineteenth century (it’s not a sudden shift) Western culture and thought was based on Christian ethics and presuppositions.
The basic presupposition was that there are absolutes in morals. With presupposition of absolutes, classical reasoning from thesis to antithesis (right/
wrong, good/bad, true/false) is possible. The secularisation of culture andthought resulted in a shift to relativism – synthesis instead of antithesis. At
its heart, this represents a change in the concept of truth. The implications
for journalism and journalistic objectivity should be evident: If the journalist
deals in truth and truth is relative, depending on the receiver, then the only
course is to present “value-free data” so that the recipient may fashion his
own “truth” from the “facts”.
Shaeffer (1968) traces this “line of despair” from the German philosopher
Hegel (1770-1831) through the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855)46

THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

and existentialism and shows the line descending like a staircase from philosophy through art, music, general culture, and theology. He dates the shift
as before 1890 in Europe and between 1913 and 1935 in the United States.1
Shaeffer (1968: 16) describes the diffusion of the shift:
The shift spread gradually, in three different ways. People did not suddenly
wake up one morning and find that it had permeated everywhere at once.
First ... it spread geographically. The ideas began in Germany and spreadoutward. They affected the continent first, then crossed the Channel to England, and then the Atlantic to America. Secondly, it spread through society,from the real intellectual to the more educated, down to the workers, reaching the upper middle class last of all. Thirdly, it spread ... from one discipline
to another, beginning with the philosophers and ending with the theologians.

In discussing political change in America during the 1990s, the columnist
George F. Will outlined changes in “American religiosity” (Will 1995). He
listed a series of “awakenings,” beginning with the Great Awakening of 17301760 that emphasized “new birth” at revival meetings and preceded theAmerican Revolution, followed by a second “awakening” between 1800 and1840 that featured camp meetings and “taught that anyone could acquiresaving grace by inner struggle and by struggling against social sins.” Out of
this grew the abolitionist and temperance movements. The third “awakening” occurred about the time of the rise of the modern news paradigm:
The third quickening of religious life, between 1890 and 1930, came during
increased urbanization, immigration and labour strife. Its core belief, shaped
by Darwinism and the new faith in science, was that humans and society could
evolve toward perfection as scientists discovered God’s laws in nature. The
Social Gospel movement preached that poverty is not a personal but social
failure. Embraced by the growing ranks of people running universities andmass media, this doctrine provided the intellectual predicate for the welfare
state. (Will, 1995)

It appears that the third wave of religious fervour resulted in a merging of
religion with natural and social sciences, a secularisation that shaped theculture and thought patterns of that generation. Lears (Fox & Lears, 1983: 6)
refers to a rise in authority of medicine and a decline in authority of the clergy
in the late nineteenth century:[The] professionalization and growing authority of medicine had been under
way at least since the early antebellum era, when health reformers sprouted
like mushrooms, linking medical with moral standards of value. But during
the late nineteenth century, medical prestige became far more firmly established. While urban ministers’ authority waned, doctors of body and mind
became professionalized into therapeutic elites. This meant a growth in influ-

47

HARLAN S. STENSAAS

ence not only for traditional M.D.s but also for neurologists, psychologists,social scientists with panaceas for a sick society, and even for mind curists on
the penumbra of respectability. Ministers and other moralists began increasingly
to conform to medical models in making judgments and dispensing advice.

A shift from authority of “revelation knowledge” of the clergy to the authority of “objective” knowledge of science would have major implications forsociety. Lears (1983: 6) says it resulted in a “secularisation of liberal Protestantism among its educated and affluent devotees”. Such a climate may wellhave contributed to the rise of objectivity in journalistic practice.

A Reshape of Literary Traditions: The Long View
The news paradigm did not appear suddenly, the immediate result of somecataclysmic event, nor did it spring from a sudden brilliant and inventive
idea birthed in the brain of a genius. Rather, it has very early beginnings but
accelerated between 1880s and 1920s before becoming the standard formin American journalism. Its time of blossoming runs parallel with many otherdevelopments in American culture and society, chief of which is the phenomenon referred to above as “secularisation.”
As a cultural phenomenon, the news paradigm was no orphan. Other
writers besides newspaper journalists also shifted direction. In American literature, the Romantic Movement was ushered in by Irving (1783-1859) andran its course through Whitman (1819-1892) and Melville (1819-1891) before being followed by the Realists. The dates of change to Realism in literature roughly parallel those of the genesis of the news paradigm in journalism. John Fiske (1842-1901) was writing about evolution and natural selection in the early 1870s as a contemporary of Mark Twain and other realists.
Some of Fiske’s correspondence with Charles Darwin is included in anthologies (Foerster, 1947: 939-940). Realism merged with Naturalism sometime
near the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Foerster’s description of theRealistic outlook provides insight to the common cultural heritage of Realistic literature and the news paradigm:
A new period was at hand when men turned from the ideal ship to the actual
ship, from the land of heart’s desire to the not so rosy facts of life. They now
proposed to give up dreams and face the truth, to avoid warm enthusiasm
and begin cool observation, to abandon wishful thinking and adopt the integrityof science – to be disinterested, objective, exact, to see things as they reallyare. In harmony with the scientific-industrial civilization of the modern world,
they would produce an impersonal literature, subordinating or suppressing
personal preferences, confidences, and confessions, all the illusions of the innerlife, and endeavour in complete honesty to picture with truth the world outside the individual consciousness, the world we actually live in. (p. 933)

48

THE RISE OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

So the news paradigm evolved in a culture that was being reshaped on all
sides by advances and changes in science, technology, industrialization,
education, religion, and a host of other human activities. It was a new age,a changed culture, and Queen Victoria was not in charge.
An important feature of the closing decades of the nineteenth century was
the rise of egalitarianism in higher education, this resulting from the Morrill
Acts of 1862 and 1890. The land-grant colleges emphasized agriculture andmechanic arts and applied the scientific method to agricultural problems. One
effect of this may have been the infusion of the basic notions of positivism
into the population. The movement in higher education also provided thebasis for professional journalism education and the opportunity for more
standardization in journalism. Objectivity was part of the standardized journalism presented in classes, as evidenced by early textbooks (see Ross 1911;
Crawford 1924). But egalitarianism in higher education provided a vehicle
for diffusion of the secularisation process.
Thus, the genesis of the news paradigm in the U.S.A. is the result of basic
shifts in American culture, which brought forward forms already in existence
and converted them to standard practice in American journalism.

Note
1.

The first showing of modern art in the United States was in the Armory Show in New
York in 1913

49

The News Pyramid and its Origin from theAmerican Journalism in the 19th Century
A Professional Approach and an Empirical Inquiry1
Horst Pöttker2
An important component of the news paradigm is the form of news universally recognised today, which is described in journalism handbooks as the‘inverted pyramid’. When and why did this form of news gain acceptance asa professional standard? Let me first describe the inverted pyramid. Thereafter, I will discuss four theses regarding its development as described in journalistic literature: a technological, a political, a cultural, and an economic
approach. The common feature for these theses is that they seek the reasons for the development of this professional standard and its constitutive
aims outside of journalism; in the development of telegraphy; in the interests of government to control and steer the flow of information; in the changing of the educational system and in the commercial interests of publishers.
I would like to confront these approaches with the argument that the widespread use of the inverted pyramid in professional journalism must be explained by its communicative potential to reach readers or listeners with news,
thereby creating a public discourse. To support my thesis, I present a diachronic content analysis of the New York Herald and the New York Timesfrom 1855 to 1920. I collected the relevant literature and press materials during
a research semester at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2001.

The Inverted Pyramid
Professional journalism knows a variety of standardised forms of presenting
information, for which special communicative principles of dissemination
are characteristic. Reportage uses authenticity to overcome resistance to reception; commentary employs conclusive argumentation; the interview takes
advantage of the attractiveness of real dialogue. The most investigated and,in the training of journalists, most extensively taught genre is ‘hard news’,
which attacks the selectivity of perception by expressly placing the most51

HORST PÖTTKER

important information at the beginning of the story, thus circumventing thereader’s decision whether to continue or stop.
‘Hard news’ is commonly considered an especially objective form of reporting events. This is only true, however, of the chronological report if the reporter refrains from adding their own judgements and interpretations. It is
not necessarily true of a descriptive method that to a great extent presupposes
decisions on the relevancy of the topic by the journalistic subject. Even if
these decisions are based on widely accepted conventions, they are not, incontrast to the chronological chain of events, inherent in the objects of journalistic work.
If the most important information comes first, the name ‘pyramid’ seems
an obvious choice. It is far less obvious why an ‘inverted pyramid’ should
be concerned, bearing in mind that if the most important information comes
first, it is printed in newspapers at the top of the column.
The most important information is summarised in the so-called ‘lead sentence’ that, according to standard practice, has to answer to four or five ‘Wquestions’ (who, when, where, what, and perhaps why?). After the lead sentence comes the rest of the story, which may already be redundant for thereader. The information presented after the lead sentence appears in a decreasing order of relevance and with an increase in quantity. The details
considered least relevant appear at the end.
In addition to quick readability, the professional advantage of this styleof covering events is that news written in such a way can easily be shortened from the end. This means that the journalist responsible for the final
editing, who is invariably pressed for time, is not obliged to undertake a timeconsuming comprehensive reading of the text when compiling a page or abroadcast transmission.
The answers to the question about when and why this form of presenting information originated and ultimately prevailed as the trademark of professional journalism, is of interest to more than just academic historians. If it
could be demonstrated that extensive use of the pyramid form in news writing
was only due to the influences of interest groups not related to journalism,
the dominance of this method in the education of journalists would hardly
be understandable.
Like most other professional standards, the pyramid form of news-writing obviously originated in 19th-century American journalism. Like most otherinvestigations regarding the origins of the inverted pyramid, I restrict myself
therefore to an analysis of American press practices. From there the invertedpyramid news-writing style began to spread around the world during thelast third of the 19th century. Whether, when and how this happened is analysed in other parts of this book about the diffusion of the news paradigm.

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THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

Two Paradigmatic Examples
Old narrative style, chronological, opinion bias: The New York Herald, January 17th 1850
TORTURE IN SWITZERLAND
A strange circumstance has just taken place at Herisau, the capital of Inner
Appenzell, in Switzerland, showing how much in these countries of old liberties civilization is behindhand in some matters. A young girl of 19, somemonths back, assassinated her rival. Her lover was arrested with her, and, as
she accused him of the crime, both were put to the torture. The girl yieldedto the pain, and confessed her crime; the young man held firm in his denial;
the former was condemned to death, and on the 7th of this month was decapitated with the sword in the market-place of Herisau. This fact is itself a startling one, but the details are just as strange. For two hours the woman wasable to struggle against four individuals charged with the execution. After the
first hour, the strength of the woman was still so great that the men were obliged
to desist. The authorities were then consulted, but they declared that justiceought to follow its course. The struggle then recommenced, with greater intensity, and despair seemed to have redoubled the woman’s force. At the endof another hour, she was at last bound by the hair to a stake, and the swordof the executioner then carried the sentence into effect.

Factual news style, inverted pyramid, no bias: The New York Herald, January 17th 1920
PHYSICIAN KILLS HIMSELF – AFTER ROMP WITH SON
Dr. Frank Lawrence Cochrane, forty-three years old, of No. 742 St. John’s Place,
Brooklyn, shot and killed himself yesterday in his home by firing a bullet
through the roof of his mouth. He was found by his wife, who heard the shot,lying in the bath room.
Dr. Cochrane was well known in Brooklyn, where he practised for the lasttwenty-five years. He belonged to many clubs. It was said that he killed himself because of worries over the interest due on a mortgage on his house. He
was educated at the Boy’s High School, Brooklyn, and completed his course
at Cornell. He was a graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, fromwhich he was graduated in 1900.
Mrs. Cochrane told the police that shortly after breakfast yesterday her husband romped with his five-year-old son, James. He then went to his office,left the combination of his safe and the key to his safe deposit vault on his
dresser, wrote a check to his wife for all the money he had in the bank andthen made his way to the bath room, where he killed himself.

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HORST PÖTTKER

The Inverted Pyramid: The Four Explanations
The Technological Thesis: Unreliable Telegraph Lines
The most famous German dictionary of communication studies contains anentry about the development of the inverted pyramid form (also called “climax-first” or “top-heavy form”) that reads as follows:
The top-heavy form of presenting news developed during the American Civil
War (from 1861 to 1865). Due to the fact that at that time the telegraph lines
were still rather unreliable, very often only the beginning of a report on military
action reached the editors. If the report had been chronologically built thecore message, i.e. the outcome of the reported fighting, did not reach the reader.
Therefore the journalists started firstly to transmit their messages in two parts,
namely in the first place the so-called lead or head sentence and in the second place the body of the message. In the lead or head sentence a summaryof the most important news was presented whilst in the body part additional
information was given. (Noelle-Neumann, Schulz & Wilke 1989: 72f.).

There is a similar definition under the heading “News pyramid” in the Dictionary of Socialistic Journalism: “This method developed in the early yearsof telegraphy when technical malfunctions were still frequently experienced”(Sektion Journalistik 1984: 147f.).
Explaining the development of the inverted pyramid by referring to theunreliability of the electric telegraph seemed so obvious and was so convincing that neither Marxist nor traditional communications scientists felt
obliged to support this claim with empirical evidence. This can perhaps be
explained by the fact that technological explanations have a plausibility of
their own based on the foundation-superstructure premises of Marxism3 aswell as on the progress paradigms of the Enlightenment that see a sign ofliberation in humanity’s increasing command over natural resources.
If the technological thesis is true, the inverted pyramid form must havespread in journalism at the same time as the use of the electric telegraph.
After nearly a century of experiments, electric telegraph connections begantransmitting news before 1850 – in the US in 1844 (Washington-Baltimore)
and in Germany in 1848 (Berlin-Frankfurt/Main). In 1865, William Howard
Russell reported for The Times of London on a failed attempt to lay a transatlantic cable by ship from Ireland to the United States (cf. Hudson 1995:
231-243). By 1870, the initial technical difficulties had been overcome, andthe electric telegraph was used by journalists and newspapers on both continents. Russell, dispatched from the Times as a special correspondent toFrance, could no longer compete with his colleagues because he continued
to submit his reports by letter – in contrast to the Americans, who used themuch quicker telegraph (cf. Hudson 1995: XXIVf.).
Did the inverted pyramid really succeed in making its way into American
newspapers between 1850 and 1870, possibly with a push between 1861 and54

THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

1865 during the Civil War? If use of the inverted pyramid in newspaper reporting between 1850 and 1870 did not significantly increase, the technological thesis would at least require serious re-evaluation if it were not dismissed
altogether.

The Political Thesis: Governmental Steering
Although some authors in the United States argue that the rise of the inverted
pyramid in journalism must be attributed to the unreliability of the telegraphlines, this opinion is by no means universal. Mitchell Stephens thinks thatthe war reporters of the Civil War, “rushing to transmit their most newsworthy information over often unreliable telegraph lines” (Stephens 1997: 253f.),
were responsible for the development of the inverted pyramid (cf. also Jones
1947: 322). But other American historians of journalism, especially thoseworking with empirical and quantitative data, doubt that this thesis is correct. Frank L. Mott presumes that, although a more direct style had been used
to cover the Civil War, the traditional chronological presentation of facts was
still prevalent in the reporting of the time (cf. Mott 1962: 330). Michael
Schudson refuses to believe that the episode of the Civil War was at all relevant for the development of the pyramid style. He argues instead that thefirst examples of the pyramid occurred in the 1870s and 1880s (cf. Schudson
1978: 61-87). The standard work of American press history by Emery andEmery also places the development of an “objective” style of reporting in
the post-Civil War period. In any case the authors regard the murder of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865 as the decisive moment when the rise of theinverted pyramid began (cf. Emery/Emery 1996: 143f.).
David T. Z. Mindich undertakes a critical synopsis of empirical studies on
the development of news-writing style in 19th-century American journalism.
He suggests that the findings concerning a possible correlation between theuse of the telegraph and the rise of unbiased (“objective”) news, as proposedby Donald L. Shaw, are unconvincing if one considers that news bias had its
heyday in 1872: i.e. a full generation after the introduction of the new technology. On account of the state of the research, Mindich refutes technological explanations and favours instead a political thesis. Like Emery and Emery, he is of the opinion that the Civil War and the murder of Lincoln coincide with the genesis of the pyramid form.
Mindich demonstrates his political thesis using the figure of Edwin M.
Stanton, Secretary of War for the Union during the Civil War who, despite alack of military expertise, was appointed by Lincoln in 1861 to rid the Armyof the Northern States of corruption and other troubles. He can show withsome justification that the power-hungry politician Stanton, unpopular among
the generals and in need of suitable means to catch the ear of the Union
Army, favoured the pyramid form when preparing official bulletins. Stanton
could, by doing so, better influence public opinion in the interests of thegovernment. The pyramid, by virtue of an elevated, almost authoritative55

HORST PÖTTKER

bearing, makes the public more susceptible to official positions. Furthermore
the inverted pyramid by way of hiding those judgements in line with theposition of the government behind the facade of its rigid, apparently objective construction actually increases their influence on the public. By placing
those items that the government regards as most important at the beginning,
officials exert influence on what the public views as important. Mindich
explains thus: “The ‘objective’ news report is, at best, an honest attempt toassemble facts as fairly and accurately as possible; but it can also be a deliberate ordering of ‘facts’ to manipulate public perceptions... Stanton’s ‘objective’ facts are used to mask his personal agenda. During his tenure as war
secretary, Stanton was fanatical about controlling the dissemination of information” (Mindich 1998: 74f.).
Mindich substantiates his thesis, that the development of the inverted
pyramid in American journalism is attributable to the interest in power andthe ability of politicians like Edwin M. Stanton to steer public opinion, byreferring to a number of official bulletins in pyramid form that were released
to the press and printed virtually without alteration. Among them was the“official dispatch” of the death of Lincoln and its circumstances that appearedin the April 15, 1865 issue of the New York Herald (cf. Mindich 1998: 68-94).
The political explanation that specifically refers to Stanton, as well as thetechnological argument, would have to be regarded as void if it could bedemonstrated that the pyramid form did not circulate widely among newspapers during or shortly after the Civil War, but considerably later. If the
pyramid form is in fact deeply connected with the political intention to steer
public opinion, it would have occurred most frequently in authoritative systems where such intentions were most advanced, e.g. during the Nazi regime or in the Soviet Union and other East European countries before 1990.
This explanation therefore obviously contradicts all historical experience
which is also presented in other parts of this book.

The Cultural Thesis:
Educational Paradigm Change in the Progressive Era
While the technological and political theses date the rise of the inverted pyramid to the time of the Civil War, two explanations that focus respectively on
the socio-economic and socio-cultural context date the diffusion of the “relevance principle” as a news standard to the years from 1890-1910, the so-called
Progressive Era. The most explicit in terms of dating is the cultural thesis that,to my knowledge, has so far only been published on the Internet (cf. Errico etal. http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/mediahistory/mhmjour1-1.htm). After analysing a number of randomly chosen newspapers from 1860 to 1910 in a diachronic content analysis, Errico and others come to the following conclusion:“...few examples of the summary news lead can be found in newspapers of
the 1860s. In fact during 1865, when the Civil War ended, no examples of stories

56

THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

that used the summary news lead or inverted pyramid writing were found…
It was not until 1895 that even 1 percent of all stories surveyed had summary
news leads… Between 1890 and 1900, however, this study found a significant
nationwide increase… in the number of stories with a summary news leadand the inverted pyramid story form. The trend continued steadily upward…By
1910 one of nine news stories surveyed used the summary news lead andinverted pyramid construction” (Errico et al.: 3).
Based on their findings, the authors conclude that the pyramid form did
not develop prior to 1880, but spread most robustly in the first decade of
the 20th century. They attribute this fact to the quantitative expansion of
education – which resulted in the rapid decline of illiteracy – and the paradigm change from the classical-humanistic to the pragmatic-technological idealof education during the Progressive-Era in the United States. Hand in handwith this paradigm change, in their opinion, there was also a change in the
expectations and skills of both journalists and the public. Consequently, achange from the traditional “soft” comprehensive narration to the “hard”
reporting of concise and relevant facts became unavoidable.
Although innovative, empirically and historically well founded, the survey is not without gaps. Doubts concerning the method of data collection
are justified. The survey authors only considered texts longer than five sentences. As a result news material most characterised by a principal featureof the inverted pyramid – brevity – was neglected. It should also be notedthat James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, one of the first “penny papers” and famous for its major innovations in the field of journalism was notamong the newspapers surveyed. These omissions suggest that Errico et al.
may have underestimated early distribution of the pyramid form. Furthermore the survey authors do not provide a theoretical framework for theirargument. Where is the causality between the change in the educational idealsof society and the spread of the pyramid news form in journalism?

The Economic Explanation: Cost Saving
Explanations focussing on the economic context of the rise of the inverted
pyramid are often found in scholarly literature. This approach tries to explain the development of a form of journalism that favours relevant facts andapparent objectivity by the profit-mindedness of the publishers, especially
their interest in minimising costs.
An examination of the thesis focussing on the commercialisation of news,
reveals that practically the entire period from the introduction of the “penny
papers” in the 1830s to the full unfolding of the “penny press” at the end of
the 19th century is regarded as related to the development of the pyramid
form. The most representative of this economic approach is Gerald J. Baldasty,
who interprets the standardised form of presenting news exclusively as aconsequence of commercialisation (cf. Baldasty 1992).

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HORST PÖTTKER

A closer examination reveals that the relevant literature mentions several
economic advantages of the new, “hard” style of news-writing. The mostcommon is that the huge costs of wiring news by telegraph forced publishers to put as much information as possible into as little text as possible (cf.
Bleyer 1973, Emery/Emery 1996, Jones 1947, Schudson 1978). The connection to the technological approach that exists in this argument is very clear.
In order to cut labour costs publishers increasingly relied on the telegraphservices of the news agencies, especially that of the Associated Press (AP),whose influence on the presentation of news had continually increased since
its founding in 1848 (cf. Dicken-Garcia 1989, Emery/Emery 1996, Hynds 1980,
Mott 1962, Shaw 1967).
A third theory suggests that the speed with which newspapers can beproduced – implying the saving of time and money – must be regarded as
the main stimulus of competition (cf. Dicken-Garcia 1989, Kobre 1969, Perry
2000, Warren 1944). However, the opinion that the summary news-lead was
primarily used as a lure in the fight of competing daily papers to reach thebiggest number of readers by offering a quick and superficial reading isrelatively rare (cf. Stephens 1997, Warren 1944).
The economic approach is quite helpful in reminding one of a fundamental
fact that is often either deliberately neglected or taken for granted in communication studies: that there is a fundamental contradiction between thecommercial interests of the mass media and journalistic quality. The pyramid form, like other professional standards of journalism, arose in a media
system that was fully market-oriented from the very beginning. The development of both the principle of creating public awareness and public discourse as well as the rules of journalistic professionalism occurred because,
not despite, of the dynamics of capitalism. To explain this unquestionablehistorical connection, communication research still needs a closed theory.
The economical approach to explaining “hard” news coverage could be thefirst step in this direction.
This approach does, however, have its deficiencies as can be seen fromits inaccuracy in dealing with the question of dates. Since the introductionof the “penny papers” in the 1830s, the commercial interests of publishers
have played an enormously important role in American journalism. However, the pyramid certainly developed as a standard of news presentation
decades later. If the changes in the economy caused by telegraphy are regarded as the main cause both the economic and the technological theses
must be rejected if the pyramid form proves not to have developed during
or immediately following the Civil War.
Like the technological, the political, and the cultural theses, the economic
approach suffers from the fact that only factors outside of journalism and its
organisation in the mass media are considered. The economic and the cultural theses at least have the advantage that, instead of focussing on single
factors, social connotations are more comprehensively considered as possible explanations.

58THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

The Inverted Pyramid: A Diachronic Content Analysis of
the New York Herald and the New York Times
A diachronic content analysis of one or more archetypal newspapers of theperiod, from the introduction of telegraphy prior to the American Civil War
and the climax of modern print journalism before the introduction of radio,
is evident to verify the approaches described above and possibly detect new
explanation patterns. For this reason I have chosen the legendary New York
Herald, which James Gordon Bennett, Sr found in 1835 as a “penny paper”,
and was merged in 1920 with the New York Sun after the sale of the Bennett
press empire. This newspaper can be regarded as a prime example of professionalism in 19th-century American journalism in terms of its support forentrepreneurial and editorial innovation.
The years 1855, 1875, 1895, and 1920 were selected as being relatively
uneventful (not closely overshadowed by major wars) and ‘normal’. The numberof articles written in the pyramid form was tallied from the total number ofarticles that appeared on a fixed day chosen at random – January 17.
In very short texts, it is virtually universal that the most important news ispresented at the beginning, which is also already the end. Errico et al. maintain with some justification that the pyramid form requires not only a “lead”
but also a “body”. They therefore analysed only those articles that were longer
than five sentences. In my opinion, however, it is possible to determine
whether an article comprising three, four, or five sentences is written in the
inverted-pyramid form, and consequently I have analysed all articles, eventhe shortest. In order to determine the not-too-significant share of peaks in
the use of the inverted pyramid due to the small size of an article, the lengthof all articles was also recorded.

The New York Herald between 1855 and 1920
The results of a comparison of the number of news stories longer than 50
words that used the pyramid form with the total number of articles evaluated seem, in my opinion, especially significant.
Table 1.

Year

The New York Herald , January 17, Articles in the Editorial
Section Using the Pyramid Form
NumberofarticlesPercentageofpyramids% of pyramids
Articles <or = 50 words% of pyramids
Articles >50 words
3.0

1855

66

6.1

3.0

1875

116

15.5

6.9

8.6

1895

194

35.6

8.7

26.8

1920

187

39.0

10.7

28.3

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The Table shows that even in 1855 (six years before the outbreak of the Civil
War), 3% of the articles over 50 words used a real pyramid structure. These
are not telegraph messages, and the frequency (two articles in one issue) isso small that the idea of the inverted pyramid as a working routine or evena professional standard at this time can be excluded. Rather, one may presume that this happened by accident. Up to 1875 the share of pyramids increased to 8.6%, which at best can be attributed to the working routine ofindividual journalists but not to a professional standard. Only between 1875
and 1895 does the share of pyramid news stories rapidly increase to morethan a quarter, exactly to 26.8%. Because the percentage remained more orless constant from 1895 to 1920 (28.3%), one can reasonably assume thatthe inverted pyramid form became a professional standard in American journalism not earlier than 1875, but certainly not later than 1895.
This argument is supported by the fact that the pyramid phenomenon isclearly mentioned in a journalism handbook that appeared in 1894 in conjunction with the advice “that a well constructed story begins with its mostimportant fact and ends with the least important” (Shuman 1894: quoted after
Mindich 1998: 65).
Between the years 1875 and 1895, additional changes in the appearanceof American papers took place:
Table 2.

Year

The New York Herald , January 17, Articles in the editorial section(except “Financial and Commercial” and “Maritime Intelligence”/“Shipping News”)

NumberofarticlesAverage Articles with Illustrations (%)
word
lengthDrawings
Photos
Total

Headline of article (%)
without

small

big

1855

66

711

97.0

3.0

1875

116

627

81.0

12.1

6.9

1895

194

367

8.2

8.2

14.4

61.9

23.7

1920

187

244

1.1

6.4

20.9

30.5

48.7

5.3

The number of articles in a single issue of the newspaper increased substantially and rapidly while the average length of an article decreased. In
1875 there are no illustrations, while in 1895, 8.2% of the articles are illustrated. This use of illustrations increases slowly until 1920 when photography replaced drawings as the primary illustration technique. There was amore dramatic increase in the use of headlines; 80% of all articles are without headlines in 1875, while 85% of the news stories appear with a headline
in 1895. The number of headlines then decreases slightly until 1920, but thosethat do appear increase in size.
Additional changes occurred that are not recorded in Table 2 are worth
a mention. The number of editors is mentioned in the masthead in 1895, in
direct contrast to their absence in 1875. Furthermore the articles are more

60

THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

clearly sorted into categories such as Washington, New York, international,
sports or culture. Section divisions, however, still do not appear.
In conclusion one can say that in 1895 the New York Herald had becomemuch more clearly arranged, readable, and stimulating for the reader than it
had been in 1875. American publishers and journalists had by that time discovered their readers and, finally, some better methods for selling information as a product. The task of the journalist now no longer merely consistedof placing news arriving from outside sources into the paper in its original
condition, but of preparing them for the reader by adapting their size, appearance, and textual and visual condition to the needs of the newspaper
and its readers. By means of this ‘inside editing’, the communicative qualityof the texts improved considerably, making them more understandable.

A Closer Analysis of the New York Herald between 1880 and 1890
In order to find out more precisely, when and why this inner professional
process took place at the New York Herald, I used the same instrument toanalyze the crucial years 1880, 1885 and 1890. Thus, a closer meshed net offive-year intervals unfolds, ranging from 1875 until 1895.
Table 3.

NumberofYear articles

The New York Herald , January 17, Articles in the editorial section(except “Financial and Commercial” and “Maritime Intelligence”/“Shipping News”)
Percentage of Pyramids
_< 50
> 50
Total
words
words

Average Percentage
Word
with
Length Illustration

Headlines
Without S m a l l

Big

1875

116

15.5

6.9

8.6

627

81.0

12.1

6.9

1880

123

26.0

10.6

15.4

679

12.2

77.2

10.6

1885

169

26.0

11.8

14.2

258

23.7

70.4

5.9

1890

181

30.9

9.4

21.5

363

1.7

13.8

76.8

9.4

1895

194

35.6

8.7

26.8

367

8.2

14.4

61.9

23.7

A close look at Table 3 offers insights that help to explain and understandthe spread of the pyramid form within the framework of the developmentof ‘inside editing’. It is striking that the average length of the articles abruptly
drops by more than half, and then slightly rises again in the short time span
between 1880 and 1885. It is fair to assume that this change can be traced
back to a measure that had been taken by the editors and was immediately
put into effect; but in the workaday routine lost some of its obligation4.
Similar results show in the sudden, radical decline of articles without aheadline from 81.0 to 12.2 percent between 1875 and 1880, as well as in theincrease of large headlines from 9.4 to 23.7 percent between 1890 and 1895.
The number, as well as the form, of headlines can be changed by editorial
decisions from one day to the next.

61

HORST PÖTTKER

The share of pyramid-news for all editorial contributions, as well as forarticles longer than 50 words, increases gradually and continuously. This is
explicable, because the writing of news according to the relevance principle is a professional technique that cannot be enforced but has to be learned
and distributed via teaching and training. Furthermore the technique contradicts the quasi objective tendency to give way to the sequential order of eventsand narrate them chronologically.
The technique of writing pyramid-news is an essential part of the second,
professional nature of journalists that has to be wrung from their first, innate
nature in a constant and laborious process of self-critical socialisation. There
are also indications (visible to the researcher but not from the Tables in thisarticle) that in 1880 and 1885, when the share of pyramids among longer
articles was too small to be indicative of being a routinely used standard,some long articles are constructed by summing up several short news items
continuosly under general headlines such as “City News Items”, “Summaryof the News”, “Army Intelligence”, “Personal Intelligence” or “Obituary Notes”.
These articles are off-set against the rest of the text with cross-bars. They
exist of singular lead-sentences of 10 to 25 words without a news-body whichhave been put together densely, apparently with the goal to give hasty readersan overview on different events, topics, and subjects.
The management of the editorial department could not trust their journalist’s routine in so far as the pyramid is concerned. Consequently, they
probably collected and put together the news that was meant for the hasty
reader into tabular form. These have probably been edited by journalists,
who were specialised in the matter. Use of this practice gradually declined
after 1890, when the pyramid had for most journalists become a routine
procedure, but without disappearing completely from the press further on –in either the US or Europe.
On the basis of such vivid details, it can be reconstructed why and bywhich practical steps the pyramid developed as a professional standard in
the two decades between 1875 and 1895, finally becoming popular among
American journalists, and also a part of journalistic training.

The New York Times between 1855 and 1920
In order to find out whether and to what extent the New York Herald must
be seen as an exception, I have also analysed the relevant issues of the New
York Times from the years 1855, 1875, and 1895.
Although the changes taking place during 1875 and 1895 are less obvious with the New York Times than with the New York Herald (perhaps attributable to a smaller degree of readiness for innovation), the same fundamental developments can also be found. There is a tripling of inverted-pyramidnews stories; considerably more, and on average, shorter articles; the addition of illustrations; and the use of bigger headlines. We may therefore as-62

THE NEWS PYRAMID AND ITS ORIGIN FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM...

sume that the New York Herald is not an exception and that the general trendof the 1880s toward communicative quality and journalistic professionalism
was only more striking with the paper edited by James Gordon Bennett, Jr
than with its competitors.
Table 4.

Year

The New York Times , January 17, Articles in the editorial section% ofNumberpyramidsof> 50 words a r t i c l e s

1855

Average
Articlesword
withl e n g t h drawings
(%)

101

?

1875

4.6

153

684

1895

14.5

241

362

1.7

Headline of article (%)
without

small

8.9

91.1

6.5

93.5

2.1

94.2

big

3.7

The Inverted Pyramid, Journalism,
Public Communication and the News Paradigm
If the inverted pyramid really became the professional standard in American journalism in the 1880s, the technical, the political and the cultural theses cannot be true. If unreliable telegraphs or power-hungry politicians during
the Civil War were responsible for this phenomenon, its development would
have been finalised in the mid-1870s at the latest. Had the increase in thequality and quantity of education during the Progressive Era caused the increased use of the inverted pyramid, it could not have happened before theturn of the century. If one does not want to rely entirely on the economic
approach, one has to look for a new thesis that takes the question of chronology into account.
At the beginning I pointed out that the ‘lead principle’ enhances the receptivity of the reader by circumventing selective perception. It enables aquick reading, so that readers with little time can learn the most important
facts. Writing news in the inverted-pyramid form – like the reduction of text
and sentence length, the illustration of articles with drawings and photographs,
the use of headlines, and the sorting of news into specific sections – therefore enhances the communicative quality of the journalistic product. It is not
surprising that this style of news presentation spread at the same time asother innovations intended to stimulate the readers’ receptivity. The emergence of this professional standard should therefore be viewed primarily as
a function of its communicative potency – helpful in the journalist’s task ofcreating public awareness and public discourse – rather than solely as theresult of influences from fields outside its own domain, i.e. technical, political, or cultural frameworks.
The thesis based on communicative aspects does not exclude the economic interest of publishers in making newspapers more attractive to readers. The development of inside editing after 1880 must surely be connected63

HORST PÖTTKER

to the economic considerations of American publishers eager to enhance theusefulness of their papers. But economic considerations and journalistic
professionalism do not exclude each other. They share the intention of reaching as many people as possible via the media regardless of whether they
are called buyers, consumers, readers, or recipients.
The advantage of the inverted pyramid as a work routine lies more in its
cost-saving aspects. The advantage is that texts can be shortened from theend if the final layout requires it, and this saves time and labour costs during
the editing process. At the same time, it facilitates quick production that
increases the currency of the news, a journalistic quality appreciated by bothnewspaper sellers and readers that is reflected with an increase in the numberof copies sold.
Only if, and when, a general understanding emerges in the field of communication research, that mercantile interests and the journalistic ethos are
not diametrically opposed, but share (at least partly) the same aims, will
professional standards like the inverted pyramid, which originated in the fully
market-oriented American media system, no longer be seen as external
obligations that journalists must simply endure, but rather as means of increasing professional efficiency.
This explanation obviously is important for our question when and why
the news paradigm as a whole originated and diffused throughout journalistic cultures in the western world.

Notes
1.
2.

3.
4.

64

Revised and with new data and their interpretation extended version of an article which
at first has been published in Journalism Studies, Vol. 4. , 2003, No. 4, p. 501-511.
The author wishes to thank Tobias Eberwein, Anne Fölting, Christina Kiesewetter, Chris
Long and Johannes Rabe for various technical help with this study. He is also grateful to
the John F. Murray Fund of Iowa for financial support during the research.
This premise postulates the dependence of consciousness and various forms of communication (superstructure) on the material being (base).
Similar phenomena still show in newspaper layout-reforms today: First the new concept
is being followed consequently, but over time some journalists come back to their old
professional habits (cf. Katz & Reichstein 2002).

Old and New Journalismin The London Press
The 1880s and 1890s
Svennik Høyer
As an illustration of how the ‘news paradigm’ was first domesticated outside
the US, this chapter describes how new and old ideas of journalism confronted
each other in the London press during the last two decades of the 19th century.

Partisanship and Commitments
In the 1890s: “... ‘independent’ and ‘neutral’ papers began swamping theovertly partisan ones ...” Alan Lee writes (1976: 193). The accuracy of thisstatement depends on the meaning of words. Neutrality and its synonyms
like nonalignment and dispassion are ambivalent words; they might as welldenote disinterestedness or aloofness, words that do not cover the realitiesof the London press, even in the 1880s and 1890s.
London newspapers and journals had been aligned along fault lines ofstark political and religious antagonisms, before and after an interlude of six
years, 1679-85, when Parliament failed to renew The Licensing Act. In 1695
licensing was abandoned and press freedom confirmed indirectly even if later,
and until 1855, it became curtailed by both libel laws and “taxes on knowledge”. But censorship and regulations of the press in the UK often failed tocurb opposition completely.
Stamp duties on news created the conditions for a bristling market of an
unstamped, oppositional, illegal and low-priced underground press,
containing comments rather than news. Thus the irreverent ‘new journalism’
in the 1880s followed an old tradition by demonstrating a lack of loyalty to
the establishment, whether Whig or Tory. Impartiality was a condition forbeing independent, but a part of it was commitments to social and politicalissues. Newspapers in the 1880s were often dedicated to causes outside thegiven political agenda, as Alan Lee remarks above, which they neverthelesstried to influence.

65

SVENNIK HØYER

William Thomas Stead coined the expression ‘new journalism’ in one ofhis most quoted articles “Government by journalism”, which was publishedin the Contemporary Review May 1886 (653-674). Here Stead demonstrates
his ambitions for a professional journalism, which for him was a far cry froma detached objectivity; through his campaigning journalism he hoped to gain
both democracy and socialism (Conboy 2002: 97). According to Stead, journalists should struggle for given causes rather than for gaining political influence. The press should be dedicated to identifiable politics rather than toa political party (Boston 1988: 91-104). Through his own investigative journalism he conducted social and political campaigns on vice and the exploitation of the poor in his penny paper the Pall Mall Gazette, where he firstbecame a reporter, then assistant editor in 1880 and sole editor between 1883
and 1900.

The Fourth Estate
Stead’s message must be read with his contemporary leading London newspapers in mind, of which The Times was an embodiment of newspaper traditions since the 18th century. Already by the time of the Napoleonic wars
The Times had become both independent and the most influential of newspapers, as much inside as outside government circles. Editorials in given
circumstances could destroy ministers politically, even Cabinets. By the mid
19th century The Times had become the most important channel between
public opinion and the governing institutions, the only essential reading on
political matters and it increasingly became a spokesman for the middle classand the commercial interests fronting for the landed aristocracy (Clarke 2004:
230-31).
Part of The Times’ influence was based on very tight links to the Government and the Civil Service; in the 1830s and 1840s it regularly published theQueen’s Speech and the texts of government treaties ahead of the event(Walker 1982: 35). The Times had earned this symbiotic relationship withthe powers that be, by several means, one of them being technologically infront of its competitors from the beginning of the 19th century. In 1841 The
Times was also a business success with a circulation of 28,000 copies on anaverage day and a profit of £ 17,100. Much of the profit was reinvested inextensive networks of correspondents in foreign capitals and major provincial cities and agents in important harbours, to speed the communication ofnews. This network ensured The Times was on occasion better informed thanthe Government.
But as much as editors cared for their speedy news service and the political impact of their newspaper, and for public rhetoric in their writing, newgenres and forms of journalism were not their main concern or talent. The
unique semi-monopoly The Times enjoyed among morning papers waned

66

OLD AND NEW JOURNALISM IN THE LONDON PRESS

when newspaper taxes were repealed in 1855. More inventive competitors
came to the fore.
To save taxes, which were levied on each sheet of newsprint, editors had
packed as much information on every page as possible, which gave thenewspaper the impression of a solid block of reading material, without any
hint at where to begin except at the left side corner at the top of the page.
This became a tradition for many of the London morning newspapers andto the end of the century they clung “stubbornly to the traditionalist formulaof The Times – the front page of ‘smalls’, the minimal news-titling headlines...”(Hutt 1973: 71).
Major articles were centred on a number of lengthy editorials, or on reports of judicial proceedings, usually printed verbatim. The “interests, which
the regular ‘stamped’ London dailies represented were those of the politicalsociety in which editorial staff moved” (Brown 1985: 255). Editors and leading journalists hunted social prestige more than scoops. The ambitions of
the established mid-Victorian newspapers were to select stories within therange of ‘normal politics’ and to inform on acceptable events and opinions.
Events were most often transcribed the way they happened with few
perspectives added. Incoming news was handled almost without condensation. An important court case in the Telegraph could be as long as 15,000
words (Engel 1996: 34), longer than any chapter in this book. Newspapers
appeared as compilations of discrete items with little attempt to organise,
let alone manipulate, the news in pursuit of an editorial objective (Brown
1985: 250-51). Meetings were reported chronologically, letters from correspondents, from officials or from readers were printed with little or no editorial pruning. The news notices gave disparate and disconnected information often out of context, and were spread randomly between pages.
This old formula changed gradually towards the end of the 19th century.
Long speeches were edited and shortened and the number of reported
speeches decreased markedly (Lee 1976: 123). “Top-ranking parliamentarians,
who had been used to receiving in the press the equivalent of the columns
they filled in Hansard, were fortunate to secure abbreviated reports of theirspeeches” (Koss 1981: 348).1 The Times lost its edge both technologicallyand journalistically with the ever-increasing capacity of rotary presses fromthe 1860s onwards when several new competitors, who were better able tocatch the attention and fancies of the middle class readers, overcame it incirculation.

Campaign Journalism
In opposition to the old formulae, Stead became an advocate of active reporting; his trademark was a dramatic style – radiant, radical and rebellious.
He became known as a disseminator and practitioner of an American muckraking style of journalism, rather than an innovator himself. He demonstrated

67

SVENNIK HØYER

his admiration for the unrestrained creativity in United States in his The
Americanisation of the World (1902), where he wrote in the preface:
It is only when we look at the manifold manifestations of the exuberant energy of the United States, and the world wide influence which they are exerting upon the world in general and at the British Empire in particular, that werealise how comparatively insignificant are all the other events of our time.

This was an enthusiasm Stead tried to infuse into his own journalism. The
Pall Mall Gazette became a model for the new literary evening papers covering the arts, politics and social questions, providing more analysis anddiscussion than the morning papers (Clarke 2004: 258). Stead was himself
an accomplished author, biographer and literary critic; his bibliography includes studies on Pound, Yeats and Eliot, a biography of Gladstone etc.
In October 1883 Stead introduced the celebrity interview, and published
134 of them the following year in the Pall Mall Gazette (Chalaby 1998: 127).
In Stead’s own comment (1902: 111): “The interview was a distinctively
American invention, which has been acclimatised in this country, althoughwith odd limitations. The Times, for instance, will never publish an interview
with any person if it takes place on British soil.”
As an editor Stead asked journalists to investigate concrete cases of political malpractice and conditions of social injustice, similar to the campaign
journalism Horace Greely pioneered in the New York Tribune thirty years
earlier. Charles Dickens too had pioneered social reportage with realistic
descriptions from prisons and slums in the 1830s, but without calling for public
actions (Slater 1996).
Stead’s ambition was to influence the political agenda, not to reproduce
acceptable controversies and ceremonial events. He was crusading againstthe ‘old corruption’ in exposing slums and bad housing conditions in London,
but also fought for an improved Navy, for General Gordon to be sent to Sudan
and for closer imperial ties in general. Most notoriously Stead disclosed thepractice of juvenile and child prostitution under a flaring headline ‘Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon’. A headline like this was new in London journalism in 1885. Stead also used questionable methods when collecting his
information. The reportage brought Stead much substantial condemnationin higher circles. Members of Parliament publicly criticised his journalism
on prostitution, newsagents stopped selling the paper and the Prince of Walescancelled his subscription (Conboy 2002: 97-8, Clarke 2004: 259).
Investigative journalism alone could not satisfy Stead, he went on thelecturing circuit. This was certainly not part of the American type of ‘newjournalism’ or of ‘objectivity’. According to the Pall Mall Gazette 19 October
1885 Stead had in fourteen days covered 2,200 miles and addressed fifteen
meetings and audiences of between forty and fifty thousand people. Suchcrowds did not pay off in increased circulation, which increased only slightly
from 8,360 to 12,250 during the most heated campaign on juvenile prostitu-

68OLD AND NEW JOURNALISM IN THE LONDON PRESS

tion. Stead’s popularity was not enough to withstand later losses in advertising and circulation; he was dismissed from the Pall Mall Gazette on 1 January 1900 (Clarke 2004: 262).
There were others coming home from a trip to America full of ideas for
new stories, like T. P. O’Connor, founder of The Star in the same market segment as the Pall Mall Gazette. In his manifesto for The Star in 1888 he declared an intention to bring stories beyond mere politics; he believed readers also wanted something dramatic and picturesque, humorous, pathetic oranecdotal, yet also stories of fashion and the arts of housekeeping (Engel
1996: 45). But to O’Connor’s way of thinking a new journalism did not preclude a point of view:
The Star will be a Radical journal. It will judge all policy – domestic, foreign,social – from the Radical standpoint.

The Apolitical Tabloids
Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) was amongst the first and the mostsuccessful of tabloid entrepreneurs, serving both as publisher and executive
editor for his newspapers. Harmsworth had a vision of a popular newspaper, details of which he was not hesitant at ordering his editors and journalists to realise (Taylor 1996). Unlike W. T. Stead, Harmsworth was a businessman more than an idealist. He aimed his halfpenny Daily Mail at an
audience of the lower-middle and upper-working classes; launched in 1896
it approached a circulation of one million by 1900. Consequently
Harmsworth’s methods had a greater impact on the development of modern English journalism than Stead’s. Due to its immense popularity the Daily
Mail formed a model for other London tabloids.
Harmsworth was not uncommitted politically, but – like Gordon Bennet
in New York half a century earlier – he committed himself openly to a selection of causes that left his papers harmless to the majority. In his first leader
on August 31st 1894, after he took over the Evening News, he wrote:
Free from fad and prejudice, the Evening News will preach the gospel of loyalty to the Empire and faith in the combined efforts of the peoples united underthe British flag. Conservative and Unionist in Imperial politics ... non-sectarian in all questions affecting the religious belief of the community, sympathetic
towards labour and friendly to every phase of communal advancement. (Koss
1981: 358).

This was a kind of political concern performed in a non-partisan way, incontrast to the “independence” of traditional political journalists who were
proud of being able to choose between party factions, rather than to free69

SVENNIK HØYER

themselves from commitments to a single party (Startt 1988: 287-288).
Harmsworth’s campaigns were launched like social events and not out of
moral concern. According to Chalaby (1998: 78-7) this was part of a larger
19th century trend, which continued into the 20th century, away from political questions and ideas as a mainstay of news and comments towards a focus
less on issues, and more on people and private life. When the Daily Mail
was crusading it was for wholemeal bread, a new hat shape, better roses,
purer milk, better houses etc. (Chalaby 1998: 142).
A year after launching his popular Daily Mail in 1896, Harmsworth explained the reason for his success: “The possibility of our being able to issue eight page papers with success is entirely one of editing and sub-editing” (Brown 1985: 251), and indeed the Daily Mail was more thoroughly
rewritten than its competitors. Harmsworth demanded brief and easily digested texts from his staff. By the same token the Daily Mail also contained
a wide variety of short stories, to suit the reading abilities of a new kind ofreader buying the paper in increasing numbers. Down the avenue of ‘human interest’ stories, a wider spectre of topics was introduced: adventure,celebrities, fashion, horse racing and travel in addition to the traditional topics of political, foreign and domestic affairs. By the late 1880s most newspapers had a sports editor and they developed their own conventions of presentation (Brown 1985: 254).
The new recipe required a more active journalism and the interview
became the most useful tool for it, in addition to the telephone (Chalaby
1998: 91). A new technique of creating ‘new’ and more complex ‘events’ inthe editorial department came by collating, summarising and combining
incoming information into one story. Eliciting information from the telegraphand their own network of correspondents, newspapers were able to coverand to compare complex strings of separate events and social conditions likegeneral strikes, damaging weather etc. It was a kind of journalism, which
did not depend on things to happen in one place alone or depended onstatements to be uttered in Westminster or Whitehall. In addition many newspapers initiated events themselves by, for example, involving their readers
in competitions, and sending reporters on adventurous missions. All of thiswas very different from what newspapers were able to do in the 1870s and1880s (Brown 1985: 268-69).
Another prominent feature of ‘new popular journalism’ was a more colourful style, which emphasised a different kind of observation and new details.
Headlines and reportage became more descriptive; they gave a picture of
the person or situation rather than a literal rendering (Hutt 1973: 67). A contemporary observation by P. O’Connor (1889: 423) notes: “There was a day
when any allusion to the personal appearance, the habits, the clothes, orthe home and social life of any person would have been resented as impertinence and almost as ... indecent...” but apparently not in ‘new journalism’
by the late 1880s.

70OLD AND NEW JOURNALISM IN THE LONDON PRESS

In addition, new layout and display typography came into use thanks toinventions like the so-called ‘linecaster’ and the linotype-setting machine (Hutt
1973: 69). Bold types appeared together with stacked or decked headlines,
sub-heads and crossheads. The many-levelled headlines emphasised thestructure of the news and summarised different aspects of the story as aforerunner of the lead. Increased use of illustration also helped to highlight
key points in main stories (Lee 1976: 121, 129). Lesser news stories andcomments were departmentalised topically and given their special pages andcolumns inside. By such means editors of the tabloid press were able to clearly
differentiate between stories and give each of them added significance. But
as late as 1892 the Morning, a halfpenny paper, became the first to regularly
place news on the front page (Wiener 1988: 51). Illustrations became common only around the turn of the 19th century.

Independence, Dedication and Indifference
More than Objectivity
We have given prominence to three newspapers, which illustrate different
aspects of the relation between press and Government. The Times represented, at stages, a corruption of the Fourth Estate, all for the sake of being
better informed of government affairs, but it could also muster enough independence later to challenge Cabinets. The Pall Mall Gazette did not careso much for Government as for social issues. In order to raise social conscience and change the political agenda the paper used unconventional journalistic means and methods. The Daily Mail was concerned with making agood read, about life style topics, and stories, which could tickle the curiosities of readers. Most of this was new in British journalism and became immensely popular. The Daily Mail was not interested in governing the country or aligning itself with any particular community; in political affairs it was
rather indifferent unless the conflict ahead was of an overwhelming national
importance.
At the end of the Victorian Age ‘new journalism’, as illustrated by the Pall
Mall Gazette, was a movement away from fixed commitments to politicalparties and not so much towards balanced or detached ‘objectivity’ as inAmerica. Independence rather than objectivity were its hallmark. Much ofserious journalism was mainly to stay dedicated to communal causes, campaigns and scandals with a moral impact, which had clearly anticipatedconsequences for the political decision-making process. This independenceof choosing their positions, and being unbound by parties, but still have thefreedom to take sides supporting or attacking candidates before elections, isvery much alive today in British print journalism, in contrast to the ‘correct’and less colourful television news (Semetko 2000: 354).

71

SVENNIK HØYER

The transition to ‘new journalism’ in Britain lasted forty years, loosely
calculated, from about 1880 to 1920. This is a short period compared to thepreceding three centuries of the British press. Jean Chalaby (1998: 65) calls
it a ‘rupture’ of traditions. After a short and chaotic period from the 1880s to
1900, journalism in Britain was no longer the same kind of texts and discourse. The Times called it ‘the demise of the dignified’ (The History of The
Times, 1947: 91).
Whether we call it a rupture or a demise of traditions, ‘new journalism’ in
Britain was much influenced by the American forerunners, but not dominatedby it. The peculiar British mixture of strongly committed and independentjournalism imported most parts of the American ‘new journalism’ from the1880s onwards, except a belief in journalistic ‘objectivity’ and impartiality.
Chronologically the transition to modern journalism in London was areversal of influence from the time of colonial and federal press in America,
which for most of its news depended on sailing vessels bringing over thelatest possible London newspapers (Clark 1994). By adventurous editors andjournalists, like William Thomas Stead, influences began to travel in the otherdirection two centuries later. Stead, however, died on one of his missions to
America; he was a passenger on the Titanic on April 15th 1912.

Note
1.

72

Hansard is the record of the proceedings of the House of Commons.

Scandinavia

The Rise and Fallof The Scandinavian Party Press
Svennik Høyer

Introduction: The Concept of Party Press
According to Western ideals of press freedom media and government should
be separate centres of influence and power. The media is supposed to observe and influence the political process without being a legitimate part offormal decision-making. The freedom of expression, as a human right, wasoriginally conceived of as the possibility for individuals to enter the publicsphere freely. ‘The fourth estate’, on the other hand, refers mainly to the forum function of media, or to media as a system of outlets, where opinions
are put into action within a political setting by anyone having something
relevant to say. The media in this public sphere are free to determine whatin the public interest is to be published.
Thus the idea of a ‘fourth estate’ is corrupted when the roles of press andpolitics are interlinked under a given ideological superstructure as it was in
the Scandinavian party press. The multi-party press gave the public few
choices but politically biased newspapers, although the papers were biased
in different ideological directions.
In order to inform and evaluate events and actors independently, a nonbiased but politically engaged newspaper keeps a critical distance to the everchanging political decision-making process without having any obligations
to the interested parties. Sympathies may change in the process from one
party to another. A party newspaper, by contrast, rarely sets the political
agenda. It lets the party lead the way.
Most authors in the Scandinavia section take the party press as a given
historical frame of reference: a century of partisan newspapers dominates
media history. Since words like party press and partisan are used differently
some introductory and conceptual clarifications may be needed for the following overview. ‘Party press’ denotes interrelations of many kinds and withvariable strength of mutual bindings; the expression also has many negative
connotations. Frank Luther Mott writes about the dark ages of partisan journalism (Mott 1942: 167-180) while more recently Jeffery L. Pasley (2001)

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describes the tyranny of printers when in the late 18th century printers began to mix business with party politics. Jürgen Habermas (1962) viewed theparty press as a stage in the decline of public discourse in Europe.
In a more precise meaning a party paper is a newspaper owned, staffedand directed by the political party or by political party affiliations, which
was often the rule for the Social Democratic press in Scandinavia. Labour
newspapers in Norway between 1945 and 1989 were required to be loyal tothe party cause. If a Labour paper lost confidence in the party, this automatically implied a loss of its possessions to the national party organization.
Commitments in the bourgeois newspapers were, by contrast, often‘grundrichtungsbestimmt’ to use a German name for it. They were long-term
allegiances, without any formal strings. Arnhild Skre provides an importantdetail that tells a lot about the quality of this relationship in the 1960s. Representatives from the bourgeois parties in the run-up to the general elections in 1965 and 1969 met in secret with representatives from the political
department of the three largest Oslo newspapers to discuss informally common strategies before the election campaign started (Skre 2004: 41).
Instead of focusing single-mindedly on the media Colin Sparks (1998)
treats media and government as two opposite sets of partners in public
communication which cannot avoid interacting in many situations. Sparks
calls the relationship between the opposite partners – ‘interpenetration’.
He refers to the various components of mutual dependencies and the natureof services given between media and political institutions; Sparks suggests
a configuration of conditions that may change, bit by bit, over time in both
democratic and authoritarian regimes. Thus ‘interpenetration’ is a moreneutral and a less static concept than ‘the fourth estate’ and less tainted
than the ‘party press’.
•••
For the Scandinavian press we suggest five main periods along the temporalaxis: 1st – the original printers press with an implicit elite orientation until
the 1860s; 2nd – the mobilisation of a politically committed press; 3rd – theinstitutionalisation of a multi party press; 4th – the development of a public
service broadcasting, which influenced print journalism in many ways fromthe 1960s onwards and 5th – the commercialisation of newspaper ownershipfrom the 1980s and the slow unwinding of party commitments in the press.
The duration of these periods varies; they even overlap to some extent
both within nations and across the region. Nevertheless it is well documented
that the periodicity can be applied in all Nordic countries and that the variety of political bindings is of a similar nature in all four nations. We startwith the 2nd and 3rd periods.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

Institutionalisation of the Early Party Press
A greater part of the Scandinavian party press was formed during the last
two or three decades of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th
century. This period of political polarisation overlaps with an extraordinary
expansion of the press. Expansion occurred through the development of avariety of new technologies that made printing more efficient and newsprint
cheaper, which eventually led to lower copy prices, stronger competition
and a wider circulation. Expansion of the press was further facilitated throughdecreasing postal tariffs and an expanding transportation infrastructure ofrailways, steam ships and an extended network of roads.
The period also overlaps with the formation of political parties, first as
factions in parliament, then as nationwide organizations. Several lengthy andsevere political conflicts were vital in this process during which parliamentary opposition groups decisively wrested political control from the King,
from the nobility and from the upper echelons of the merchant class.
It is tempting to combine these two larger events and conclude that theparties utilised the expanding newspaper market to mobilise the electorate.
This interpretation is misleading as it places the means of publishing in thehands of parties. The parties did not command such resources in the beginning, and more often than not newspapers had committed themselves politically before parties were organised locally or nationwide.
Available data supports a hypothesis of combined strategies by editors
and publishers. The political conflicts in the 1880s made it increasingly difficult for newspapers to remain in the role of a spectator, so in the end only
7 out of a total of 99 Norwegian newspapers remained neutral by 1885, one
year after the liberal victory. Party labels were not chosen incidentally. Regional variations in votes for the two parties were paralleled by commitmentsin the press. The Liberal press was in a clear majority in districts that werestrongholds for the liberals, and vice versa for the Conservatives (Høyer 1968).
The Socialist press became an integral part of the party organisation fromits very beginning. Initially bourgeois newspapers were party supplements
outside their parties; later on they became important substitutes where local
party chapters were missing (Høyer 1995: 346-56). During the mid-war years
the bourgeoisie parties also relied on their press to organise elections campaigns
locally, and on editors and journalists to man their organisation (Danielsen1979).
The Social Democratic dailies in the capitals, proved so successful by theend of the 19th century that their profits could be used to subsidise the extension of the party press in the districts. This was especially true in Copenhagen where Socialdemocraten became Denmark’s largest paper by circulation 1900-1910. Also in the larger industrial cities of Scandinavia the labour press were as a rule economically profitable in the first decades of the20th century (Engblom 1996, Hadenius, Seveborg and Weibull 1970, Thomsen
1972: 178-86, Høyer 1978, 1995).

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The bourgeois press perceived their Socialist competitors as a serious
challenge, which encouraged their parties to engage in newspapers that were
purely politically motivated. The ensuing political differentiation of the press
became most expressed in Denmark, where the Four Dailies system appearedin the larger urban centres from the 1880s with one newspaper for each of
the four major parties. The system survived until the 1950s (Niels Thomsen
1972: 166-71).
As copy prices fell and the market expanded, new social groups became
available as a public for establishing newspapers, which tended to appeal
to members of these social layers. The evolving stratification of the readership market had clear political overtones. Päiviö Tommila and Raimo
Salokangas conducted a detailed study of this gradual segmentation of themarket; they identified altogether 16 categories of newspaper readership
between 1800 and 1950. Differentiation of the Finnish press started before
1820 with newspapers aimed exclusively at the Swedish speaking educatedupper class; only from the 1830s were papers produced for the Finnish speaking educated class and landowners. Newspaper entrepreneurs then increasingly appealed to the middle-class from the 1860s and the working class fromthe 1890s onwards. Small holders gained a press dealing with their interestsfrom around 1900. Among the last groups to have newspapers covering topicsof their interest were the population in peripheral districts from the 1920s(Tommila 1988: 490, Salokangas 2001).
•••
The first national and apolitical organisations for journalists in Norway were
founded in 1883 during the most bitter of political conflicts. Parliament was
the first regular meeting ground for reporters and it apparently served as acatalyst for further professional and social contacts. Nine years later two
political press associations, one conservative and the other liberal, replaced
the national union. These organisations were often used actively to formalise mutual representation between parties and their press. Sometimes gentlemen of the press were awarded a place in Parliament in return for a competent service to the party. Indeed close to 10 per cent of representatives in
the Norwegian Parliament in 1909 had a background in journalism or innewspaper management while 22 per cent of representatives in 1965 had asimilar background (Høyer 1968: 107).
A non-political association for both journalists and editors was formed again
in 1910. This organisation could not serve as an effective professional forum
for journalists partly because of the political discord within the organisationand partly because of different opinions between editors and journalist. The
first wage contract for journalists was only negotiated in 1938, and the National Union of Journalists was founded in 1946 (Ottosen: 1996). Journalists

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESSin Sweden were organised in 1901, but not until the 1950s did the organisation obtain a wage contract with owners (Windahl and Rosengren 1976).
•••
In 1920 the scene suddenly shifted, as the parties became major actors in
the newspaper industry. Business cycles suddenly turned downward in 1920
and the majority of newspapers faced ruin (Danielsen 1979). The newspaper industry did not generate enough capital to sustain the number of newspapers that was actually published during the inter-war period. The bourgeois parties, confronted with rising popularity for socialist parties and thenear annihilation of a majority of their co-opted newspapers, were willingto supply subsidies as well as inviting preferential advertising from the business world. New bourgeoisie papers were started, and an old one rescued,by a combination of local capital and national planning. The socialist papers by contrast had to mobilise the loyalty, the diligence and sometimes
the money of their party members to survive (Høyer 1995: 330-45).

Interpenetrations between Partyand Press in the 1960s and 1970s
In this section we shall follow some manifestations of interpenetration
between party and press during the 1960s and 1970s through the politicalactivities of editors and journalists as well as through their expressed opinions in a number of surveys.
Party newspapers were still the rule during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Party dailies represented 92 percent of the total number of newspapers inDenmark in 1968, 57 percent in Finland in 1970, 60 percent in Norway in1972 and 92 percent of dailies in Sweden in 1975 (Salokangas 1999: 95, NOU
1992: 14 p. 38, SOU 1975: 79 p. 65). Definitions of ‘newspapers’, ‘dailies’
and the nature of party attachments may differ somewhat in these figures,
but the general impression for the early 1970s is a clearly dominant multiparty press, in number of titles and even more in percent of total circulation.
The dealings between parties and their press existed in an assortment oflong forgotten documents. Mutual understandings were more prevalent inwhat may be named as a political and oral culture among journalists. Announcements of vacancies or of new positions sometimes mentioned the party
orientation of the newspaper; implicitly or explicitly political loyalty was often
requested as a condition for being appointed (Høyer and Ihlen 1998: 99).
Most journalists knew anyway to which party the different newspapers belonged. This system restricted career choices but created politically harmo-

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nious editorial staffs; we found that the most politically deviant journalists
worked in the sports department (Høyer 1979: 78-100).
The party culture in the press contradicted ideals of autonomy and integrity. Similar contradictions could also be traced in survey responses. Few
editors admitted that they served the party when asked by Kai Kronvall (1971),
for the most decisive qualifications for their own appointments: 60 percent
of Swedish editors-in-chief considered journalistic experience the decisive
qualification, only 3 percent mentioned political experience, while an additional 19 percent mentioned political experience combined with other qualifications. A survey in 1974 of Norwegian newspaper journalists and editors
found that 74 percent of respondents agreed that journalists must be independent of political parties. A slightly smaller share of 62 percent thought
journalists must be loyal to the political policy of their newspaper. Many
editors and journalists apparently meant that they could both be professionally independent and loyal to the party of their newspaper when needed.
Table 1 below gives more information from the same survey on politicalactivities among Norwegian journalists, specified by their editorial status andthe party commitment of their newspaper.1
Table 1.

Political Activity among Norwegian Editors and Journalists 1974
(percentages)

Political Position
by Members of
the Press

Party
Commitmentof newspaper

Member of Municipal Council Socialist

Office in PoliticalParty

Member of a Political Party

Editors

Sub-Editors

Journalists

40

32

12

Bourgeois

26

6

9

Socialist

83

82

51

Bourgeois

59

32

28
75

Socialist

93

95

Bourgeois

74

54

46

N=100%

Socialist

35

38

257

N=100%

Bourgeois

76

68

461

Source: Høyer and Lorentzen 1975 : 296, Table 7.

The data in Table 1 clearly shows that political activity increases with editorial responsibilities. Further cross tabulations demonstrated that the overlap
between the party label of newspapers and the political sympathies of newsmen increased with the number of years of professional experience, by their
specialisation and as they rose in the editorial hierarchy. A more recent survey revealed that political experience increased from 35 percent among theyounger reporters (20 to 34 years old) to 62 percent among the older ones
(more than 55 years old), which reveals an emerging generation gap (Allern
2001: 126).

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

Comparisons to Sweden and Holland confirm the high political activity
among Norwegian editors in the 1970s. Kronvall (1971) found that 26 percent of editors in the party press had held offices within the national party
and that 54 percent had party assignments on the regional or local level.
Kempers and Wieten (1976) found that 26 percent of Dutch journalists weremembers of a political party (compared to 19 percent for the Dutch electorate) in the 1970s.
The basically high level of participation among Norwegian journalists
percolated upwards in the political system. Seven percent of members of
Parliament in the post-war period have been recruited directly from the press,
in addition to many other representatives more loosely attached to the press.
A study of political elites from 1962 to 1967 revealed journalists as one ofthree professional groups most frequently recruited to elite positions.
The focal point of newspaper opinions is of course the editorial. Høyer(1964), using editorials as a measuring stick for political allegiance in 9 party
newspapers, counted editorials with explicit statements supporting their party
or attacking political adversaries during a month before three general elections in the 1950s. The main hypothesis was that market leaders in various
cities were less prone to agitate politically on behalf of their party than theircompetitors with a politically more homogeneous readership. The hypothesis
was confirmed.
Another finding in this study was a marked drop in the frequency of party
dedicated editorials during the 1950s. Høyer extrapolated this trend andpredicted the decline and possible death of the institution of a party press
within a decade. Arnhild Skre (2004) in turn investigated the prediction indetail by studying the editorials of three Oslo-papers during the week aheadof three general elections from 1957 to 1973. She found few if any confirmations. The party press was still going strong in 1973 (Skre 2004), in Norway as in Sweden.

Confidantes and Adversaries
Authorities in Scandinavia, as in the US, emphasise openness towards media
as a matter of law (Freedom of Information Act) and of principles(Tryckfrihetsförordningen). Even if the administrations are not always law
abiding in this respect, journalists can demand access when and where theyknow about certain information inputs, or outputs, to and from the administration whereas information circulating within administrations are in principle closed to outsiders. The privilege of governments to conceal important information is, by contrast, favoured by more centralised administrations
as in France, Germany and in the UK where the Official Secrets Act efficiently protects Whitehall from normal journalistic surveillance (SeymourUre 1974, Galnoor 1976, Cockerell, et. al. 1984).

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Relations between politicians and journalists are normally fluid and informal in present-day Scandinavia. 56 percent of the respondents in a Danish survey among members of the parliamentary press corps from 1975
deemed a good relationship with the politicians to be a necessary conditionof their work in the Parliament and while 71 percent accepted secrecy by
the politicians as a natural part of certain phases in the decision-making
process, 80 percent of political reporters, totally or partly denied any rightfor the politicians to influence the agenda of mass media (Thulstrup 1975).
This ambivalence of journalists acting as fellow conspirators and sometimes as adversaries seems to have been a natural part of the party press in
the 1970s. A Swedish survey among journalists conducted in the autumn of1973 underscored the investigative and public service role of the press: 92
percent of the respondents considered control of the local government essential to their newspaper, while 76 percent agreed that the press should bea channel of unbiased political information (Fjæstad and Holmlöv 1976). Local
politicians, however, in a similar survey revealed an all but unanimous discontent with the treatment given them by newspapers representing their rival
parties, whilst being favourable to the publicity given them by their own
press (SOU 1975:78. p. 154).
If this was taken as a statement on media performance, the politicians reported biased journalism as a general rule, which Lennart Weibull (1975) confirmed in a comprehensive content analysis. By the mid 1970s there was stilla clear party bias in the selection of news both in the Social Democratic and
the Bourgeois press, irrespective of local competition (Lennart Weibull 1975).

A Wider View on ‘Objectivity’
Emanating from Broadcasting
Public broadcasting has had a long and venerated tradition of supporting thegovernment and administration and not expressing or instigating any conflict.
Newspapers viewed broadcasting news as a dangerous competitor from the
beginning (Dahl 1975, Halse 2001). The first newscast of the day was restricted
to come on air only after the evening papers had come on the street at 7 o’clock
p.m. Most of the content in Scandinavian radio newscasts originated from thenational news bureaus that in turn were owned by the press.
Politics in the early years of radio news was regarded as a potential sourceof unrest, comparable to the political role of the opposition press. Broadcasting management was also anxious to keep an image of uncontroversial
enlightenment. The programme director of the Finnish broadcasting(Yleisradio) gave a speech as late as 1960 in which he laid down some rules
for “What one cannot say on the radio”: Radio must not undermine the foundations of lawful society … Criticism was permitted but only in a positivevein … Criticism of the authorities and public institutions was to be avoided

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

even in humorous contexts (Salokangas 1996: 115, 149). But winds of change
were blowing both from outside and inside Scandinavia.
Until the advent of a mass television audience, deferential interviews served
mainly as a platform in BBC from which politicians could explain and defend
their points of view, maintains Brian McNair (2000). In the mid 1950s this stylechanged. The more interrogatory interview now came to the fore in the BBC
when facing competition from the more self-consciously populist ITV.
Reporters in Scandinavia also came to distrust the idea of ‘objectivity’ innews, the old hallmark of public service broadcasting, including passive
observations of events ‘produced’ by elite decision-makers. After a long andheated debate of policies in Finnish broadcasting, the norms for proper
conduct by reporters were changed in the direction of investigative journalism. It was stated in the 1967 preamble of the company’s programme rules
that: “Programmes should air different and even contradictory views of life
and the world, but the formation of views is not the task of Yleisradio (Finnish public service broadcasting) but that of the members of society as individuals” (Salokangas 1996: 149).
One specific event that obviously contributed strongly to the fall of theparty press was the rise of television as a dominating channel for news in
the mid-1960s. Half of the adult population on an average day saw the televised newscasts either on the one national channel in Denmark and Norway or on the two public service channels in Sweden. This also implied thatevery reader had seen a quite fair and balanced reporting of domestic politics on television by the time they read their (party) newspaper. Part of thispicture was also a new and radical sense of professionalism among journalists. They tried to redefine their role in current affairs reporting, which provoked many confrontations with the political establishment. This “uproar” isgraphically described in Norway by Hans Fredrik Dahl and Henrik G.
Bastiansen (1999: 411-524) in their monograph of the Norwegian Broadcasting
Company 1945-1981.
At the heart of the professional discussion among Scandinavian broadcasters during the 1970s was the right of reporters to go outside elite circles
in their search for news and to be openly critical and, if necessary, controversial. ‘Objectivity’ in this context became an act of balancing establishedpolitical doctrines with alternatives not easily detected by routine reporting.
The more expressed political role of public broadcasting was strongly debated by the press, which feared that television should become the politically most influential mass medium, which they of course accurately anticipated (Bastiansen 2004).
There were differences of opinions between parties in the 1960s and early
1970s as to how much political programmes in television should be regulated, especially before elections. No party was willing to give broadcastinga free reign in these matters (Bastiansen 2001), while the more basic characteristics of ‘neutralism’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ were discussed in semipublic forums and in closed seminars within media organisations.

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Another possible source of unrest grew with the sharply increased recruitment in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, which came with the advent of
television and the increase in station time in radio. The widened scope ofactivities and the many new positions needed to be filled implied a morelax corporate control (Engblom 1998). This opened journalism up for many
fresh candidates, right out of universities and with student’s unrest overconservative teaching, eager for more Marxism in social sciences and humanities, and with protests against the Viet Nam War fresh in their minds.
Jörgen Westerståhl and Folke Johanson found in their comprehensive andunique content analysis of Swedish media in six cross sections between 1912
and 1972 that Public Service broadcasting in Sweden moved in stages towards a critical and independent journalism. Public broadcasting moved froman ideology of being neutral and educational in a rather paternalistic manner within the frames of establishment consensus to a balanced, neutral anduncontroversial media ideology, and further to one of investigative journalism from the middle of the 1960s. The amount of stories with a critical bias
grew in the process and the scope of news reporting expanded topically.
Clearly broadcasters used news criteria more self-consciously. But their selection of critical news did not keep them closer to trends in society as documented in official statistics. When unemployment was, for example at its
height in this period, reporting on unemployment was at it’s lowest in the
media (Westerståhl and Johansson 1985).
The proportion of critical news-stories increased from almost zero in the
1930s and 1940s to almost a third of all stories in the early 1980s. Broadcast
journalists from the beginning of the 1960s increasingly asked questions in
an interrogatory manner, especially with politicians, but also with information sources from other sectors of society. The focus of interest was changed
from person-oriented events to environmental and social problems. Moresignificantly, new angles were given to traditional topics. Military defence
was, for example, presented as public expenses on defence, the productionand export of Swedish weapons, the living standards of conscripts etc. International conflicts and military defence in a cold war perspective was rarely
mentioned. As a result of these many changes media consciously began toset priorities for public attention trying to influence the political agenda, rather
than the other way around.
Westerståhl and Johansson’s description of the changing role of reporters
corresponds closely with the broader analysis of the current affairs programming in the Swedish Broadcasting, which Monika Djerf-Pierre and Lennart
Weibull published in 2001 (Djerf-Pierre and Weibull 2001). They distinguishfour periods: the paternalistic enlightenment (1925-1945), public service
information and consensus-building (1945-1965), the idea of broadcasting
as a ‘fourth estate’ using confrontations and polarisation as journalistic means(1965-1985), and finally the interpreting and investigating journalist also
playing the role of a public bard, beginning around 1985, when the publicbroadcasting monopoly was broken.

84THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

These epochs, Monika Djerf-Pierre and Lennart Weibull insist, do not follow
a linear progression. Competition and the perceived need to maximise ratingsintervened with the objectives of Public Service broadcasting. The more recent
commercially inspired orientation is, in some respects, more similar to theideal of a correct information disseminator from the late fifties and early sixties, than to the period of investigative journalism, which lies in between.
The same trend was observed in Norway, most typically in political programmes. From serving as platforms for politicians in the 1950s, broadcasting became a political arena in the 1960s. From the 1970s broadcasting journalists also became actors or stage managers in political debates, whichsometimes could develop into happenings (Bjørklund 1991: 291). Nowhere
was the conflict over the legitimate role of journalists more expressed thanin election programmes. In the 1970s parties could no longer agree over theformat of election programmes, and journalists took over the initiative. From
being only moderators for candidates in the 1950s, which met with prepared
manuscripts, broadcast journalists, in the style of talk shows, selected participants and themes, and took charge of turn taking and the dramaturgy ofthe discussion in 2001 (Allern 2004).
Yes we run the show. We decide who shall participate and what to discuss.
And so what – who else shall decide – the politicians and their spin doctors?
(Quoted from Allern 2004: 141).

The statement was given by the head of the political department in the Norwegian nation-wide commercial channel TV2, in a debate in the Oslo Journalist Association, summing up the experiences of the 2001 general election
campaign. Her self-assurance also reflects another more basic turn taking;namely that the newspapers had become accustomed to regarding the main
TV programmes as the most important events in the campaign.

The Party Press Fades Away
No one has set a date or even a year for when the party press disappeared.
By 1995 only 30 percent of the Finnish language press in Finland had formal
party ties (Salokangas 1999: 97). In Norway 39 percent of newspapers in 1990
were classified as belonging to the ‘political’ press, but in 1999 only one newspaper declared a party attachment or party commitment in its preamble (NOU
2000, p. 79). In Sweden the leading broadsheet (morning) paper Dagens Nyheter
had declared itself independent in 1974. Similar vaguely formulated commitments could be found all over Scandinavia: ‘politically independent’ were thekey words under the frontispiece of newspapers at the end of the 1990s. Thiswas for the regular news press; all nationally circulated evening tabloids had
been either apolitical or politically ambivalent for most of the post-war period.

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SVENNIK HØYER

Several explanations have been given for the supposed death of the multiparty press. It appears that an accumulation of conditions were interacting withina short period – the introduction of new media, an increased sense of professionalism among journalists, concentration in the broadsheet market and thesuccess of apolitical tabloids. Some of these conditions have only recently been
analysed.
•••
An awakening professional self-consciousness became manifest among print
journalists in 1968. The union of Norwegian journalists in their tariff negotiations demanded to be consulted whenever publishers planned to appoint
new editors, or promote journalists to sub-editors. The demand was repeatedin 1972, 1976, and in 1980. The journalists also asked to be consulted whennewspapers planned to redesign or reorganise content and layout. These
consultations were termed ‘internal’ or ‘editorial’ democracy. Publishers andeditors retorted that such demands would undermine the right of owners tocontrol the long-term philosophy of their newspapers; a principle that the
party press was based on.2 Journalists insisted and were willing to abstain
from wage increases for a period, in return for more control over their working
environment. By 1980 they won the right to be consulted (NOU 1982:32,
209-212). Similar discussions were going on all over Western Europe at about
the same time (Høyer, Hadenius and Weibull 1975).
•••
The newspaper economy underwent great changes during this period, inthe readership market as well as through a commercialisation of newspaperownership, fuelled by a rapidly expanding advertising market from the 1960s,
which skewed the income base. Market leaders among newspapers took thelion’s share of the advertising market, out of proportion of their share of thereadership market. Reinvesting their profits, the market leaders, mostly bourgeois newspapers, were able to expand more rapidly in circulation than theircompetitors. This was called the ‘circulation spiral’ (Furhoff 1967). In theprocess the political composition of party press readers was also seriously
skewed: in 1969 45 percent of the Norwegian audience read only bourgeois
newspapers versus 15 percent for the Labour press, a quarter of Labour votersread only bourgeois newspapers, while only 3 percent of bourgeois voterswere confined to labour newspapers alone (NOS A 350, 1970).
The modern tabloid developed in Denmark from 1904, in Sweden from1944 and in Norway from 1952. In Sweden and Norway the tabloids wereless affected by concentration from the 1950s because they operated in a
new and expanding market segment, which eventually comprised about aquarter of total circulation.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESSAs concentration in the reader market continued it was not a viable businessproposition anymore to continue as party newspapers. The minimum numberof readers required to return a profit became larger than any existing localgroup of party supporters. On the other hand, with a growing monopolisation of local markets there were fewer incentives to change old habits.
The same concentration was observed in several European democracies.
The readership market for broadsheets saturated gradually but slowly fromthe 1950s. This spelt a decrease in the variety of newspapers locally, and a
growing political heterogeneity of the readership for the surviving newspapers. This eventually inspired a politically more flexible and open attitudein journalism (Høyer, Hadenius and Weibull 1975).
•••
Three types of ownership dominated in the Scandinavian press in the 1970s:
1) Private ownership through the descendants of old printer families, who
owned some of the largest newspapers; 2) limited companies that controlled the rest of the privately owned press and 3) party ownership that was
dominant in the social-democratic press. The activity of conglomerates became prevalent from the early 1980s when a few companies began to invest
in the communication sector generally buying up local market leaders in thenewspaper industry, before expanding to international acquisitions. The dawnof the new millennia saw 75 out of 223 Norwegian newspapers and 55 percent
of total newspaper circulation controlled by three of the largest Norwegian
conglomerates (Østbye 2001: 241).
Ownership became commercialised. Multimedia conglomerates re-organised the newspapers and put them back in the market. This meant that success in publishing was no longer measured in political influence but by the
returns on capital investments. Profits from newspapers were transferred toother communication sectors. Profit was not necessarily reinvested in thenewspaper itself, which was the traditional rule. There was no room for party
committed newspapers in such business calculations. If the logic of thenewspaper market had weakened the concept of a party press, the newownership killed it.

New Rules for Interpenetrations
There is still some discussion as to whether the party press still exists. Theinterpenetration between parties and press nowadays has certainly changed
in character. Relations today are mostly delimited to normal routines of information seeking and information-giving where participants all have theirown business to mind and where services are exchanged and implicitly

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SVENNIK HØYER

negotiated on the basis of neutral news criteria. Editors are not active anymore
in politics and journalists have made it a rule to stay outside parties and interest
organisations.
Lennart Weibull nevertheless (2000: 102) asserts that a majority of Swedish newspapers still declare, more or less clearly, some sort of political commitments in their editorials but not in their news content. Lars Nord (2001)
in an analysis of the press in Sweden during the 1990s, however, finds thatnewspapers rarely took a clear-cut stand in favour of any party. When theeditorials deal with parties, as they often do, the parties are described aspolitical actors in a play where journalists are onlookers. Comments are usually addressed to recent events and issues and not to overarching ideologies. However, during the closing weeks of the election campaigns in 1998,
42 percent of newspaper editorials were found to deviate from this pattern;they supported fully or in part their old political friends.
Indeed, as Nord (2001) argues, some of the old networks are still active
in a number of covert ways. Party agencies continue to distribute political
articles of which some are reprinted verbatim by a few smaller newspapers.
There are telephone conferences at which the party news services, mainly
from the Social Democrats and the Centre (Agrarian) party, comment on recent
political events. There are meetings between editors working within a common “sphere” of political interests, and also those exclusive meetings in
Stockholm where party leaders, leading politicians or power players in industry, business and military defence explain their long term policies “offthe record” to editors and leading commentators and are then open for questioning. None of this is printed or broadcasted.
Anker Brink Lund (2002) depicts different scenes and games of interpenetration between politicians and journalists in the Danish parliament(Folketing). It is a play in two arenas: in investigative and in routine political journalism respectively.
Investigative journalism can be looked at as a challenge to the establishment in the form of scrutinising reports, often with intended political repercussions, initiated by the media organisation, but often with unpredictableconsequences. Only a few concrete events and named administrative units,
firms or persons are regularly involved as objects of reportage of this ‘focusjournalism’ as it is called in Danish.
The routine reporting of the national political decision-making process
has its centre in the Danish Folketing (parliament) – or more exactly in theparliamentary press corps. The focus rests on government business. Ministers are regularly invited to attend meetings with the press corps and as arule are given national attention in important cases, while backbenchers haveless access. In order to share some attention ordinary members of parliament must provide newsworthy information, e.g. on new or faltering alliances for pending laws.
In their fight for publicity politicians are both competitors and team players with journalists in a game of uncertain outcomes. There is little overlap

88THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

between the agenda of the parliament and the agenda of media, but there
are still possibilities both for politicians and journalists to influence these
agendas.
By contrast, the relations between journalists and representatives weremore deferential in the 1960s, as described by a veteran member of the press
corps in the Norwegian Parliament Olav Maaland: “the press serves as anintegrated part of the parliamentary system” (Maaland 1965: 222). It takes atleast one year of mute observations by a freshman reporter to detect the
unwritten rules, he observed, and it takes several more years to have friendly
relationships with representatives: “Be respectful and keep silent until you
are spoken to” was Maaland’s advice for the neophyte (Maaland 1965: 223).
The reversal of roles between politicians and journalists was reflected in asurvey of Members of the Norwegian Parliament thirty years later in 1995:
54 percent agreed completely and 41 percent agreed partly that media stories too often influence the setting of the political agenda (Allern 2001: 262).

Party-press Interpenetrations and Cultural Diffusion
In this chapter I have taken as my point of departure the many roots, which
the ideals of journalism have – culturally, economically and politically. Politics in combination with economics can elucidate the development of partypress interpenetrations. We need this combination of approaches to explain
the beginnings and perseverance of party attachments in both privately
operated and politically organised newspapers throughout Scandinavia. Likewise the fall of the party press was both commercially and politically motivated. In the end politics was the weaker part, both as a psychologicalmotivation and as an organisational support. Party politics was clearly nolonger a good business for owners, while plain trustworthy news and investigative journalism eventually became prime professional values for journalists, free of party commitments.
Technological innovations pass national borders more easily than thecultural, as we noticed in the introduction to this book. It took more thanhalf a century for the news paradigm to pass from the US to Scandinavia,
even if the beginning had many similar traits. The rising circulation and theprospect for a mass press, following from improved printing methods andcheap newsprint made of pulp, influenced journalism from the mid 19th
century in all five countries, but somewhat differently, depending on thehistorical situation.
Parallel developments are depicted both in the US and in Scandinavian
between the 1880s and 1920. The curves for newspaper consumption arequite similar in shape and chronology in the US, in Finland, Denmark and
Norway. Total circulation started to rise from the 1880s, exponentially aroundthe turn of the century, and then levelled out or dropped in 1920 (DeFleur,89

SVENNIK HØYER

1970: 21; Høyer 1968: 92; Thomsen 1972: 172; Tommila & Salokangas 2001:
25). But if similar in technology and circulation, the political situation wasquite different during most of the 19th century. As a result: while the American press gradually became more politically independent towards the endof the 19th century, a party press was borne in Scandinavia, much as a resultof the same expansion in circulation and competition.
The Scandinavian countries had a relatively autocratic political tradition
until the last three decades of the 19th century while the American tradition
was based on freedom of speech. Party organisations in Scandinavia began
to rise only towards the end of the 19th century, whereas they had been
securely entrenched in American public life for many decades at that time.
The party dependent press in America was the result of a low level of capitalisation in the newspaper industry, as was to become the case in Scandinavia. Presidents and Governors controlled much of the US press politicallyby giving either preferential printing contract of government documents tofriendly printers or subsidises and inside information to cooperating editors
out of contact with a professional milieu (Kaplan 2002, Dicken-Garcia 1989).
In Scandinavia the Kings more or less openly subsidised friendly publications or had editors on their pay roll.
State affairs were the privilege of Kings and their courts to discuss until
the mid-19th century. To form factions or political groups was immoral if notillegal for most of the century in Scandinavia. Thus a party commitment in
the 1870s and 1880s had quite a different meaning compared to the US.
Making a party commitment was not an act of surrender to politicians, on
the contrary, for editors it was a sign of independence. It authorised them todeal with the most important affairs of the nation on behalf of the majorityof their followers among the readership. A party committed press initiated a
democratic discourse.
In the US the political development took another turn. Richard Kaplan(2002) argues, as many have argued before him, that objectivity as a journalistic tenet in the American press was inspired by economic progress inthe newspaper industry from the 1880s. Kaplan, however, insists that objectivity in political journalism became dominant only in combination with atransformation of public life in the 1890s when the role of political parties
waned.
By way of a conclusion: Changes in both political and economic conditions were essential ingredients of similar market strategies of newspapers
in Scandinavia as well as in the US. But while the role of parties waned in
US public life, the press became a vital part in the forming of a party systemand of parliamentarism in Scandinavia. The differences in the national histories, and especially in the role of political parties, are the key to defining
the initial differences in the styles of journalism that lasted for many decades.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SCANDINAV I A N P A R TY PRESS

Notes
1.

2.

Our data about the political activities and opinions of journalists and editors in the press
has been derived from a postal survey addressed to members of the National Union of
Journalists and the Norwegian Editors Association in the spring of 1974. The return rate
was almost exactly 70 percent resulting in 1300 interviews. Tests of the representative
character of our data showed deviations of up to 3 percent on known variables from
more comprehensive databases. See Pål E. Lorenzen and Svennik Høyer (1976).
This is formalized in an agreement between the association of editors and publishers;
that publishers have the right to decide the basic philosophy (or party alignment) of thenewspaper, while the editor is free to interpret this philosophy without daily interference.

91News Paradigms, Political Power andCultural Contexts in 20th Century Sweden
Jan Ekecrantz

Introduction: What Causes What?
What historical and structural conditions can explain the rise of the “newsparadigm”? Is there a paradigm in the first place and, if so, how should it bespecified in terms of form and content? This chapter starts from the assumptionthat both exogenous and endogenous factors are at work here. That is, theparadigm, first loosely conceived of here as news as we know it in the modern
Western world, has diffused across space and time, but throughout it has
also been strongly conditioned (as to form and content) by national, historical,
structural and other contexts. The idea here is to elaborate on this assumption and then qualify it by taking a look into a concrete national context.
I will argue for multi-contextual approaches and for a distinction between
long-term and short-term perspectives, since they actualise different typesof explanations. If there is such a thing as a universal modernization road,there are also many partings of ways. I will provide some historical examples in order to substantiate the multi-contextual approach and to move further
away from not only a developmentalist, but also a universalistic modernization perspective. I have pursued this line of reasoning elsewhere, criticizing
the idea of a global convergence of news cultures resulting from the ubiquity of so-called global media. There is enough evidence around of news
(also TV) being couched in national outlooks (‘domesticated’ or ‘nationalized’). Further, print journalism that is in focus here still has an importantrole in setting national news agendas. CNN prides itself on representing“history in the making”, but it is only on rare occasions and then for brief
moments that global broadcasting cuts through all the filters set up by national media (Perlmutter 1998).
The bulk of the chapter is a summary overview of the results of a series ofstudies, all of them aiming at a comprehensive understanding of the complex
and dynamic relationships between news media and the rest of Swedish society. One overall conclusion is that, given a general modernization impetus
early in the 20th century, the concrete national context intervened strongly in

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the shaping of both the forms and contents of news – and continued to do sothroughout the century. This is not only a matter of local modifications of auniversal process (towards some higher stages of journalism), but part of cyclically appearing tensions between the informational and politicised modesof news. More speculatively the question is raised about the fate of the news
paradigm in what has come to be called the post-journalist age, in which critics consider news as less reality-driven than market-driven.
Journalism is by definition based on the idea of the value of a daily inputof news in our lives. ‘Le journal’, the daily report of the relevant events ofthe day had its origin in the merchant’s office (Carey 1989). ‘Le quotidien’,
French for the everyday, the contemporary and the newspaper is another wordthat helps us trace the origins of the idea of the value of daily news (Terdiman1985). News, as such, is of course of a much older date than both the newspaper and the idea of the indispensability of everyday news about the world1,
but the modern “news paradigm” (facticity, event-orientation, objectivism andconcomitant formats, styles and sub-genres) is of a still later date. It cameinto being with matured capitalism in the second half the 19th century, converting the daily (later hourly and even continuously) transmitted information to large audiences into a commodity, as part and parcel of European
modernity (Hartley 1996).
A mix of more specific and well-known explanations of the rise of news
has been offered, based on factors such as technological or infra-structural
innovations like the railway, the telegraph, introducing the telegraphic text,
and the camera, contributing to the idea of ‘objectivity’, historical events, notleast wars like Crimea and the American Civil War, economic conditions likethe rise of the mass market, business needs (the stock exchange). Demographic and sociological explanations have also been suggested, like population growth during the 19th century (Peckham 1962), the rise of a pettybourgeoisie and a working class, urbanization, etc. The nation-based state
and the homogenous language region (Innis 1951) are other sociologicalcircumstances often mentioned. In Sweden, for instance, the national news
agency was first set up in the foreign ministry.2
These conditions were internally related and the press and its news andadvertisements have often been seen as integral parts of a general “modernization” process, which took about the same form everywhere throughout the Western world. This idea of a uni-linear and unidirectional development does not preclude an uneven development because all these preconditions are not met at the same time “everywhere”. This applies to both infrastructures and formats of news journalism. The press photo is a case inpoint. A combination of technical and demographic conditions (the many
immigrants) triggered its appearance in the New York City newspapers of
the early 20th century (Schudson 1978).
History offers many examples of new technologies, formats and genres
not being adopted in society just because they exist somewhere. HistorianPeter Burke comments on the historically variable civilizational shifts, where,94NEWS PARADIGMS, POLITICAL POWER AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS IN 20 TH
CENTURY SWEDEN

for instance, the introduction of printing was delayed by a couple of hundred years in Russia. Once the first printing house was set up, massive production of print would still take a long time (Briggs & Burke, 2002). The
same tsarist country also long resisted the (Western) conception of news
(Palmer 1998). We have thus to take into consideration the whole complex
of conditions, technological, economic, political, social, and cultural.
Richard Terdiman has described the close relationship between the riseof news and factors related to class, economy and markets. Newspapers havefrom the very beginning created their markets by identifying themselves witheveryday life and by propagating commercialism. Tellingly, the word ‘article’ stands for both a written piece in a newspaper and a merchandize advertised next to the article. Together they make up the newspaper page, theadvertised commodities and the journalistic articles in between them. Thus,
the newspaper was really the first modern consumption object, to be disposed of when consumed, a widely distributed specimen of the mentalitythat it propagated in its pages. By selling a new(s) consciousness it first of
all sold itself (Terdiman 1985, Carey 1989). The standardization of its products was to follow, as the “routinization of the unexpected” in the words ofGaye Tuchman. It is obvious that the growth of modern media and media
forms is closely connected to the rise of modern capitalistic economies, but
this is not the whole truth. There are also the political and cultural determinants, as a few historical examples will demonstrate.

Inconclusive Histories
The number of newspapers or of copies (total paper consumption) is often
used as an indicator of modernization – like hospital beds, cars and telephones.
This may be an adequate measure of the presence of modern media in societies, perhaps also of the presence of modern journalism, but this latter correspondence is far from self-evident.3 Another complication with the correlation
between media growth and general modernization is that it may be valid in
the long historical (many centuries) perspective. In the shorter term it is obvious that the number of periodical publications or circulation figures also depend, sometimes drastically, on collective information or propaganda needs
in extremely uncertain and unpredictable historical situations.
Consider for instance the following figures from the time of the French
Revolution. In the decade before 1787 the average number of pamphlets
published annually in France was 26. From then on a dramatic increase followed, culminating with 3,305 printed pamphlets in the revolutionary year
1789. Ten years later this figure was down on the 1787 level, a mere 211
pamphlets (Hartley 1996: 115). Let us compare this with similar figures fromthe early 20th century Estonia, showing the impact of the Russian Revolution
around 1905. In the years before 1906 the number of periodicals swayed95

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between 27 and 38. In 1906 and 1907 the figures were 100 and 112. Afterthat the number stabilized at 70-80 periodicals for the years to come. In 191314 there followed “a new increase in press publications because of the tense
political atmosphere prior to World War I” (Lauk 1990: 12). A similar situation
was at hand in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia when, around 1990, boththe number of outlets and total circulation figures increased sharply. Then,in the 1990s many people turned away from politics and the average circulation of national newspapers dropped from 2.58 million to a mere 118,000(Vartanova 2004: 192). Television, now in almost every Russian household,or the Internet (accessed by some 8% of the population) alone cannot explain this drastic decline in newspaper reading.
There are innumerable examples of rapid changes – at the same timequantitative and qualitative. In Spain a media explosion reminiscent of theFrench Revolution, occurred in the 1930s, in the short-lived 2nd Republic,
between Rivera’s dictatorship and the Civil War (1931-36). The 2nd Republic
saw 2,000 new periodical publications. It was at the same time a quantitative leap and a qualitative shift: an outburst of modern journalism, news,
tabloids, entertainment, sports, etc. It was an emancipatory tabloidization,
breaking with the non-informational “journalism” of the dictatorship years(Ekecrantz 1991). Like Weimar in the 1920s, it was an example of outburstsof collective action in a popular public sphere, or the civil society, more orless independently of the level of technological development, but as in thecase of the Spanish republic, quickly materializing the unrealised potentials
of new newspaper technology and form. Another upsurge occurred after thedeath of Franco in 1975, but in a totally different media technological situation:
visualized media and a personalized, scandalizing and semi-pornographic
journalism, reminiscent of the media landscape in Estonia around 1990.
Latin America provides us with examples of a different kind: technology
was let free within the political confines of authoritarian regimes. Several ofthese regimes in the post-War decades did not (however harsh the political
censorship) close off their countries from international communications (likecommercial TV), nor did they obstruct technical changes in the media(Waisbord 2000). When these regimes were gone advanced media systems
were already in place in terms of technical level and media genres.
Other historical examples show that societal conditions may spark technological breakthroughs. Russia and the Baltic countries in the late 1980s
and early 1990s would be other cases of what may sometimes be a temporary mismatch between communication forms and social realities, sometimes
a dramatic and sudden catching up. In situations as these real media pluralism or anarchy may occur temporarily without the presence of modern media.
St. Petersburg towards the late 1980s offers a good example, as demonstrated
by Tamara Krekola in a study based on unique archival materials, a multitude of short-lived papers appearing in the streets (Krekola 2000).
All this illustrates my point that national political cultures, transformations
and major events co-determine media developments generally and with that96NEWS PARADIGMS, POLITICAL POWER AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS IN 20 TH
CENTURY SWEDEN

the transformation of journalistic forms. In times of intensified political struggles or social upheaval the activity in society’s ideological machineries isheightened. The temporarily intensified production of images and counterimages is based on the mobilization of available resources for ideologicalproduction (Wuthnow 1989). This production apparatus then may transform
itself into a machinery for cultural and ideological reproduction under morestable or static conditions. “Objective” or factual news may in one historicalsituation, in times of transformation and struggles between old and new social
forces, serve as a political weapon against oppressive, authoritarian systems
based on national or other historical myths. In other situations, when thestatus quo is broadly unquestioned, informational, a-political news may serve
ruling interests, either by diverting attention from political realities altogether
or by framing them as without alternatives.
The idea of news has been given very variable meanings across space
and time. It has also been an idea filled with contradictions, being partly
rational and partly irrational. Driven at the same time (as has often been thecase) by contradictory needs for market maximization and information needs,
between the ethos of the new and the need to frame everything in conventional terms and stay within the horizon of expectations. The routine rendering of the deviant and the improbable constituted an “aesthetics of surprise”
or shock that was already present in the early days of modern news journalism, that is the late 19th century (Donovan 2001). It has since been a more orless latent feature, an embryonic ‘society of the spectacle’ much later to appear
in full-blown shape in today’s matured global television system, founded ona spectacular impulse and a pleasure principle often in the guise of its opposite (Kellner 2003). Infotainment is one of its names. Whatever our analysis of this phenomenon – it problematizes ideas about a universal development spelled heightened enlightenment.
Gravitating between such extremes, journalism of the last hundred years
does give us an array of gradual, unidirectional shifts in news formats andstyles, but also cyclical and qualitative transformations not readily identifiable in terms of an overall modernization process. The story of Swedish news
journalism is as much a story of a social institution finding its place among
other institutions, with all the power struggles that are entailed in that process. How did this show up in the newspaper pages?
Within a large research programme we wanted to shed light on the ways
in which news texts reflect, especially in indirect ways, a society’s social
structure and political culture as they transform themselves across time. Above
all it was our intention to disentangle journalism’s own active role in thishistorical process, as part of the larger modernization of Swedish society
throughout the 20th century.
The programme yielded a series of books and reports, most of them in
Swedish, for instance Ekecrantz & Olsson, 1994, Editing Society: On the history of journalism, descriptive power and informed reason (in Swedish), basedon front pages in the years 1910, 1935, 1960, 1990) and Becker et al, 2000,

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Picturing Politics: Visual and textual Formations of Modernity in the Swedish Press (in English and based on a sample of newspaper articles from 1925,
1955, 1987, 1995). The most easily available summary of theory, methods
and results is found in Ekecrantz 1997. Before entering on a longitudinal
exposition a few words about the materials and methods are in place.
Editing Society was thus based on front-page articles from four (national
and local) newspapers, all articles from one such page on a certain day, every
third month in the selected years. In the later studies (Becker et al., Ekecrantz
et al.) another sampling procedure was used, based on one full week foreach of the years and the whole newspaper, within which a random sample
of articles was drawn. One rationale for working with full (real, not constructed) weeks was the focus on “journalistic events” as these developed
within a weekly news cycle. In these studies ten papers (four of them used
for closer study) were included and all sampled articles were digitalized for
detailed linguistic analyses. Both qualitative and quantitative techniques wereapplied and we also included a range of contextual data (the approach wastermed ‘contextually oriented discourse analysis’). Two of the years, 1955
and 1995 were given special attention by groups of researchers and doctoral students working with the full newspapers and evolving journalistic
events (Ekecrantz et al. 1995 and Becker et al. 1996, respectively). It is worth
noting here that the different sampling procedures and sample sizes yieldedvery similar results (see below). This, in itself, indicates that modern journalism is a relatively stable, collective and predictable social practice, acrossdifferent newspapers and within the time frame of a few years. Even a small
sample can consequently be highly representative. In others words, we haveto do with an institution and, like professionalization, institutionalisation
develops historically. We shall now turn to such historical transformations.

Sweden: The Long Road to What?
1909 is a pivotal year in many Swedish journalism historiographies. This iswhen the “Americanisation” took place in the major national daily, the Dagens
Nyheter This term can stand for much of what we often associate with amodern journalistic product: a front page filled, not with advertisements, butwith the major news stories of the day, photographic pictures, headlines,
etc. The modern front-page, of course, was in place on a given day and othermodern elements were to show up at a pretty fast rate. Some of them, likeoutdoor press photography, had to wait a decade or so before technicalinnovations made them possible. This is one way of studying the modernization process – by the historical fixation of breakthroughs of significant
elements characterizing modern journalism. Quantitative growth patterns, as
we have discussed above, is another way.

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The number of newspapers peaked in 1922. The 1920s was also the decade when advertising got its breakthrough. The 1920s is often depicted as
the moment when modernity broke into the Swedish society, and news wasseen, together with advertising and cars as the paramount sign of the times.
It was a politically tumultuous time, in the aftermath of the First World
War with the Russian revolution reverberating internationally and nationally.
Sweden was, until the late 19th century, one of the least industrialized andurbanized countries in Western Europe. It now experienced an accelerating
modernization, economically, but also politically, with general suffrage from1921 and fluctuating majorities in the parliament. There was first, a generalneed for information in a dramatically changed national and global situation. Secondly, there was a fierce ideological struggle between the socialist
and bourgeois party groups, a situation to be ended in the early 1930s. Fromthen on the Social Democrats were to stay in power until the 1970s. It was
during these decades that modern journalism was defined and developed.

An Institution Comes of Age
In Sweden the news paradigm and the idea of objective news developed
within the confines of the party press system. The press’ ideological distinction between news and views served to uphold the idea that the impact ofthe party affiliation was restricted to the editorial and opinion pages. In thereal world, politics also entered the news pages, more so with the formationof forces in Europe before the Second World War. In the 1950s thepoliticisation of news was no longer driven by the party system to such an
extent. Consensual politics could use the journalistic institution as an ideological organizer in the service of the welfare state then being socially engineered in relative political accord. The 1980s saw the birth of outright campaign journalism, most outspokenly in the tabloid press. Later it would findits way into the national and local morning papers. As is usual for journalism with a populist slant, this version’s prime rationale was commercial. The
local papers nowadays mostly mobilize their readers around local issues, reminiscent of the national dailies’ adherence to national goals in the 1950s.
Journalism is, with its bundle of genres, an institution very much definedby its relationships to other institutions in society. An overall interpretationof our findings was that there has been a shift in the relationship such thatthe autonomy of journalism vis-à-vis other institutions in society, including
the political system, has grown successively over the last century. In relative
terms the early dependence on the political party turned into a dependence
on the state, later replaced by the market.
The development of Swedish journalism was thus closely interconnectedwith the creation of “The People’s Home”, the peculiarly Swedish (and to avariable extent Scandinavian) version of the welfare state. Journalism took
on the officially sanctioned task as the indispensable link between the po-99

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litical system and the citizenry – not only as a disseminator of two-way information between the two, but also as a social organizer. Across the century this implied a number of distinct forms of “news societies”. This is how
we chose to label them in Editing Society (Ekecrantz & Olsson 1994).
THE SOCIAL FORM OF NEWSTYPICAL EDITORIAL PRACTICE

The unedited society: -1910

Mechanical transmission of news items

The accounted society: 1910-1955

Taking notes of prominent utterances

The conversational society: 1956-1965

Organizing and representing dialogues

The edited society: 1966-1990

Instrumental, politicised actualisation

Ten years after the appearance of this book one should perhaps add:
The spectacle society: 1991-

Staging media events, political
spectacles

The definition of the periods should not be taken too literally, one reason
being that the different (types of) newspapers developed unevenly, anotherthat earlier forms lingered on when a new form had gained prominence.
Furthermore, significant changes occurred within these periods with thepossible exception of the short third period. Still, we believe that the etiquettes
give a fairly adequate idea of central traits in the social history of Swedish
news journalism.
In the “unedited society” the editorial office was basically a “post office”.
Messages dropped in from near and far, which together with clippings fromother newspapers were assembled in no particular order. Embryonic headlines existed in the shape of first sentences in bold. In the “accounted society” reporters stood close to their prominent sources who appeared in the
texts without much editing of the often quite lengthy statements. The articles were often illustrated with a photographic portrait of the speaker. In
the beginning of the period these photos were taken in an atelier, not by apress photographer. In most cases the accounts were introduced by a briefreporter statement about the time and place of the “speech act”.
In the “conversational society” this transmission of monologues gave way
to all kinds of dialogues, either as textually represented with the journalist
as an observer or as an active participant. In the welfare society under construction, most dialogues concerned social issues. Also photographs carrieda social content in the sense that many of them displayed groups of people,
very often interacting with another, talking consensual society into being, as
it were.
This was one of the traits that disappeared completely in the full-blown“edited society”. Now the whole arsenal of objectivism techniques is used
to establish journalistic authority in the texts. At the same time the journalistic or editorial initiative in actualising certain conditions or events at theexpense of a myriad of others is disguised as impartial reporting, however
detrimental or beneficial the revelation might have been to a political actor
or interest. This “instrumental actualisation” (Kepplinger et al. 1991) is largely

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unpredictable and contributes to a new instability in the political system. The“spectacle society” represents the extreme form of the edited society, a society in which politics is strongly media-driven (Kellner 2003). This extrapolation of our own results is still waiting for comparative historical documentation in Sweden.4
The identification of these “societal” forms and ideal typical practices was
based on a number of content, formal, editorial, graphic and other criteria.
Some of these can be seen as indicators of long-term gradual changes, others representing the introduction of key elements, characteristic of modern
journalism, and still others had to do with qualitative shifts – one dominant
form giving way to another.
After the Americanisation of the Dagens Nyheter and other newspapers
in the following years one could safely say that, in principle, the key elements of modern news journalism were in place by the end of World War I.
The news material was compartmentalized as to subject area and placed intoa hierarchy of ascribed importance. There were headlines and illustrations
and at least some of the five W’s could be detected in most of the articles.
However, beyond that, important changes would follow in the decades tocome. Some of them were of the gradual kind and related to a generalmodernization process. Others should rather be seen in the context of thetransformations of the national political culture.

Into the Centre of the Stage
Representative samples of articles from the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s displayed
significant changes in the ratios of articles with illustrations and signatures
The portion of illustrated articles, including photos, drawings and news graphics doubled from the 1920s to the 1950s and trebled into the 1980s. In thelater period a third of all articles were illustrated. The increase in the use of
signatures is even more dramatic. Starting out in the 1920s the signature wasalmost non-existent. It was not the journalist, but the newspaper, as “organ”,
which was the mouthpiece, for others or for itself. In the 1950s less than
10% of the articles carried signatures. By the 1980s this figure had risen to
close to 40%. Also the types of signatures used, tell us about changes in theprofessional role model. First there were the more or less anonymous initials, later came the “artist” names, still later to be replaced by full names.
Today one can easily observe that the ratio of signed articles is much higher
than the 40% of the 1980s. This relates to tabloid development and the frequent use of photo by-lines.
The use of questions and answers and how this usage has changed over
the years tells us something about the journalist’s, and journalism’s, relationships to both authorities/sources and readers. In the 1920s question marks
appeared frequently in the headlines. In later decades they were very rare.
What were the questions about in the ‘20s? They were primarily concerned

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with three topics. It was asked: i) If a certain rumour was actually true? ii)
Which decision would be reached? iii) What do we really want? The uncertainty of predictions and normative dilemmas were considered to be interesting reading on the threshold of the modern society. Questions were open
and positive answers were largely missing. Guesses were still guesses andlike predictions and rumours, they were not transformed into facts. This wasa time of questions and also uncertainty in the world of journalism.
In the 1950s all the uncertainty of the 1920s was gone. The socially engineered People’s Home had all the answers to the questions it posed and thenewspapers, then positioned close to the political system and the state bureaucracy, took pride in reporting about the pending solutions to remaining
social problems. There had been, in the 1980s, another change. Questions
posed from outside no longer drove journalism to such an extent. Journalism’s selective actualisation of issues provided “answers” to questions that
had not really been raised in either some autonomous public or politicalsphere, but more often had been generated from within the media system.5
Illustrations, signatures and questions and answers all attest to the more central
position of the journalistic institution. Other dimensions add to the pictureof a zigzagging modernization process.

The Formation of the Journalistic Event
The temporal dimension can in different ways be used to further assess themeaning of modernization in the Swedish context. This variable is defined
here, as the main time orientation(s) of the article: past, present and/or future. This also gives an indication of the complexity of the journalistic text.
The most complex ones deal with the present and include references to thepast and also some speculation about future consequences in the form ofpredictions, hopes or fears.
Out of the possible combinations those including the present, a “now”,
increased their share, especially those focussing on the present and the future:things happening now have future consequences. This seems to be the basic
temporal logic of modern journalism, Swedish style. The portion of all articles
that had this ‘current’ orientation increased from one-sixth to more than half.6
There is thus a steady change with regard to the temporal orientation of
Swedish news over the 20th century. How are we to interpret this change
and how is it related to social, professional and institutional changes? There
are two explanations. In the first decades of the century Sweden was still inthe middle of a strong ideological phase of modernization. The “modern”
versus the old or “traditional” constituted the dominant discursive field.
References to history (old technologies going wrong, traditional institutions
failing) served to hail present changes and the brave new world waiting on
the doorstep. In later years historical references or causes disappeared gradually. Historical explanations were no longer in vogue. The future is chiselled102NEWS PARADIGMS, POLITICAL POWER AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS IN 20 TH
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out now, it is not seen as an outcome of history. This is the typical Swedish
rhetoric of progress, selectively suppressing history (Palonen 1997).
The second explanation of the gradual disappearance of history is thatthe very short micro-history of reporting also disappears step by step. “Somedays ago” is no longer a viable temporal fixation of an event in the 1960s or
1990s. The discursive context of the journalistic event is peeled off, including for instance the meeting between reporter and source. Journalism also
speaks with a voice of its own when it channels the voices of other actors.
This is just one objectivism strategy out of many.7
A related dimension is the type of journalistic event that dominates. In
the early days traditional event types such as the unique and cyclical events
made up 83% of the total. The remaining 17% were a mix of trends (tendencies), processes and (circumstantial, situational) states. Towards the end of
the century these ratios had changed to 58.3% and 41.2%. The ratio of “state”
articles had more than trebled. The once typical journalistic news story, an
account of something unique that has occurred in the recent past is not sotypical any more. This might seem paradoxical, thinking of the standard ‘Five
Ws’ definition of news journalism.
Swedish media’s orientation in social and political spaces across time is adifferent story in the sense that there have been no notable changes overthe 20th century as to the privileging of certain sectors or levels in society.
Using a dichotomised scale distinguishing between “power” spheres and“society” spheres, the only really significant change is that the ratio of articles dealing with both these groups of spheres increased significantly. This
reflects a strong increase in the type of news that focus on political or authority decisions and how they affect or afflict ordinary people. In the daysof the People’s Home ordinary people appeared as spectators or as participants in social events. This was later to be replaced by a victimization ofmen and women “in the street”.
How did this relate to the type of events that occurred? What happenedin the different sectors in terms of the event types that we discussed earlier?
Distinguishing between “modern” and “un-modern” event types we foundthat modernization, the move away from the unique and cyclical to theprocessual, tendential and circumstantial, goes faster in the power spheres
than in the social spheres of society. Power modernizes itself, it is dynamic
and future-oriented, whereas the rest of society is slow or standing still, looking backward rather than forward. Modern Swedish journalism looks withdifferent eyes upwards and downwards. At the top we find plans, rationality, verbosity and progress – at the bottom irrationality, deviance and randomness, and non-speaking or reactive subjects.
It seems to us that increased professionalism in news journalism naturalizes
the perspectives at the top. Different social strata are thus ascribed different
time horizons, subaltern groups more often than others lacking future outlooks. One implication is that the temporalities of journalistic texts are correlated with power and ideology. They reflect the relationship between jour-103

JAN EKECRANTZ

nalists and other actors and they show the degree of adaptation to the dominant value systems of a particular society at a particular historical moment.

Concluding Remarks
We started out with a strong commitment, founded on a series of studies, tothe idea that the modernization of the formats and contents of journalistic
news is, to put it bluntly, less a universal trend than a national affair. The
preceding pages have shown examples of this lack of steady “progress” inthe journalistic texts. Apart from such easily observable changes as the increased uses of illustrations (visualization) and signatures (personalization)
it is hard to identify one-directional changes. Once modern journalism, as
characterized here, was installed around World War I the rest of the story
has more to do with changes in the national political culture than with anything else, globalisation included. We are talking of print journalism. Other
journalism is partly another story, a story of how the TV-dominated societyof the spectacle may signal the demise of the news paradigm altogether as
a mass mediated cultural form.

Notes
1.

2.
3.

4.
5.
6.

7.

104

Michael Palmer argues for a much longer historical perspective on news: “...the (Western) journalistic canon of the 5 Ws and the inverted pyramid is, in a way, a throwback to
Quintilian’s rhetoric of circumstances...” (Palmer 2003). Here, however, we are concernedwith commercial news intended for a mass audience and may therefore content ourselveswith a 150 (or 175) year perspective.
An overview of such factors is presented in Høyer (2001) and, with a focus on
professionalization, in Høyer & Lauk (1997).
If prejudice and superstition is taken as indicators of archaic or pre-modern journalism
the correlation might sometimes even be the reverse. I am thinking of British million
circulation tabloids, for instance, often subverting even the concept of news.
A first treatise of spectacle politics, within the research programme, can be found inMedierummet (Media Spaces), Becker et al, 1996.
For a detailed account of questions and answers throughout the studied periods, see
Becker et al, 2000, chapter 2.
These data are from Editing Society and based on the years 1935, 1960 and 1990. Another study (Ekecrantz et al, 1994) yielded similar results. For an English article version,see Ekecrantz 1997.
For just one example of studies dealing with such strategies see Lisbeth Lipari : “As withother aspects of news work, textual strategies such as stance adverbs [like obviously,
clearly, apparently, and presumably] can serve to enhance and conceal both journalistic
and social authority” (Lipari 1996, 821). In Sweden Mats Ekström and colleagues haveconducted several studies of journalistic strategies.

Telling the News
Danish Newspapers 1873-1941/2000
Søren Kolstrup

Historical Outlook
The period of 1870-1910 in Danish history is one of swift and profoundeconomic, political and social changes. The peasants join the public sphereen masse around 1870 and in the ensuing 25 years they organise their political, economical and cultural life, and are soon followed by the workers. The
country is industrialised after 1870. Life in the countryside changes as theurbanisation of Denmark creates a totally new environment for every daylife – that of the modern city. There is an arduous three-way political contest between the Conservative government, the Liberals of the peasants’ party
and Social Democrats of the workers’ party. Finally, after thirty years of discourse during which the political and cultural power of the Conservatives isslowly eroded, parliamentarism is installed in 1901.
In this context and throughout this period the press expands. The expansion of the political party press is led, by the liberal press in the 1870s, andthen by the social democratic press in the 1880’s and 1890’s. At the same time,different types of popular, non-political, newspapers develop especially at theend of the century. There were, in 1870, 73 provincial newspapers with acirculation of 42,000 copies. This had increased by 1913 to 128 provincial
newspapers and 113 sub-branch newspapers with a circulation of 402,000
copies (Thomsen 1972, 172 and 220). The Copenhagen press had, in themeantime, risen from 9 to 17 titles and circulation had increased from 53,000
to 381,000 (Ibid. 241-245). Commensurate with this expansion the reading
surface of newspaper issues doubled or tripled during this period (Ibid. 248).
The readership expanded among old and new social layers (Ibid. 246).
The penetration of the newspapers to the remote western and northern partsof the country is the clearest expression of the expansion of the press in thisperiod (Ibid. 133).
The press fulfils different needs. It brings political/cultural information andadvice, it strengthens the readers self-esteem, which was absolutely necessary
in an atmosphere of Conservative contempt for the peasants and workers and105SØREN KOLSTRUP

it provides entertainment. Furthermore it should be noted that only the press
is able to give all levels of society an awareness of the nation as a structure
where different actors are involved in different activities or processes at different
places at the same time. This is one of the main points in Imagined Communities (cf Anderson 1996). As a result new types of newspapers are introduced
especially new types of popular newspapers. New genres are introduced (thereportage is definitely established around 1880) and the existing genres change.
The model for news articles changes completely over this period.
The content becomes more and more entertainment oriented. Thomsen has
examined the distribution of the Copenhagen newspapers’ reading matter insix categories: politics, economics, (high brow) culture, sensation (crime andaccident), (the popular culture of) entertainment and diverse (personal andsocial events). He puts together the last three categories into one ‘Popular’
category. I have summarised the first three into a category of ‘Serious reading’and have calculated the average figures of these two categories. Finally I havecalculated the importance of categories in Social-Demokraten (1874-2000) and
Politiken (1884-the present). Table 1 indicates that Politiken was very late togive the entertainment reading a central role; it also shows that SocialDemokraten returned to providing ‘Serious reading’ at a moment when ‘entertainment’ was well established in the rest of Copenhagen’s newspapers.
Table 1.

Year

The Distribution of Serious and Popular Reading over the Years
According to Thomsen 1972, pp. 888-90 (per cent)Seriousreading

Popularreading

Seriousreading
Soc-DemPopularreading in
Soc-Dem

Seriousreading in
Politiken

Popularreading in
Politiken

1868

63.4

36.6

1884

55.9

44.1

69.1

30.3

66.7

33.3

–

1902

38.7

61.3

43.8

56.2

63.0

37.0

1914

38.5

61.5

54.7

45.3

44.0

56.0

This paper tries to see the evolution of news structure as a long-term process over half a century. It is seen in the light of the French Annales Schoolthat was famous for its distinction between a long and medium term history(Braudel 1996, 15-38).
Media history is normally a history of formats, the triumphant concepts
and is focused on short-term history. Thus when Politiken had been modernised in 1905 by its famous editor, Henrik Cavling, history had come to its
term and the evolution of the more conservative newspapers was uninteresting (cf. Lehrmann’s discussion in Lehrmann 1999, 47). Danish media history is still marked by a fascination of Cavling (see the descriptions of Cavlingin Drotner 1996 and Marzolf, 1982). It is a history of events. It is a shortterm history. The Cavling revolution at Politiken 1905 is seen as a rupture,
but like other ruptures we deal in this case with the consequences of a long106

TELLING THE NEWS

process within the press (cf Søllinge and Thomsen, vol 2, 75-76): As forentertainment reading Politiken joins the mainstream in 1905.
In this chapter I try to follow the dying formats as well as the emerging
ones. While it is difficult to establish when a particular development or historical phenomenon begins, it is even more difficult to say when it stopped.
These slow developments may be very hard to follow and demand more
empirical studies than this chapter alone can offer. Barnhurst and Mutz (1997)
have, however, conducted a very thorough and detailed investigation of theevolution of news reporting over a period of 100 years in “American Journalism and the Decline in Event-Centred Reporting”.
The structure of news is the expression of working routines, and working
routines change imperceptibly slowly. Then at a given moment they become
conscious. That is the change. Unfortunately we still do not know when the
new structures of news became conscious routines in all sections of the Danishpress.

The News Genre
Any news story in Danish newspapers in the 1870’s had a linear structure, butby the 1940’s almost all stories were constructed according to the inverted
pyramid (relevance order, instalment principle, top-down organisation, cf. van
Dijk 1988a, 48). How did this fundamental change in text structure come aboutin Denmark? I present an explorative investigation based on 3330 articles takenfrom 75 Danish newspapers covering the period from 1873 to 1941.
We all know that it is hard work to define the different journalistic genres.
What do they have in common and what distinguishes them from each other– what are the criteria? It is even more difficult to define them over time –what is the identity of a changing genre? Most books about journalism have achapter on journalistic genres or text types. Normally the routines of the production processes are fundamental criteria for defining genres, but since thedefinitions are normally very loose, the genre problem is not very important(Meilby 1996, 64–72). News is the hardest genre of all to define – it can beanything. We cannot use structural features – they change. We cannot use theroutines of the working process – they have also changed. The size of an article
is not a useful criterion. The long article of 200 years ago is deemed today to
be a short notice. But in the absence of any other criterion we have to admitthat news can best be defined by its content. News, as Pynt Andersen suggests, contains a rupture. Events that distinguish themselves or can be presented as distinguished from the daily routine are news (Pynt Andersen 2002,
221 ff.) For more information about news as rupture see Jamet et Jannet (1999aand 1999b). This has been a constant feature since the beginning of newspapers. News comprises crime, sex, scandals, accidents, marriages, catastrophes,
political events etc (cf. Søllinge and Thomsen 1989, vol. 2, 75). News content
seems in many ways to have remained stable since the 16th century, but notnews structure. It is astonishing that within a period of 40-50 years the way

107SØREN KOLSTRUP

news stories are told changed completely and then remained stable for almost
a 100 years. Furthermore the structure of the newspaper story is even adaptedby news bulletins of the temporal-linear media – radio and television (cf. Lewis
1994). There are several explanations for this change, but without a thoroughinvestigation of the ‘how’ of this evolution, it is useless to ask the ‘why’. This
paper is a first step to investigate the how.

Linear and Non-linear Principles in Newspapers’ Layout
The linear principles reign, in 1850, in the newspapers’ layout as well as
within single articles. This means that the newspaper invites the reader to acontinuous reading line and that the story tells events in a chronological order.
There were not necessarily, at that time or in the following years, headlines
for each article. The specific news item was not an independent unit. The
few headlines indicated the provenance of news: 1) The specific place from
where the news and/or the newspaper came that was the source of information. 2) The method of the communication: Postal information and later
telegram news. 3) The division of foreign (Udlandet) and domestic news
(Indland/Fædrelandet) was a thematic indication, but closely related to theindication of the source.
How did the evolution from the newspaper as a ribbon (the uninterrupted
columns) to a topographic display occur?
The newspapers from the beginning of the 19th century had the same print
format as a book with, normally, two columns, but sometimes only one as
was the case of Politievennen (circa 1820). Early in the century the format
grows longer, but still in the 1840s Danish newspapers had normally twocolumns and they continued to have a pagination covering a whole year. So
even a single issue of a newspaper was not, in principle, independent.
About the middle of the century the newspapers began to have three columns and to use the feuilleton and at approximately the same time the useof bold print-types helped in dividing the long columns into more easily
legible units.
While the principle of the provenance for telegram news was, around 1870,
still predominant in Copenhagen, in the provincial news we see the emergence of the single article with headlines in bold or, more commonly, withthe first words in bold. The use of ‘gothic’ fonts was abandoned in advertisements and the experimentation of the use of two columns is apparent.
The advertisements are now isolated units and begin to disrupt the ribbon
display. As such, the reader is invited to view them in a different manner. A
linear reading is no longer viable, as each advertisement is attempting tointerrupt the reader’s perception of the adjacent advertisement.
It was possible by the end of the century for newspapers to choose any
format from the tabloid to “blanket” format. They could cultivate the classic

108

TELLING THE NEWS

Figure1.

Berlingske politiske og
Avertissements-Tidende , 21 st
January 1873, front page

Figure2.

Aarhus Amtstidende , 2 January
1873, front page

look with up to seven or even eight columns. This highly aesthetic and austerelayout possessed all the problems of reading, in linear fashion, three broadsheet pages with very little space for the eye to rest. They could, on the other
hand, continue in the direction that had been initiated by the advertisementswith the introduction of bigger headlines and headlines covering several
columns. The newspapers began to give up linear reading and began theconstruction of the topographic layout with multi-layer headlines.
Forposten (1899-1901) which continued under the name of Middagsposten
1901-09) was the most outstanding example of the popular press just after
the turn of the century. The articles are easily distinguished from each other.
The titles or headlines use Latin characters (of different fonts), and headlines may cover several columns and even the whole page; and multi-layer
headlines were common. These are all the elements that are needed formodern newspaper layout. Thus the reader can, by the turn of the century,
skip articles, can jump from one article to another and the headlines serve
as guidance. The headlines create islands of the central information anddirections for more details – if so wished. This topographical system is, by
1940, well established. It remains the principle in use today with the exception of the tabloids’ front-page.

109

SØREN KOLSTRUP

The single news item cannot be a completely independent unit until thenewspaper uses a topographical headline design. The isolation of each news
item gives it a specific identity that is a prerequisite for the change into a
construction of relevance (the inverted pyramid).
Figure3.

Forposten , 11 th February 1901,
front pageThe Investigation of News in 75 Newspapers
This chapter is based on the systematic reading of 75 newspapers covering
the years 1873 to 1941. Table 2 contains a overall list indicating for each period
the number of newspapers and the number of articles in these newspapers.
The reading and counting of the news articles was systematic It cannot,
however, be said that the choice of newspapers was systematic. Imperfect as
it is, the data is useful anyway, and it helps to ask the right questions and to
get an idea about the general movement of change.
All the articles have been registered in a few categories; news; reports frommeetings and “other articles”; comments, short news/notices, reportages, features, all kinds of fiction and cultural material that does not have the aspect ofnews. A great deal of news is presented in notices. But any notice that it isreduced to giving information like “X has arrived yesterday at Y” is too short
to show either a linear structure or a relevance structure or to have the aspectof a narrative. This type of notice has been relegated to the category of notices.

110

TELLING THE NEWS

Table 2.

The Number of Newspapers InvestigatedNumber of newspapers

Number of articles

1870-187911288

1880-1889

14488

1890-1899

11327

1900-1909

20848

1910-1914

07

343

1927

02

136

1940-1941

10900

Total number

75

3 330

I understand linear constructions as news stories that present the events inchronological order and thus with very little information in the headlines andintermediate constructions as those that present some information in the headlines or in the lead and then presents the main information in chronologicalorder. The notion of relevance order is used in the sense of van Dijk. But whenis an intermediate structure no longer intermediate construction but a relevancestructure/inverted pyramid? (cf Inger Lindstedt 1998, 79).
Table 3 contains the distribution of the three categories for news articles(soft and hard news) and for reports of meetings for each period, first in numberof articles, then the percentage of the news articles in the three categories:
linear (lin), intermediate (int) and relevance structure (rel). Reports frommeetings are rare from 1927 onwards, and are mostly treated like ordinary
news articles. They are therefore not counted as reports but as news articles.
Table 3.

Distribution of Structure of the Articles
News Articles
Numbers
Percent
lin int rel
lin int rel

Reports of Meetings
Numbers
Percent
lin int rel
lin int rel

1870-1874

22

00

00

100 00

00

17

00

00

100 0000

1875-1879

43

01

02

93

02

04

13

00

00

100 0000

1880-1884

16

00

00

100 0000

1885-1890

63

06

32

62

06

32

23

00

04

85

00

15

1890-1894

13

00

03

81

00

19

1895-1899

21

06

14

51

15

34

21

00

00

100 0000

1900-1904

41

10

32

49

12

39

02

00

00

100 0000

1905-1909

54

16

29

55

16

29

20

00

05

80

00

20

1910-1915

24

21

22

36

31

33

17

00

04

81

00

19

1927

27

19

27

37

19

37

1940-194105

40 24902

14

84

These figures do lack statistical significance. Nevertheless they show that thenewspapers move from a state of total linearity through a more complex
situation to the complete dominance by the relevance structure. In fact the111SØREN KOLSTRUP

numbers for linear structures cover the examples of narrative constructions– but no attempt has been made to count them, the numbers being too small
and the distinction between simple linearity and narrative structures being
too uncertain. An analysis based on two unstable categories, simple linearity and narrative linearity, would suffer from extremely low reliability.
One other conclusion can be drawn from the data: the reports from meetings do not change at the same speed and rate as the proper news articles.
There were attempts to change this dinosaur of Danish journalism. The detailed reporting of meetings died out after 1920 and was absorbed by theordinary news reporting except for a few examples of reports from meetings in local councils or committees.

Linear and Non-linear Principles in Newspaper Articles
Story and Discourse
The linear representation, from the start of newspapers’ existence to about 1890,
was the way to capture events (Bell 1991, 173). This means that story and discourse in the sense of Chatman match each other (cf. Chatman 1978, 63 ff.).
This construction principle works well if the subject matter (the story) is
simple and if the evolution of events can be contained within one temporalline. If the event is complex and has actions with temporal ramifications goingon at the same time, the linear model is problematic. The reports in the Danishpress about the French revolution 12th – 15th of July 1789 or the terrible battleof Isted 1850 are good illustrations of the inherent problems (for the problems of temporal ramification see Øhrstrøm 1998, 253 ff.).
Here is an example where a simple story line matches the discourse line
perfectly: In the year 1885 the cabinetmakers and the joiners began to organize their trade unions in the province. Two members of the trade union
organisers in Copenhagen visited 13 towns within 18 days. Social-Demokraten
wrote, on the 9th of June 1885, a rather long article of 80 lines about thisevent. The article strictly follows the events in the last five towns on a dayby-day basis giving a resume of each meeting as closely to the chronological story order as possible. The article ends: “Berg and Jensen arrived at
Copenhagen after a journey of 18 days having meetings in ...” and then the
13 towns in chronological order are listed. The article may seem a bit bewildering for a modern reader, but it is easy to understand, and with a bit oftraining you will find this way of presentation perfectly normal.
Such linear texts are easy to read, but they do present some problems.
First they invite the reader to read the whole text as the last piece of information in the text frequently has to be read to understand the point of thearticle. In the case of the two trade union organisers, the information thatthey have now returned home is the key fact. Secondly, as long as the newspapers had only two or three small pages of reading matter, tabloid or a format

112

TELLING THE NEWSbetween tabloid and broad sheet, linearity is no problem. The reader has
the time to read the entire article. But if the reader has less time or if thenewspapers have become bigger you cannot be sure that the reader can read
the whole paper. Thirdly, long linear texts give you the feeling that you do
not receive all the information. The story looks like a conveyor belt of information. There is nothing to indicate the important and less important facts.
Readers as a result lose the plot when they have to read long articles. They
may be easy to read, but they are difficult to grasp.

The Temptation of Narrativisation
A lot of news material can be turned into a narrative according to this model:
Initial situation – disruption – actions – solution/non-solution – final situation.

This model is a version of the narrative scheme according to the Swiss text
linguist Jean-Michel Adam (Adam 1992, 54-58, see also and Branigan 1992,
14).
Allan Bell (Bell 1991, 147ff) uses the Labov model for personal narratives
to gain a model that seemingly is valuable for the structure of news in newspapers:
Abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, solution, coda.
(cf. Bell 1991, 148ff, and Labov 1972, 354ff).

Bell, however, misunderstands the model when he makes it a model fornewspaper stories, as he has to discard the temporal aspects and the withholding of information. He has therefore to discard the “mise en intrigue”(the putting into plot) of Adam. But he is right in the sense that there is a
rupture in both types of stories. Strangely the first handbook about journalism (Shuman, 1895) was perfectly aware that the great difference between
news stories and narratives was the absence of narrative plot in news stories(Lindstedt, 95-96).
Here are some examples of the use of narrative devices:
9th of June 1885. Social-Demokraten prints a report about the way the newspaper’s sub editor (Wiinblad) had been called to police court about an article
on military affairs. Wiinblad makes a satirical portrait of his opponent andpresents himself as a poor, innocent and inoffensive person. He plays withthe different points of view, indicates clearly the strong points of the evolution (complicating action and the absence of the expected solution) – all these
literary devices give the text a strong ironical moral.

113SØREN KOLSTRUP

The same year, 1885, a young man made an attempt to assassinate the Conservative, and dictatorial, Prime Minister Estrup. Sorø Amtstidende, a liberal
opposition newspaper, in existence 1866-1963, published a report on 22nd
October, which is reduced here to a resume of the main points.
1) The rumours in Copenhagen presented with a dramatic mise en scene,2) The rumours were right,
3) The scene of the attempted murder:
Estrup has just come home; he is in front of his house.
Young man turns up and shoots.
Estrup: “Do you want to kill me?”Young man shoots once more.
People arrive to rescue Estrup.
The front door is opened from inside.
Estrup goes in.
4) He has not been hurt.
5) Estrup: “Well now I can say that someone has tried to kill me”.

The whole story has an implicit narrator who points out, indirectly, how thedifferent actions should be understood. The Prime Minister finally closes theincident with a kind of moral.
One type of story was frequently used by the popular press; reports fromthe courts, especially the brief stories about people having been given small
fines. These were humoristic stories with a very strong emphasis on the
narrator or their point of views. The popular newspaper Aftenbladet (18871959) has ten of these stories on 24th of July 1889. The individual stories share
a common headline “From the Police Court” and are differentiated by anindentation of the first line and the names of the protagonists are marked
with spaced letters.
The narrative has the advantage of presenting a good story, it is easy tounderstand and the important and less important elements are easy to distinguish, and it is easy to remember (cf. Branigan quoted above). The reader
is captivated. But the narrative solution also has its disadvantages. Information in a good story is withheld (cf. Bordwell and Thompson 1990, 482 andBranigan 1992, 66), there is a constant play based on the disparities of knowledge, and only at the end is the total pattern of causality understood (theretroactive determination). This is one of the fundamentals in story telling.
But the dissemination of serious information in newspapers is neither a play
nor a game. The journalist has to deliver the information as quickly and as“willingly” as possible. They should not play with the reader, in the mannerof an author or a film director. If they do so, the focus is on the fascinationof the text (as in the reports from police court) and the focus is not on thereferent. Narratives are normally marked by the existence of a narrative voice,a point of view, and a level from which the story is told. This is a bad device
in news reporting. In the merging journalistic ideology, news is not told by114

TELLING THE NEWS

someone, it is not submitted to a point of view. News is there; the facts are
there; the press just collects them (cf. Meilby 1996, 64ff).
Narrativisation means also that the story becomes more or less self-containing. Deixis, in narrative fiction, is only valuable within the limits of thestory (Harms 1991, 150). If the news story is told according to these lines it
begins to look like fiction. But news is not fiction; news is fact. A self-containing deixis cuts the links to our actual world. The text loses its referentialfunction. News must have a clear link to actual reality. That is the fundamental contract. This contract is very strong when the information is important – especially if we are dealing with political information. The ways thestories from court are told in Aftenbladet make them look like fiction – but
this has no consequences for their credibility as the reports from court are,by contract, pure entertainment or fun.
As mentioned before it may often be difficult to distinguish linear, chronological description from true narratives. The narrative solution existed since
the very beginning of the print press – the casual leaflets – and it seems tohave been quite widely used in the period 1880-1910. But it was never predominant. It was mostly used in stories where one person opposed the other,crimes or humourous stories from every day life. It was, however, normallyabsent in political affairs. Nevertheless the impact of narrativisation varies alot over time. The narrative structure, in the 1940s, seems to have been rare,
but there were variations from newspaper to newspaper. Today narrativisation
seems more acceptable, at least in the popular press, and the narrativisationof news has become an issue of importance for the survival of the print media.
I am convinced that the period 1885-1900 was the golden age of narrativisation
when even political material seemed to rely heavily on it as well as on fictionalisation.
I am not in favour of linking a long-term evolution – the changing of news
structure – to the history of events. But the still hypothetical and extraordinary use of narratives in the period 1885-1900 may very well be due to thefact that a direct reporting of political affairs could be dangerous and that insome cases the literary devices were an easy cover up. Narrativisation wasa useful tool in the very harsh political climate of this period.

The Principle of RelevanceThe narrative solution was not therefore a perfect solution; it was and remains a secondary one. It did not reduce the time spent by the reader andit only marginally facilitated their comprehension of the text. The solution
was the inverted pyramid, the principle of relevance described by van Dijk
in several of his texts from the 1980’s. How the new inversion of order has
been established is still not very well explored. It may well be that the firstexamples of inverted structures can be traced back to the telegrams during

115SØREN KOLSTRUP

the American Civil War. But we still need a better knowledge about journalists’ practice of news reporting and their consciousness of the phenomenon.
When did the new structure become a normative and conscious model for
the work of Danish journalists? It was a conscious device for at least someAmerican journalists, as Shuman’s ‘The Art and Practice of Journalism’ waspublished in 1894 (cf Lindstedt 1999, 94 and Schudson 1995, 53). The change
does not seem to have begun in Denmark as a part of a conscious project.
Indeed the first changes are almost imperceptible. The first Danish textbook
on journalism, Ole Cavling’s ‘Journalistik. Kortfattet vejledning i moderne
journalistik’, presents the relevance principle, but seems to infer that thisstructure was far from being established in 1928 (Lindstedt 1998, 106-07).
In most textbooks there are two explanations for the fact that in journalistic texts the discourse order is so different from the story order:• The inverted structure enables the reader to choose whether they wish
to read the whole article or whether they should be content to read
only the resume.
• It enables the sub / editor to cut overly long articles ‘from behind’ –the main information will still remain (a point already described by
Shuman).
This is of course true – this final stage is a well-established and conscious
routine. But before this establishment there were intermediate stages (seebelow) and these intermediate stages did not normally allow for cutting ‘frombehind’. To which extent were these stages conscious? Danish journalists could
not foresee in 1885 how the news would be structured in 1915. Articles, fora good many more years, kept important information till the end of the story,
even with some important information placed at the beginning. We can,however, point out the conditions necessary for the structural change. It is
possible to array some types of news stories/informative texts where therelevance principle could be at hand as a model and then point out thepractical advantages of the inverted structure.
• The individualisation of the piece of information introduced by a headline is a precondition.
• The influence from descriptive non-chronological texts such as personalportraits and obituary texts.
• The reports of debates about Bills and other propositions of laws. The
bill has been voted on (event) and there then follow explanations anddetails about the new law – and even references to the debates. These
texts are a blend of chronological structures and a-chronological descriptions. Unfortunately such texts are rare, the reports of debates inparliament are not at all innovative and the evolution seems to havebeen slow in this particular domain.

116

TELLING THE NEWS• The crime story, the trial and the verdict. The main event is the murder, the corpse or the verdict. The detective enquiry follows, the murderer is found and finally the reader is told what happened before themurder or the verdict. But this story could quite as well be told fromthe very beginning: events preceding the murder, then the murder, etc.
So in the case of crime stories we have two possible structures: First a
simple chronological story about the successive events or the stressingof the main event, the murder, from which point the rest of the story
is told.
• In the case of ‘breaking news’ events, the newspaper has to add incoming information. The linear texts were unable to cope with thissituation whereas the inverted structure permitted new information to
be added from behind (see below).
Here is an example of intermediate construction of the news story:
Story 1. Politiken 12th June 1885
Headlines

Man Shoots Himself.

Main event
Circumstance &Consequences

Man shot himself at a public baths (identification details.)
Assistant sees man and does not suspect him, hears shot,
finds the dead man, corpse disposed of in the office.

I use van Dijk’s notions: Headline, lead, main event, circumstances, consequences, history etc. (cf. van Dijk 1988a, 52) even if this is in fact an anachronism, the 1885 story seen with the perspective of 1988. The death in thisstory is important as we receive this information twice, but as there is nofurther information about the dead person, the perspective changes and wefollow the assistant from his point zero: the arrival of the candidate for suicide.
Story 2. Kolding Folkeblad 18th June 1885
Headlines
Main event
Consequence
History

Main event

No headlines: use of bold for the first five words.
High court has made a decision in an administrative trial(decision not indicated).
A decision that probably will be tried at the Supreme Court
The churchwarden has asked to be paid for ringing thechurch bells at the burial of the late Queen (four years earlier). Payment refused by the governing church council. A
detailed description of the reasons follows.
Supreme court has decided that the parish must pay.

This story is closer to a relevance structure, but still uses old structures evenwith some true narrative devices (the withholding of information). First the
information is given that the Supreme Court has made a decision, there follows a linear history and finally the content of the decision is given.

117SØREN KOLSTRUP

The two stories show – if this should at all be necessary – that from thesimple linearity to the relevance structure, the intermediate nuances are
numerous. They might suggest that the crime story is an ancestor to the relevance story where the main event precedes the explanation. The crime
stories (crimes, verdicts, suicides, accidents) were an experimental field,
where new routines and models were tried. The crime story is equally suitedfor narrative as well for relevance structures.
This evolution towards the inverted structure should not be considered asa smooth and equal movement towards a well-defined goal. The popular press
may, in many respects, have been the section of the press that began thismovement. While this may be true, even the rest of the press showed strange
divergences. Folkets Avis (1897-1928) and Forposten print the same story on
6th of February 1901: The suicide of a staff sergeant at an inn in Copenhagen.
Folkets Avis relates the main event, the suicide, four times within an article of 70 lines
Headlines
Lead 1
Lead 2Main event

Consequence
Comments

The death
The deathHis arrival – and his death
Detailed report about the events from the beginning at 1 a.m.
in the night till he was found dead (description): there is achange of point of view, we see the sergeant through the eyesof the landlord.
Police arrive
Information about the sergeant.

Forposten compiles a much shorter article, half the size of Folkets Avis
Headlines
Main event

Consequence

The death
Report about the events from the beginning till he was founddead (description): there is no change of point of view, fromthe very beginning we see the sergeant through the eyes ofthe landlord or the staff.
Police arrive.

The first article has a structure not far from the crime stories found in popular newspapers today or even in the quality morning papers: the main information is presented twice (or more) at the beginning, the story then returns
to the main event in a linear narrative. Forposten has a much more classicalstructure: a very short headline and the rest in total linear order.
News stories, circa 1910, and especially political stories are more frequently
organised according to the relevance principle. This is just one example: In
1908 Alberti, the Minister of Justice, was arrested for fraud. The value wasenormous. The scandal was enormous. Folkets Avis composed an article
covering three columns with headlines covering all three columns.

118

TELLING THE NEWS

Headlines
Lead
Main event
History &previous events

Alberti arrested.
The official announcement functions as a lead: Albertiarrested.
Alberti arrested (linear description, narrative).
Causes for his arrest.

The rest of the article consists of new information that has turned up, ofreportage and an interview with Alberti’s wife.
The problem for Folkets Avis, and for other newspapers as well, is clearly
the overload of important information. The newspaper has only one way tocope with the situation, which is to add the incoming information as it arrives. In fact the relevance principle has already given us the main information so the incoming information needs no further explanation. The relevance
principle is much more efficient in such context than the narrative or the
linear discourses.
The inverted structure never really became the only solution even if thenewspapers around 1940 have very few articles with narrative or other quasilinear structures. The inverted structure was adopted for its practical usefulness. It was both easy for production purposes and for the reader’s orientation. But it was not a good solution for comprehension and memorisation(cf. discussion in Justin Lewis 1994.)

1940-1941 and 2000
The relevance principle is, by 1940, the principle. Almost any article about
events is presented according to the relevance principle. Even stories that
could have been narratives like the court reports. The 17th August 1940 B.T.
(1916 – the present) relates an assault against an innocent holiday visitor.
Headlines plus twenty lines is not a long article, yet the information of themain event – the assault – is given four times at the beginning followed
immediately by the consequences! Aftenbladet, on 21st May 1941, relates arailway accident with headlines about the consequences of the accident andthe whole article is a constant shift from consequences to main event andback. It is not until the end of the article that the reader was given the information about the beginning of the accident. It is necessary to look thoroughly
to find simple linear or narrative stories in 1940-1942. The few stories with
the intermediate structure come in twenty cases from two provincial papers
and many are reports from local meetings, the rest are accidents. The fivestories of the 1940-42 data with a linear structure are narratives.
The inverted structure has become an ideological signal indicating trueand serious information even in the most trivial affairs. The inverted structure has thus at least four positive functions: It facilitates the production; itfacilities the orientation of the reader; it reduces the reading time and it

119SØREN KOLSTRUP

appears as a authorization for serious information. On the other hand it isdebatable whether the structure aids either comprehension or memorisationand it is by no means good for entertainment.
It should be noted that the news story today is slightly different; the van
Dijk categories of verbal reactions, expectations and evaluations have become more important The information of the main event comes increasingly
from interviews and is presented as interviews with the main actors. Thisevolution can be explained by convergence of at least three factors.
• The journalists and public, of the old political press, shared a common
culture and knowledge, albeit not a very extended one, but sufficientto understand events and texts. Today the complexity of information
is overwhelming. The journalists are specialists in nothing. They havedeveloped the practice of asking experts for their opinions, and they
do not share knowledge with the readers who are supposed to know
nothing. In this case the use of interviews is a solution for the journalist – and for the reader.
• The strong emphasis is on neutrality. Both sides have the chance toexpress themselves to give objectivity. They are therefore represented
in the news text. The journalist is less responsible.
• The influence of television? The information becomes a montage ofbits of interviews as on television.
Finally we should add that around 2000, there was an ongoing discussion
on the use of narratives in journalism and elsewhere. The linear narrative
structure has regained public favour over the last years, as with the developing focus on entertainment it has become inevitable that the use of narrative devices has increased. But when did this regain of favour begin? And towhich extent was this movement conscious? Is this new interest for narrative devices only due to the crisis of the newspapers – the narrative as saviour? Has new journalism had an influence on simple news reporting in Danish
newspapers already in the 1970’s? What we know is that most narratives arelocated in either specific genres, especially in features, or at a specific placein the news story – the linear main event.

Conclusion
This “new journalism” (factual and entertaining etc.) reached Scandinavia at
the start of the 20th century, and with it came the transformation of old-style
party newspapers. The men who introduced the modern newspaper to Copenhagen and Stockholm were Henrik Cavling (1858-1933) of Politiken and
Oscar Hemberg (1881-1944) of Dagens Nyheter. (Marzolf 1982, 133).

120

TELLING THE NEWSThe idea of the fundamental role of individuals in the over night transformation of newspaper genres and design is also suggested by Drotner (1996,
46-49). The idea forgets the slow pace of evolution preceding 1905 and ignores the equally slow pace of evolution in newspaper design after 1905. It
is equally disregards the fact that working routines cannot be changed as
easily as the paper format of a newspaper. The case of Riget (1910-1913) is
illustrative in this respect, even if it was established as a “new” newspaper,
its articles varied greatly in the use of different news structures.
The important years for the change of news structure are 1885-1910. Thiswas preceded by 10 years when the changes began, especially the use ofheadlines, and was followed by 25 years when the old habits died out. There
were no extant examples of articles composed in a simple linear structureformat in 1940. The data indicates that serious political information generalised the use of the new structure before other types of information or stories.
The change of the principles of layout was accomplished about the turnof the century. But the use of the new layout varied not only from newspaper to newspaper, but also from issue to issue of the same newspaper for
about 30 years.
The analysis of the data in this article raises numerous questions that can
only be answered after a renewed analysis on the basis of a larger and systematic mass of data:• Did the change of news structure begin in Copenhagen as common
sense might suggest? Or is there no difference between the provinces
and the capital?
• Were the remote areas the last to give up the simple linear structures
as common sense might equally suggest?
• What was the role of popular newspapers in the transformation of thenews structure? While it would not be astonishing were the popularpress at the forefront, serious political information was not the domainof the popular press.
• There is still the requirement for data from a thorough and detailed
analysis of the relations between the subject matter such as politicalevents, crimes, accidents, social stories, etc. and the new news structure. We do need a specific history of each news sub genre.
• The initial hypothesis was that the change of news structure is related
to or due to the increase of information. Does this mean that the sizeof the reading surface of a given newspaper was a factor of importance?
The political orientation and the reading matter of a single newspaper may
change more or less radically and in short time. This is what happened at
Politiken in 1905. The working routines change much more slowly than struc-121SØREN KOLSTRUP

ture changes and this is what happened to the writing of news (not thecollecting of news data) from 1885 to 1910/15. The news structure, after 1920,
has not fundamentally changed. These three changes are a perfect illustration of the Annales School’s ideas about “speed and history”.
There were complaints in the 1890’s that the changes were going faster andfaster. As for the press, these complaints were often correct even if not in thecase of the evolution of the news structure. As we have seen this evolution
was not described when it took place. Today people still complain, or are proud,about the ever increasing pace of change. The changes are described everywhere. Any discussion about the Internet has a sentence about the increase in
speed. We have forgotten all the compartments of society where things arestable and change slowly – as is the case of the news structure.

122

The Half-hearted Modernisationof Norwegian Journalism 1908-1940*
Svennik Høyer & John Nonseid

Methods and Approaches
Our purpose in this chapter is to look for some characteristics of modern
journalism sampled from four Oslo-papers during the first half of the previous century. We shall look for some traits of modern journalism, like theactive hunt for news outside newsrooms, the topical spectre and the forms
of presentation. Our questions are: When in the period 1908-1940 may themodern, or American, type of journalism have been introduced to the Oslopress, and to what extent was the use of news wires instrumental in influencing this development?
These hypotheses were derived with some modifications from Donald L.
Shaw (1967: 3-12) who was among the first among communication scholars
to suggest a connection between the use of the news wire and a bias inpolitical reporting. He investigated 147 Wisconsin dailies in Presidential election years between 1852 and 1916 and found a marked drop in political bias
between 1876 and 1884, and since then a steady low level of bias. This trend
was even observed in election news. By comparing wired news stories withstories written and edited by the newspapers themselves Shaw found thatnews agencies were clearly less biased than newspapers. The bias, however, in both kinds of content decreased over time for as the use of wired
news went up, the party bias went down.
American scholars have since challenged many of Shaw’s interpretations.
The professional consensus among communication scholars was most recently
shaken by Richard Kaplan’s findings that Mid-West papers had a bias in theirpolitical reporting until the end of World War I and well after the news wires
had come into common use (Kaplan 1997).1 The chain of causality, which
Donald Shaw had suggested, was broken, but his findings of biased andunbiased political reporting in Wisconsin newspapers are still valid, if incomplete.2
Shaw’s hypothesis was not applicable to the Norwegian condition, as isclear from the introductory chapter to this section. The multi-party press was,123SVENNIK HØYER & JOHN NONSEID

according to the history of the Norwegian press, an established tradition forabout a century between the early 1880s and the 1980s (Høyer 1995: 264378). ‘Objectivity’ – by contrast to political commitments – requires an outsider’s look at news events where the outcome of events is inconsequential
and relative to the position of the observer. We had, consequently, to findanother approach to study the advent of the modern and the ideologicallymore detached journalism in Norway. This approach we found in the styles
of presentation and more specifically in the methods of storytelling or in thedramaturgy of news.
We assumed that forms of presentation interfere less with content than
the norms of journalistic objectivity. The qualifier ‘less’ ought to be emphasised because objectivity and certain forms of storytelling belong to the socalled ‘news paradigm’ which emerged gradually in the US over approximately seventy years from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s. As was
discussed in the introduction to this book the paradigm comprises interviewing, objectivity and the presentation of news. ‘Objectivity’ is a central tenetin the news paradigm, but not the only one, as contributions to this anthology demonstrate. Stensaas (1986-87: 55, 58) found in a sample of American
newspapers 1865-1934 close statistical relationships between measures ofincreased ‘objectivity’ and the use of inverted pyramid constructions. But therelationship was not complete. Over time the use of the inverted pyramid
forged ahead of other elements in the news paradigm, like a ‘balanced’ useof information sources.
There were further limitations and specifications to our project. The four
leading Oslo newspapers that were chosen represented four different politicalpersuasions.3 They were studied during a composite week in five time cuts:
1908, 1915, 1920, 1930 and 1940, beginning with the first edition each year.
The newspapers were chosen in part because of their reputation, in one
way or another, as innovators in Norwegian journalism. We assumed thatthe first signs of the American style of news journalism being introduced to
the Norwegian press at the beginning of the 20th century would probably bedetected among these four papers.
The five time cuts were consciously chosen to reflect the situation before
World War I and to stretch the period beyond 1925, the year so far mentioned – with some authority – when modern news journalism supposedly
had a breakthrough in Norway (Roksvold 1997: 69) to the onset of the WorldWar II. The Norwegian press reported World War I mainly by news wires, as
our data will demonstrate. So, if it were true that the use of news wire influenced journalism, 1915 would be an important year.
A composite week was constructed for each time cut in which all stories
in the four newspapers were classified and coded.4 The unit, both for coding and analysis, was the whole article irrespective of its size. The wholearticle rather than the paragraph is, in our opinion, the unit that best reflects
editorial decisions in print journalism. Also the whole text is needed whenstory structure is the object of analysis. We assumed that the number of units

124THE HALF-HEAR TED MODERNISATION OF NORWEGIAN JOURNALISM 1908-194 0

in our analysis varying from 1129 to 2141 texts between 1908 and 1940 would
compensate for the variances in the size factor.
The question of unit size in measuring content qualities – whether words,
sentences or column inches versus stories – was discussed in the early literature on content analysis by Berelson (1952), and by Budd, Thorp andDonohew (1967). One of their conclusions is that measurement by column
inches and by the counting of articles gives equivalent results as reportedby Stensaas in this book. The fact that the variance in story length seems todiminish over time supports this point of view. Thore Roksvold (2001) foundin a sample of five newspapers that differences in the length of articles evenedout between 1903 and 1993; smaller articles became longer and longer articles became shorter. The number of notices fell from 314 to 100 while theaverage number of words per article went up from 120 to 196 or by 63 percent
during this period (Roksvold 2001: 63).5 The trend towards more standard
sized articles may have been caused by the use of more headlines, also forsmaller articles, during the period. How this trend in turn affected contents
or story structures may only be guessed so far, our data give further hints.

Increased Journalistic Activity
The internal history of the Norwegian press from approximately the 1870s
reflects an international trend in the steady increase of more efficient factorsof production. Circulation figures began to rise exponentially from 1880 until
1920 following lowered postal rates, cheaper newsprint made from pulp anda rapidly improved print technology, as reported in this volume.6 An expanding reader market allowed for a steadily increased competitiveness in lowered copy price and subscription rates as well as in an increased volume ofeach edition and in the scope of journalistic coverage. This is reflected in
Figure 1, which documents the number of articles in our four Oslo papers
during a composite week between 1908 and 1940, specified for self madearticles produced by journalists in the four newspapers, as well as for
newswires produced by telegram bureaus.
As we see from the figure, the increase in the total number of articles iswholly due to an increased production of copy from the editorial staffs. The
use of wired news increased as expected from 1908 to 1915, almost balancing the number of stories originating from home during the war. The use of
wired news after 1915, however, declined unexpectedly in frequency from536 (47 per cent) in 1915 to 334 (16 per cent) in 1940. Some of this decline
may be caused by the fact that journalists had been given instruction in theart of rewriting or turning wired copy into their own stories. The Norwegian
Telegram Bureau (NTB) had, from 1900, started to telephone wired news
directly to the larger newspapers, giving a fuller account of the details

125

SVENNIK HØYER & JOHN NONSEID

Figure1. Newswire and Self Made Stories 1908-1940 (absolute numbers)

2 500
Total

2 000
Self made

1 500

1 000

500
Newswire

0
1908

1915

1920

1930

1940

(Giverholt 1967). This may some times have inspired the ‘rewriter’ to forget
his original source.
The increased volume of articles in the press is in turn correlated to anincreased number of journalists (Høyer 2003) as well as to a more active
journalism as demonstrated below in Table 1. The table shows some main
methods that journalists used to retrieve information. ‘Passive journalism’ isdefined as articles derived from documents received in the editorial officewithout any additional efforts by journalists to collect more information fromoutside sources. ‘Passive journalism’ also includes reports from public meetings and the Storting (parliament) where journalists cannot intervene in theevents reported. ‘Active journalism’, by contrast, includes attributions to named
persons or authorities interviewed and reportage based on interviews andother active means of collecting information. ‘Active journalism’ also includes
observations of events that need to be transcribed or authored, like features.
Gunilla Lundström (2004: 110) quotes a more demanding definition of ‘active journalism’ given in 1931 by one of the pioneers in Swedish journalism,
Ewald Stomberg. Active journalism, he said, is the news that the newspaper
has found by its own efforts, in contrast to what newspapers report without
any toil on their part. Lastly, ‘comments’ in our classification include: editorials, reviews, and backgrounds.
As we see from Table 1, the proportion of passive journalism has morethan halved from 77.7 percent in 1908 to 35.9 percent of articles in 1940.
‘Active journalism’, by contrast, increases from a mere 4.4 percent in 1908 to
almost half of stories, or to 48.1 percent by 1940. The proportion of comments remains almost the same throughout the period: 17.7 percent in 1908
compared to 16 percent in 1940 without depicting any clear trend in theintervening years.

126THE HALF-HEAR TED MODERNISATION OF NORWEGIAN JOURNALISM 1908-194 0

Table 1.

Stories in Four Oslo-papers According to Methods of Retrieving
Information and Comments. Self-produced Stories 1908-1940

Year

1908

1915

1920

1930

1940

Passive
ActiveComments

77.7
4.6
17.7

71.4
6.5
22.1

73.7
7.3
18.9

66.0
11.6
22.3

35.9
48.1
16.0

N = 100%

690

597

772

1 062

1 806

For Stockholm Gunilla Lundström (2004: 114) found for 1915 and 1916, bya slightly different definition of ‘active journalism’, a great variance amongnewspapers in their proportion of ‘active journalism’ ranging from 64 percent of content to “very little”. This seems to make the Oslo-papers morepassive by comparison. For a longer period and with a different definitionof ‘active’ journalism Thore Roksvold (2001: 68) has classified the use ofsources of information in his sample of five newspapers, but he still corroborates some of our main findings. He found that the use of verbal sources,
alone or in combination with either observations or documents, has morethan doubled from 26 percent of stories in 1903 to 59 percent in 1993. The
same trend turned up in a content analysis of three of the newspapers inour sample (Arbeiderbladet, Dagbladet and Aftenposten) during the mid-war
period. Between 1919 and 1939 the amount of ‘active’ journalism increased
from 15 percent of articles to 29 percent (Karlsen, Lie, Moe, Ulstein andWinsvold 1995). These authors used basically the same method as ours but
they had a more restrictive definition of ‘journalistic activity’, and also a smaller
sample of newspapers.
Even if the data varies in methods and quality they give a consistent picture of increased journalistic activity and the use of new methods and genres, which requires both more efforts and ingenuity from the journalists before
they can write their stories.

Topical Structure
It is reasonable to expect that when the available space and number of journalists increase and journalists are more active in collecting news, the variety of topics in journalism will expand. The impression of variety, however,depends on how many categories you include in your index. A standard
scientific index of news content does not to our knowledge exist, so wecompiled our own. We settled for eight broad topical areas of editorial attention. The basis for calculations is the number of stories for each time cut
coded according to their main topic, as shown in Table 2.

127

SVENNIK HØYER & JOHN NONSEID

Table 2.

Self Produced (non-wired) Stories 1908-1945 According to Topics inFour Oslo-dailies (percentages)Year
Accidents
Crime
Public affairs
Politics
EconomyWar
Sport
Culture &Entertainment
N = 100%

1908

1915

1920

1930

1940

6
9
37
25
11
–
2

3
10
37
20
14
4
6

4
9
38
22
13
–
8

4
11
41
13
11
1
10

4
4
37
10
9
7
15

10

6

8

9

14

690

597

772

1 062

1 806

Table 2 gives an impression of a rather stable structure of topics within therange of our categories. The most noteworthy changes are a decrease in the
proportion of attention given to politics by 15 percent, and a steady increaseof sport reportage by 13 percent. Sport, in 1908, was a marginal topic compared to both 1930 and 1940. The other categories vary by five percent orless and do not depict a consistent pattern over time. This does not mean
that, for example, the content of politics and public affairs has diminishedin the number of stories; only that the expansion of available space has by
1940 favoured ‘sport’ and ‘war’ over politics and public affairs.
Since news is often defined as reports of disrupted social routines it was
natural to include ‘accidents’ and ‘crime’ in our index of topics. On the other
hand ‘public affairs’, ‘politics’ and ‘economy’ are areas usually covering events,
important as well as trivial, outside the private sphere. These are events thatare regularly reported in order to inform readers of the state of affairs outside their circle of regular acquaintances as they may affect their life andwelfare. ‘Sport’, ‘culture’ and ‘entertainment’ are less socially serious topics,
but possessed with a high degree of reader attraction and fascination.
Table 3.

Wired Stories 1908-1945 According to Topics in Four Oslo-dailies(percentages )

Year

1908

1915

1920

1930

1940

Accidents
Crime
Public affairs
Politics
EconomyWar
Sport
Culture &Entertainment

11
12
36
25
14
3
1

12
3
37
10
7
58
–

13
10
38
28
7
12
2

18
17
41
26
19
–
6

17
1
37
20
9
30
6

3

1

1

2

1

N = 100%

439

539

426

339

334

128

THE HALF-HEAR TED MODERNISATION OF NORWEGIAN JOURNALISM 1908-194 0

There were two major periods of armed conflict in Norway’s proximity,
during the three decades of our time cuts; World War I and the Soviet-Finnish
Winter War 1939-1940.7 So ‘war’ is one of our categories of content. A rather
curious detail in Table 2 is the small attention given to ‘war’ in 1915 in the
self-produced articles. The absence of ‘war’ in 1908 and 1920 are easier toexplain. An explanation of the low frequency in 1915 is given indirectly by
the high rate of news wires (48 percent of all stories), which carried the mainburden of battle and war information in 1915; indeed 58 percent of news wires
concerned World War I. Further details can be read from Table 3.
From Table 3 we see that accidents are more often reported in wired news
than in the self made copy (table 2). The reporting of politics and economy
has about the same proportion in both kinds of content.
The eight categories (in tables 2 and 3) do limit the ability to recording
more minute varieties of contents. Thore Roksvold (2001: 64) used twice as
many or 16 topical categories, and he confirms our main impression of arather stable topical structure in newspaper contents.

Modes of Story Telling in News
Modern news journalism gives journalists a kind of paradoxical autonomy(Høyer and Lauk 2003). The introduction of interviewing, for example, gave
journalists the decisive initiative in collecting and evaluating information. But
then, the news story is said to gain in prestige by the number of authoritative sources consulted and attributed for facts, which ultimately conceals theopinions, insights and abilities of journalists, as well as their personal responsibility for the article. The journalist should not, by the standards ofobjectivism, intervene in the story. Modern news journalism underscores thisimpersonal character in that presentation first gives the gist of the news event,followed up by explanations and details in a falling order of importance.
This, in short, is the ‘relevance structure’ as defined by the Dutch linguist
Teun van Dijk (1988b: 78). The more common name in journalism is the‘inverted pyramid’, or simply the ‘pyramid’, which has been known in American journalism since the 1860s (Mindich 1998). Julius Reuter informed hiscorrespondents in 1883:
It is requested that the bare facts be first telegraphed with the utmost promptitude, and as soon as possible afterwards a descriptive account, proportionate to the gravity of their incident (Read 1999: 106).

This is a short recipe for the ‘inverted pyramid’ where all the essential information is given in the headline and in the first paragraph, the so-called lead.
The methods of modern news journalism through stressing facts and avoiding generalisations and predictions became an antithesis to the opinionated129

SVENNIK HØYER & JOHN NONSEID

press. Party papers, for instance, had a network of information sources invarious professions and walks of life, which basically agreed with the political philosophy of the newspaper. Committed journalists could not be ‘balanced’ in their choice of sources or detached in their presentation without
ruining the formulae of politically attached journalism. This was probably
the situation in Norway at the beginning of the 20th century.
Modern news journalism in wired news may be seen in this context as a
Trojan horse, which was inadvertently smuggled into the party press. This is
not, however, a question of ‘either-or’. The omnibus or multi-purpose andambivalent newspaper becomes impossible only in totalitarian systems. Thereis still some room within a multi-party press for variations of style between
papers, even some room for experiments.
The following two stories from the conservative Aftenposten more or lessfollow the rules of modern news journalism with an event-focused lead:
Four Finnish hospitals bombed by Soviet-Russian planes.
Flysheets circulated in Leningrad: “Stop the war”
In addition to the hospital in Nurmes, where 19 persons were killed by Russian bombers, three other hospitals were also attacked by Soviet-Russian planes.
Easily detectable red crosses marked all hospitals. Altogether seven nurses
have been killed. (Aftenposten January 24th 1940).

There then follows some details about political life in Helsinki, reactions in
The Hague and a separate wired story from Moscow under the same twoheadlines. This article contains several related stories referring to the samewar, but the most dramatic news is given a clear priority. The major part ofthis composite story was not identified as wired. It may be a combination ofreports from Aftenposten’s own correspondent and the telegram bureau (NTB).
The dateline Helsinki January 24th gives only an indication.
There were many hybrids of inverted pyramid and stories told chronologically throughout the period of 1908-40: the headlines in three or four
decks gave the most important news in capsule form, while the main text
opened either with information about sources of information or with what
had happened earlier, before the news story really begin.
The following notice from Arbeiderbladet in 1930 illustrates a more typical ‘inverted pyramid’:Well-known burglar caught
The well-known burglar Skrede who early yesterday morning escaped fromprison, was caught in the afternoon when he came strolling near the municipal cleansing department where he met two constables hunting for him. He
did not resist when taken back to prison. Most of the police force searched
for this dangerous criminal yesterday. (Arbeiderbladet January 30th 1930).

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Stories written according to the formulae of modern news journalism wereabhorred as vulgar when they were introduced in Europe at the end of the
19th century. Interviews were seen more as an abrupt and unwelcome invasion of privacy, than as a polite conversation (Silvester 1993). The old European traditions of journalism (German, French or Central-European) was
closer to essay writing, to enlightenment, to traditional methods of story telling,or simply to more unstructured ways of just telling news. The most important reason for publishing newspapers by the end of the 19th century was
still a way of making opinions public, and thereby influencing power holders and establishing the proper facts of social life.
In addition to the ‘inverted pyramid’ above we have identified two othercategories of story structure or dramaturgy closer to the European tradition:the ‘diamond’ kind of news story structure and the ‘quadrangle’ as a category
for residual cases.
The story line at the beginning of the 20th century in journalism gave moreemphasis to chronology and sometimes to colour and drama in presentation. The ‘diamond’ equals the classical mode of story telling: First introduce
the actors, scene and plot, then expand the story to a dramatic climax, andfinally wind it up by a concluding statement, which brings the audience backto the present. The following story is a prime example of a ‘diamond’ fromthe Swedish newspaper Falu Kuriren October 10th, 1910. Our quote is takenfrom Jan Ekecrantz and Tom Olsson (1994: 117-19).
On board the ship Signe from Åland, which for the time being is harboured
near the town square of Maria, an awful incident occurred. Two brothers
Johansson own the ship.
The older brother came late at night on board in the company of some
women, who started to make much noise. When the younger brother told
them to keep quiet, the older brother hit him with an iron rod, followed byseveral cuts from an axe. Passers-by hurried to pacify the bully, and thewounded was taken to the Serafihospital.
His condition is critical and one cannot say for certain if his life can be
rescued.

This way of telling a story would hardly be recognised as news today but, as
we shall soon see, it was commonly applied in journalism some decades ago.
The third category, which we have named the ‘quadrangle’, comprises
all stories, which do not belong to the other two categories. This implies
that the ‘quadrangle’ type contains other genres, which were evaluated asirrelevant for news journalism. The ‘quadrangle’ stories are, as news,
unfocused and lacking a detectable dramaturgy, as Halliki Harro Loit points
out in her chapter on Estonia. The ‘quadrangle’ stories are comparatively long,so we shall comment on the content rather than translate it directly. Thore
Roksvold (1997: 69-71) gives an example from Tidens Tegn of a typical ‘quadrangle’ story of the soccer Cup Final in October 10th 1919.

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The Norwegian Cup in soccer.
Odd, Skien Norwegian champion, Beats Frigg 1-0

The headlines give the kernel of the news story, but then a longwinded introduction follows.
The main text starts with a description of the weather as the train pulls
out of the railway station in Oslo, with details of the passengers, stations
passed en-route and of how sunshine changes to snow before the train reaches
its destination. This is followed by some information about the public, thearena and how the teams entered it. The report of the match starts only inparagraph six, and then summarises it in chronological order in a further six
lengthy paragraphs. The reporter ends the story with an evaluation of theperformance of the two teams in two paragraphs. He did not report his return trip to Oslo.
This article relates two stories: a travelogue consisting of 226 words or 29
percent of the text, followed by a report of a soccer match in 444 words,
occupying 56 percent of the text, ending up with an integrated evaluationin 116 words, taking 15 percent of the text.
The following article has the same characteristics of two intertwined stories (Aftenposten February 3. 1950):
A researcher of cancer coming home from America

The story opens with the description of the call of an America liner “Oslofjord”
at the port of Bergen. Among the passengers was Dr. Liverud from the National Cancer Institute coming home from a study trip to the US. The article
then gives details of his trip, interchanging information about the sailingthrough the Panama Canal, with visits to several renowned clinics. After awhile the interview arrives/focuses at what seems to be the main topic: thetreatment of cancer. The journalist ends the interview with an open question about the distribution of cancer in the American population, which produced some vague impressions from Dr. Liverud who apparently did notknow about the distribution. The attitude is deferential throughout the story.

Data Analysis
Table 4 demonstrates the development in the dramaturgical form of news
stories in our four newspapers 1908-40. The most striking impression is theconsistent differences between wired and non-wired stories: The news agencies as expected seem to be in the lead, in more than one meaning of theword ‘lead’, away from the ‘quadrangle’ towards the ‘inverted pyramid. The
next strong impression, however, is that 1940 in most respects breaks a trend
between 1908 and 1930, especially by giving a higher than expected proportion of ‘quadrangle’ stories. A consistent and linear development towards

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more structured news stories (pyramid + diamond) was apparently broken
in 1940.
The use of the ‘inverted pyramid’ in non-wired stories increased tenfold
from 1908 (3 percent) to 1940 (32 per cent). The use of the ‘pyramid’ in wired
stories by contrast increased by five-fold to 57 per cent of all stories in 1930
and then fell by 20 percent to 1940. When we compare wired stories with
non-wired we see that in all time cuts wired stories were more often written
in the ‘pyramid’ form.
We cannot discover any clear trend for the ‘diamond’ form of news-stories: The non- wired stories were still dominated by the more dramatic ‘diamond’ form of storytelling up to 1930 but then the form almost disappeared.
The ‘quadrangle’, by contrast, decreased remarkably to 1930 and was replaced
mainly by the ‘inverted pyramid’. Quite unexpectedly, news stories in 1940
became more unstructured, according to our definition. The ‘quadrangle’
dominated.
Table 4.

Stories in Four Oslo-papers According to Genres of Presentation.
Self-produced (non-wired) and Wired Stories 1908-1940(percentages )

Year

1908

1915

1920

1930

1940

Inverted pyramid (non-wired)
Inverted pyramid (wired)

3
12

8
23

10
30

16
57

32
37

Diamond (non-wired)Diamond (wired)

46
19

56
15

52
26

57
13

25
5

Quadrangle (non-wired)
Quadrangle (wired)

51
69

36
62

38
44

27
30

43
58

N = 100% (non-wired)N = 100% (wired)

690
439

597
536

772
426

1 062
339

1 806
334

The only reasonable interpretation we can give for the break in most of thetrends in 1940 is the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. It was the event most frequently referred to in foreign news in our six sampled days from January
and February 1940. The ‘war’ category made up 30 percent of wired stories
and 7 percent of non-wired stories. The majority of the war stories were longwith a composite character, as in our example above. The winter campaign
left a deep impression in Norwegian public opinion and produced a great
deal of comment in the press. The conflict also became a symbol in theinterwar feud between Marxist radicals and bourgeois fascists. Backgroundarticles made up an impressive 14 percent of non-wired stories in 1940.
Background articles were next to non-existent in the other four time cuts:
between 1 and 4 percent of all stories. Much of the major events in the WinterWar could apparently not be reported in a detached, or in an ‘objective’
manner, without comments.

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Discussion
We started out with two questions: When may modern news journalism havebeen introduced to the Oslo-press, and could it be explained by the use of
wired news stories?
Some forms of modern news journalism were practiced early in the 20th
century, but at a low frequency. By 1940 journalism was mostly embeddedin traditional forms and in forms of transition, even though a developmentin the direction of modern journalism is clearly detectable in the preceding
period. Despite a clear trend towards a more active journalism between 1930
and 1940 the use of modern journalistic forms seems to fluctuate too muchto confirm any impression of an established routine.
It is easy to lose the perspective when focussing mainly on certain formsof news journalism, so it is wise to reserve some uncertainty about what moreexactly happened to journalism in general beyond the reach of our categories. Forms of writing and story composition, as yet un-investigated, certainly
developed between 1908 and 1940.
Harland Stensaas (1986-87: 55) in his investigation of the objectivity ideal
as practised by five US newspapers in three sampled periods between 18651874 and 1925-1934 found that, according to his definitions, on average 40
percent of stories were objective in the first period and 80 percent in thelast. Horst Pöttker in his content analysis of the New York Herald in this volume
reports that 26 percent of the stories investigated in 1895, and a similar proportion in 1920, was written in the inverted pyramid form. Norwegian journalism, by comparison, looks like a latecomer, for only by 1940 could thefour Oslo papers be compared to the New York Herald 20 years earlier. Søren
Kolstrup – in his chapter to this book – concludes that the modern form ofstory telling was securely established in Danish journalism by 1940. Denmark seems to be ahead of the rest of Scandinavia in implementing modern
forms of journalism. The Danish press, for example, pioneered the publication of Europe’s first modern tabloid newspapers in the 1860s (Thomsen 1972,
Gustafsson 1996).
Our data, however, support one of Kolstrup’s other main conclusions thatthe introduction of more fact-oriented and top-down journalism is a gradualprocess. No single year such as 1905 for Denmark, 1908 for Sweden or 1925
for Norway marks a sudden and pervasive revolution of new forms andconventions.
Gradual developments over several decades seem to be the normal condition in news journalism. Journalism, more than other forms of writing is acollective project. Texts are hierarchically edited and controlled. New forms
not only mean new ways of thinking journalism but also of observing andselecting the news, writing it up in new formulas of story telling and thenediting it in one or several steps. Routines must be agreed, tried out, practised, accepted by the audience and finally made into a working habit. These
adjustments take time.

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Inger Lindstedt (1998) has analysed an important step in the diffusion of
new forms of journalism. In her analyses of 17 Swedish textbooks, publishedbetween 1917 and 1996, she finds a more or less explicit aversion to modern news journalism in textbooks before World War II. The inverted pyramid was called “American” as late as 1953, while in 1981 it was called either‘international’ or ‘traditional’. As to how long it had been ‘traditional’ is not
yet documented.
Gunilla Lundström (2004) vividly describes the emergence of modern
journalism in the Swedish press 1898-1968. Not only were there early signsof modernism – the first two-column headline (May 18th 1900), the inverted
pyramid (1906) etc. – but also early experiments went far ahead of a morecommon practice. There were venerated traditions to be replaced andresistances to overcome. The more general domestication of new practices
was a longwinded process.
Against this background the news agencies appear as lonely pioneers in
the mid-war period. They were able to some extent to push the non-wired
news in the Oslo newspapers from a diamond form of presentation towards
the ‘inverted pyramid’, and away from the unstructured ‘quadrangle’ until
1930. Then by 1940 the ‘quadrangle’ had suddenly returned in great quantities.
In retrospect our data demonstrate that by 1920 the ‘inverted pyramid’
was visible in the Oslo press, and in 1940 was clearly in progress. Modernnews journalism did not however dominate at any time between 1908 and
1940, either in amount or in form of presentation. The important genres inprint journalism in this period were notices, comments, reviews and reportage. Our data give a firm impression that the Norwegian press was a latecomer to the factual oriented journalism. If the introduction of ‘objectivity’and a detached and independent professionalism in the US came in the 1920s,
an informed guess would be that the same process gathered speed in Norway only after World War II when the broader and diffuse association of
Norwegian publicists split into two organisations clearly intended to defend
the autonomy, the economic interests and social standing and education ofjournalists and editors respectively.8

Notes
1.

2.

Kaplan coded editorials before elections in eight Detroit papers between 1868 and 1916
and found a gradual drop in the rate of biased editorials in Election campaigns from 81%
in 1868 to 52% in 1892 and to 17% in 1916. The proportion of biased news space in
Presidential election years, however, was much lower, and the trend was not as consistent as for editorials, it fluctuated between 15 % in 1868 to 40% in 1896, to 14% in 1900
and to 5% in 1916.
Donald Shaw’s proposition more generally about a direct link between technologicalchange and journalism has also been strongly disputed by Michael Schudson, as will be* We want to thank the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo for support to the coding of news content and data.

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

136

learned from his introductory essay to this collection. Schudson (2001) maintains thatthe idea of ‘objective journalism’ borrowed heavily from current philosophical trends ofPragmatism at the beginning of the 20th century in the American society, which idealized
objective facts and uncommitted professional discretion. Schudson (1978) dates the beginning of ‘objective reporting’ to the 1920s.
The papers chosen were a cross section of the party press typology at the time, though
not reflecting the relative strength of the different party presses. The chosen papers were:Aftenposten (conservative), Dagbladet (liberal), Social-Demokraten/Arbeiderbladet (socialist) and Tidens Tegn (liberal-conservative). Tidens Tegn represented a rather small splinter party, but on the other hand, it was well known as an innovator in journalism, formany years with a circulation only peaked by Aftenposten. Social Demokraten (from 1923
Arbeiderbladet) was owned by the national Labour Party, its editor elected by the party
convention together with the chairman and the central committee. Dagbladet bragged atbeing the main organ for the liberal party, but was so only unofficially. The other two
papers were family owned for most of the interwar period. Tidens Tegn (liberal/conservative) was started in 1910. So for this paper the first year investigated was 1910.
Only the six workdays were coded. By common agreement, Sunday editions were abandoned in the Norwegian press from 1923. A ‘composite’ week is constructed by startingwith a chosen day, say Monday, in the first sampled week, then picking the Tuesday thenext week, and so on until every weekday is covered, The reason for spreading out the
weekdays in this fashion is to reduce the risk of one single event to dominate the content.
Roksvold’s sample consisted of Dagbladet, a large Oslo-paper (also in our sample),
Adresseavisen, a large regional newspaper, Gudbrandsdølen and Nordlys, two medium
sized local newspapers, and Sunnhordland, a small local newspaper
The source material for estimated total circulation figures are the statistics on circulated
copies by the postal service. Parallel trends have been observed both in the US, Denmark, Finland and Norway. See DeFleur (1972: 21), Thomsen (1972: 172), Tommila andSalokangas (2001: 25)
Our sample covers January and February 1940. The German attack on Norway April 9th
and the ensuing campaign for six weeks was not expected in Norway, and out of sightfor the four Oslo-papers in our period of analysis.
In 1946 a trade union for journalists was established, and in 1950 the editors followed
suit and established the Norwegian Editors Association. In 1951 a one year course injournalism was introduced, the first in Norway, and in 1965 a regular two-year course at
the college level was started, financed by government means. See Rune Ottosen (1996).

Germany

Comments on the German Traditionof News Journalism
Horst Pöttker

The first Bible was printed with moveable type 550 years ago and the firstnewspapers appeared 400 years ago. The places where that occurred – Mainz,
Strasbourg and Wolfenbüttel – belonged at the time to the Holy Roman Empireof the German Nation and as such the language in which the newspapers
were written and read was High German. The cradle of the press, therefore,stood incontrovertibly in Germany.
It is, however, a mistake to think that the cradle of journalism must therefore have also been in Germany. The mistake is furthered by the fact thatthe terms ‘media’ and ‘journalism’ are often confused, especially in criticalcontexts. “The press lies!” “Television was caught napping again!” We are in
the habit of complaining this way when journalists neglect their duties andfail in their tasks. At the same time, the newspaper and the television, andthus the media, are only necessary material prerequisites so that journalists
can practice their profession.

Development of Journalism with an Anglo-Saxon Lead
Journalism as a profession, as a collection of knowledge and skills, duties
and rights, behaviour-determining values and norms that serve the task ofovercoming the spatial and social barriers of societal communication andcreating public discourse does not have its origin in Germany. It lies in theold Western democracies, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In the first
decade of the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe, the British author and theprototype of the journalist, was already fighting journalistically for a sober
and independent war reportage and against legal restrictions on press freedom (see Pöttker 1998), which can be considered a characteristic of modern, professional journalism (see Pöttker 2004).
By this time there had already been magazines in Germany for several
decades that went beyond the collection of highly disparate news correspond-

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ence, which was common in the periodical press up to that time and that
had come in from distant places. But significantly, it was a ‘political sensibility’that differentiated these German periodicals from the informative correspondence collections that formed their basis (see Habermas 1962, 1989; Weber
1994: 148-153). The subjects of these reflections and opinions were social‘events’ that should have been the subject of political, not journalistic, regulation. Some publishers, on the basis of bad experiences, even believed that
it was necessary to stress that they did not want to interfere in the ‘affairs ofstate’ of the ministers or anticipate their business (Weber 1994: 143). Nevertheless, by the early 19th Century German publishers imagined themselvesin the position of politicians instead of, as in the Western democracies, developing their own professional self-image. There it was important to provide the information so thoroughly, aptly, precisely and interestingly that the
public could make its own judgments and take up its position as politicallysovereign.
One phenomenon in which the disciple role of the German-speaking
countries can be seen in the development of modern journalism, and recognizable from early in the process, is the emergence of standardized forms ofpresentation such as news, commentary, reportage, or the interview. This
book is devoted to the news paradigm and follows the emergence and diffusion of the news form of representation in four regions of the world. Theinterview, therefore, has been chosen here as an illustrative example. As aninvestigatory technique, it is probably as old as journalism itself. On the other
hand, where and when the interview began to be a sculpted, journalistic
form of presentation and gained acceptance in professional practice was the
subject of historical-empirical research whose results not only refute academic
myths, but also make possible a comparison between the Germanic andAnglo-Saxon journalistic cultures (see Grzella/Pfingsten 1993, 1994).
It is curious that the authors of these revealing studies reach the conclusion“that the interview...gained currency as a method of investigation and as agenre at approximately the same time worldwide” (Grzella/Pfingsten 1994:
112). If their findings are viewed closely, there appears to be a clear lead in
the North American development of journalism over the German and Austrian in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ‘time lag’ emerges
from the titles of their papers. “The Interview: Genesis of a journalistic formof presentation in the USA from 1830-1872” is the title of one, whereas theother is entitled “Genesis of a Journalistic Form of Presentation: The interview in Vienna and Berlin between 1860 and 1900.” The titles appropriately
sum up the results of sifting through thousands of newspaper editions. The
authors, concurring with other press historians on both continents, identify
the first text that was clearly sculpted in question-and-answer format as
occurring in the mid-1830s in American papers. James Gordon Bennett,
publisher of the New York Herald permitted his questioning of a female
witness to the murder of a prostitute to be printed word-for-word (see Grzella/
Pfingsten 1993: 4f). By contrast they found the first interview published in a

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Berlin or Viennese newspaper occurred in 1860, and then only as an acquisition from a correspondent of the London Times (see Grzella/Pfingsten 1994:36ff). Furthermore, according to the results of this research, the interview
reaches its peak in the American press in the 1860s and 70s (see Grzella/
Pfingsten 1993: 48f.), whereas it first achieves its quantitative high point inGerman and especially in Austrian newspapers between 1891 and 1900 (seeGrzella/Pfingsten 1994: 37ff.). Finally, as a further indication of the German
delay in the development of this component of professional journalism, it
can be observed that the English word ‘interview’ was adopted by the German language and was immediately employed as a professional journalistic
term (see Grzella/Pfingsten 1994: 87ff).
The earlier emergence of the interview in the USA is consequently revealing because it is, from the beginning an integral element in the development of the ‘penny papers’, such as the New York Herald (founded in 1835),
that considered the entire population to be customers and readers, irrespective of their political views and education. The ‘penny press’ exemplifies the
emergence of a journalism that increasingly relies on facts, rather than on a
party program, and on comprehensibility and other communicative qualities rather than on long-winded discourses. This emergent type of journalism, in disentangling itself from political interests is only driven by commercial
and journalistic interests. It is this new journalism of the mass press that gives
rise to the news paradigm. But so does the interview, which partly asserts
itself parallel and complementary to the news as a form of presentation. Since
communication is a universal element of human life that is ever able to cast
new light on events and because the presentation of communication in thequestion-and-answer format makes the information easier for the public todigest, the interview thus presented a communicative quality.
Experts of the interview expressly attribute its genesis and acceptance inNorth America to the development of a modern journalism that was interesting to the whole public and independent of party politics: “The development of the mass press with its need for authentic and at the same time simply-woven human interest stories aligned with entertainment and the almost
simultaneous emergence of a non-aligned political journalism independentof state power gave rise to the modern interview in the USA” (Haller 1991:
24). Also in the study of the German-language press, the function of theinterview for a journalism freeing itself from politics becomes clear: “It [theinterview] was increasingly used to look for new information and to verify
data. Politicians especially found such critical considerations to be a threat
and an imposition. With that the claim that politicians merely abused theinterview for their own promotional goals is also refuted” (Grzella/Pfingsten
1994: 113). So it stands to reason that it is possible to interpret the ‘time-lag’in using the interview as an indicator of the traditional connection of German journalism to party politics.

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Germany: The Phenomenon of Journalism as Politics
In academic literature, there is no difference of opinion on the point that
German journalism remained bound to “Weltanschauungen” and politicalintentions much longer than journalism in the Anglo-Saxon countries. While
the opinion lead and party oriented press of the latter was gradually replacedin the 1830s “by a fact-oriented, largely neutral press that had almost completely given up its political postures by the end of the century” (Donsbach
1999: 491), this was not the case in Germany. There, journalists continued
to be inclined “to contribute to the creation of public opinion with criticaladvocatory articles on literary, philosophical, or political topics ... to fightfor their ideas in newspapers and magazines” (Ibid.).
That the consensus on the continuing tradition of German partisan journalism only rests on the names of a few researchers from the same school ofthought – chiefly Wolfgang Donsbach and Jürgen Wilke – does not reduce theplausibility of this thesis upon which our chapter on the diffusion of the news
paradigm in Germany is also based. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the thesis
is essentially supported by numerous studies of individual journalists from either
the period before 1850 (see Wilke 1993) or by the results of surveys of journalists in the Federal Republic of Germany, post-1945 and after the occupying
powers had asserted the Anglo-Saxon news model as the official pattern (seeDonsbach 1999: 507ff.). While two of the essential human characteristics ofsurveys are that of an ‘objective observer’ or ‘critical watchman’ it was madeclear that the Anglo-Saxon news paradigm of ‘objective reporting’ would exclude journalists from the ‘critical watchman’ role.
Rare by comparison, if one disregards media-historical data on the newspaper ownership of parties, unions, and churches, are journalistic-historicalempirical investigations for the epoch of the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. This seems to be an especially important period for the question of the German tradition of political partisan journalism in comparison to
the West. The salient facts are potent. The authentic interview had also gained
acceptance in Berlin and Viennese newspapers by the 1890s. Karl Bücher, theGerman press economist and historian had already formulated in 1914, in viewof the war propaganda in the German newspapers, the ideal of a sober anddistanced journalism that considers its task “to serve the truth and only thetruth and to have a moderating effect on the enflamed popular passions”(Bücher 2001: 221); and last but not least Otto Groth, an editor with extensive
professional experience in the German press, had during the Weimar Republic already sketched the beginnings of an almost strikingly Anglo-Saxon conception of journalism as a mediating profession and “auditorium” (see Groth
1928-30; 1960-72). All of them point to the urgency of viewing in a more differentiated manner, than previously undertaken, the tradition of political partisan journalism in Germany. In doing so it would be necessary to ask notonly about the meaning of opposing tendencies, but also whether they canbe traced back to Anglo-Saxon examples or independent developments.

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On the other hand there are arguments in favour of the continuation of
the tradition of political partisan journalism. Max Weber, who cites Groth andlikewise had experiences with the German press at his disposal, expresslyclassified the journalist, in his famous 1919 lecture “Politics as a Profession”,
as a modern example of the ‘demagogue’ – working under the Western figureof the professional politician - the “party officer” in fact. Weber, in no way
made this classification with a critical intent, but in an emphasized recognitionof the journalistic, as opposed to the scientific, achievement (see Weber 2001).
Such a description of journalism, in Anglo-Saxon social science, as a special
case of politics would have been scarcely conceivable. At the same time,
the conclusion of Weber’s model analysis on the real German journalism of
his time is certainly obvious, but naturally not incontrovertible.

Explanations for the German Traditionof Political Partisan Journalism
In order to characterize the tradition that differentiates journalism in Germany from the development in the Anglo-Saxon countries at least until the
middle of the twentieth century, conventional explanations for the phenomenon of political partisan journalism were presented in the absence of empirical data, and finally, a few theoretical considerations of it were offered.
Donsbach names two reasons, namely the Enlightenment with its inclination toward philosophical, cultural and political admonishment as well as thelater-realized press freedom in Germany (see Donsbach 1999: 490ff.). The tradition of tracing political partisan journalism back to the Enlightenment andillustrating it with exemplary journalistic personalities from this period suchas Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin (1739-92) (see Wilke 1993) is not very convincing. This is primarily because there had also been a period of Enlightenment
in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in France in which the humanistic missionary desire and political zeal were hardly weaker than in Germany.
It is more plausible to point to the different traditions of press freedom.
The freedom of the press had already been achieved in England throughthe abolition of the Licensing Act (1644) and the subsequent passing of theFreedom of Press Act in the same year of 1695 and was anchored in the
United States since 1791 by the First Amendment to the Constitution. By
contrast, censorship in Germany only gradually subsided after the unsuccessful bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848, though the protracted development of press freedom was interrupted by major setbacks until late in
the twentieth century. It has only been recognized and anchored in all ofGermany since 1990. Political partisan journalism, as far as that goes, may
be explained by the fact that for much longer than in the Western democracies, censorship made it impossible for German journalists to express their“Weltanschauungen” and political opinions, which from the beginning has

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been easily misunderstood as the impartial “quintessence” of journalism (seeWagner 1998). Since German journalists were only freed from the shackleof censorship comparatively very late, the desire to gain publicity for one’s
own convictions was set that much more intensively in motion. The German tradition of political partisan journalism since the mid-nineteenth century can, as a consequence, be interpreted entirely as an overdue and thus
more intensive fulfilment of a long-obstructed need.
A more plausible explanation, which posits the delay of German society
in the process of modernization in general (see Plessner 1959), seems evenmore efficient. Modernization is primarily a process of the progressive differentiation of institutions and professions. Systems theories speak of “partial systems” that are concentrated on a particular social task toward which
they direct their activities with increasing endemic logic and autonomy.
If journalism is counted among these systems of action that gain autonomy
in the process of modernization, the oft described ‘other way’ of Germany,the ‘delay’ of German societal development, must also mean a deficit ofprofessionalism in journalism in contrast to that found in those societies whichwere most advanced in modernization. Journalism expressed in terms ofsystems theory, because of the general backlog in functional differentiation,cannot as a partial system have disentangled itself from other systems ofaction, such as politics, to the same extent. Viewed in this manner, the close
connection of journalism to politics represents only one, but an especially
important, sector of the comparatively limited autonomy of journalism inGermany. This connection is also manifest in journalism’s traditionally stronger
overlapping with other partial systems and their logic (economics, sports,
literature, science, war, etc.). In many of these areas the journalism in societies that are late in modernising, Italy and Russia no more so than in Germany, come under reasonable suspicion of being less independent and oforienting less on its own qualities such as relevance or comprehensibility
than, above all, journalism in the Anglo-Saxon culture.
The zenith of the political partisanship of German journalism was achieved
under the Nazi regime. The fusion of the overburdened subjectivity of German journalism with political propaganda may be interpreted as the paradox at which the highpoint also revealed the dangerous characteristic thatlowered it to criminal levels. It is only too clear that the Western occupying
powers wanted to break this tradition after the total capitulation of Germanyin the Second World War. Whether and to what extent they were successful
is now, as it was then, an important question of journalism research.

A Desideratum: German Journalism Before and After 1945
The year 1945 also represents a radical caesura for the chapter of our bookdealing with Germany. The diffusion of the news paradigm is the most im-

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COMMENTS ON THE GERMAN TRADITION OF NEWS JOURNALISM

portant component of modern Anglo-Saxon style journalism and remains as
an excellent indicator of its global diffusion. In this light there should, therefore, be a more conscious effort in the future to provide the answers to two
uncertainties about the historical development of German journalism. First
whether, to what extent, and for what reasons there had already been ajournalism in Germany that was anchored on the ideal of objectivity and on
factors of comprehensibility such as brevity prior to 1945; and secondly amore thorough investigation as to whether, to what extent, and for what
reasons the old tradition of partisan journalism, at the least subliminally,
persists.
In this section we must be more modest. Rudolf Stöber sketches the media
background of German journalism development up to 1945, which is littleknown internationally. Bernd Blöbaum asks how lasting the incision of 1945
has been. He is able to show that the Western Allies did succeed in imposing the news paradigm on German journalism, but that this is not completely
anchored in the structures of editorial organization even today.

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Journalism Paradigms Before 1945
Rudolf Stöber

Preliminary Remarks
Journalism history and media history are always part of general history.
Therefore, media and journalism history are connected with political and legal
developments, with social, demographic and economic history, with cultural
discussions and with technological progress. So I will give some preliminary
remarks on the related subjects first.
First, Germany never was a homogenous entity as central states like France
or England have been – with two exceptional periods: the Nazi dictatorshipof 1933-1945 and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) of 1945-1990.
While the German “nation” started as a political idea or as a cultural concept
deep in the Middle Ages it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that thediscussions on what Germany is, or would be, took on any significance. It
would take too long to discuss this with greater thoroughness, but it is morethan a coincidence that the emergence of the German nation as a culturalconcept and as a political entity ran parallel with the diffusion of magazinesand newspapers.
Furthermore, Germany was organized politically as a more or less feeble, almost non-existent federal state from the Thirty Years’, War's end in
1648, up to the late 19th century. The struggle for political unity is hardlyconnected with our purpose – except in an ambiguous manner. Journalism,
on one hand, has promoted the discussions of Germany’s unification sincethe 18th century. On the other hand so long as Germany did not have a politicalunity its rich cultural diversity was free to develop. Newspaper history inGermany is a product of this cultural diversity.
The concept of newspapers was invented in 1605 in Strasburg, formerly
a free imperial city in the Alsace province of the Holy Roman Empire of theGerman Nation, and spread from there initially throughout the continent andthen all over the world. Due to the cultural and political diversity of some
80 states (1803) Germany had the highest number of newspapers – comparedwith other countries – up to the 19th century. However, there never has been

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RUDOLF STÖBER

a capital press. The informal capital of the press was Nuremberg from the15th to the 16th century and Hamburg from the 17th to the early 19th century.
Between 1815 and 1848 the “Allgemeine Zeitung” (AZ) from Augsburg was
the most important newspaper. In the late 19th century, Berlin began to riseas the key newspaper city. Nevertheless, other cities such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Munich have also been important press capitals.
The press laws were as diverse as the cultures. Some German states had
no press law at all; others controlled their press very strictly. Some states –like the free imperial city of Hamburg – more or less tolerated its press. Thisvariety of attitudes decreased throughout the 19th Century as the press laws
became increasingly federal. With The Confederal Press Law of 1819 (Carlsbad
Decrees) and further press laws of the “Reich” 1848 (the Empire’s constitution), the federal state press law of 1854 and the press law of 1874 of the
newly founded “Reich” the rules of the press became standardized. It could
be argued that until the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, German newspapers enjoyed a relatively free environment – with the exception of the years
of World War I.
In social, economic and demographic history Germany experienced alternating phases of catastrophes and normal developments much like therest of continental Europe. After the great plague of the Black Death in the
middle of the 14th century the economy slowly recovered and grew at analmost steady rate up to the 16th century. The economy plunged temporarily
with the German Peasants’ War in 1524-1525 (when they demanded the end
to serfdom) and went into a semi-permanent state of chaos during the ThirtyYears War in the 17th century. The economic recovery was once again slow
due to the reduction of the population. But after the Napoleonic era andespecially from 1850 onwards Germany became more and more dynamic intechnology and economy. The population grew rapidly, too. Small towns
enlarged to big cities. The industrial basis of the economy widened; theagricultural basis lost its domination over the economy. Due to rising literacy
and rising income, more and more people became readers of the press. The
press – scientific journals, magazines of enlightenment and political newspapers – was an agent of change (Eisenstein 1979).

Invention, Differentiation and Spreading of the Press
Press history usually starts with Gutenberg. His invention (1440s) occurredin a prosperous economic phase after the recovery from the great plague.
The demand for hand written media had increased throughout the Middle
Ages. This demand, led by science, civil and clerical offices gave a fair chance
for Gutenberg’s technology to succeed. But John Gutenberg did not invent
the press. He just invented printing with removable letters and in doing so
improved writing and copying. Gutenberg had aimed at an old market first,

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JOURNALISM PARADIGMS BEFORE 1945

that of expensive books. He thought of his “new art” as the ultimate improvement of writing. Contemporaries were astonished by the perfection, not by
the speed of reproduction (Giesecke 1998). Therefore, his invention did not
automatically start the development of journalism.
Gutenberg started a new cultural technology and also invented the firstpattern of industrial mass production. But the fact that he became one of themost important inventors of all times derives from a combination of fivefortunate happenstances: First he lived in a culture with an alphabetical systemof lettering. Secondly Gutenberg was a goldsmith and was able to use metallurgy and the foundry processes for the necessary technological basics.
Thirdly Gutenberg lived in the Rhine valley where wine production was very
familiar to everyone. His press was derived from a wine press. Fourthly helived in Mainz, a rich trading city where he could borrow the huge amountof money for the venture. Lastly, Mainz lies in the centre of Europe. Therefore, the invention could spread very fast (Stöber 2003).
Hand written books, before Gutenberg, were exorbitantly expensive. Illustrated books cost a fortune. Gutenberg’s bible was expensive, too. One
could buy a city-house for its price. But it was three to five times cheaper
than the hand written and illustrated bibles at that time. And printed books
dropped in price constantly. Craftsmen and even farm labourers could afford Luther’s New Testimony in 1522. But when the demand in the traditional market was satisfied, an economic crisis occurred as the market forhigh priced books fell into stagnation round about 1500. Gutenberg primarily was interested in printing books, as were most printers until the end of
the 15th century.
Market competition in the old market for books had increased too much;some books like Schedel’s “World Chronicle”, printed in 1493, could not besold off properly. The Reformation, therefore, came just in time to rescue
both printers and publishers from business stagnation. Now Gutenberg’s
invention changed its character. Men began to use printing for providing
topical information in serial or semi-serial products like broadsheets, leaflets and newssheets. So, the religious Reformation in Europe created a newmarket and prepared the ground for the rise of journalism.
At the end of the 16th century news leaflets were very common and thefirst serial press appeared. Michael Aitzinger edited a chronicle from 1583 to1598 and a magazine was founded at Rorschach, Lake Constance in 1597.
Johann Carolus of Strasbourg took one step further in 1605. He declared in
his supplication addressed to the Imperial City’s Council that he wanted to
combine two businesses: selling hand written letters of information andprinting (Weber 1992). In both markets the competition was higher andmargins lower than they used to be. His combination of both businesses
invented newspapers. Newspapers emerged from hand written newslettersbut changed their character completely and thus became a new medium.
There were two forms of early newspapers, the political newspapers andthe so called ‘intelligence papers’. The latter were invented in France in the149

RUDOLF STÖBER

early 17th century and imported to Germany in the early 18th century. Theirhigh tide was the second half of the 18th century. There was a great varietyof this form. Most of them consisted of advertisements and private, official
and non-political educational articles. Many of the readers like teachers, clergy
or civil servants were urged by authorities to read the ‘intelligence papers’.
In the 17th and 18th century most of the political newspapers mainly consisted of news since comments and editor notes were not in use. Most absolute regimes did not tolerate opinion. Nevertheless, more and more newspapers were founded. Relative growth of the number of newspapers was thebiggest in the early 17th century because many people were very interested in
war tidings during the Thirty Years War. Absolute growth was the biggest in
the last decades of the 19th century when both population and industry increased rapidly. In the Nazi era the number of newspapers declined.
Figure1. Number of German Newspapers (1605-1945)
Logarithmical scale

Arithmetical scale

10 000

5 000
4 500
4 000

1 000

3 500
3 000

100

2 500
2 000

10

1 500
1 000
500

1

0

1605 1630 1655 1680 1705 1730 1755 1780 1805 1830 1855 1880 1905 1930

From the second half of the 17th century on magazines spread throughout
Germany. The first political magazine was founded in Nuremberg in 1674.
The so-called “moral weeklies”, general interest magazines on entertainment
and moral education, dominated the early 18th century. In the 19th century
mass circulation magazines started. A first example was an imported “penny
magazine”. From the middle of the 19th century on so called “family magazines” and – some decades later – illustrated magazines were introduced tothe market (Wilke 2000).
Printed newspapers of the early 17th century had been very expensive,
but they were ten times cheaper than hand written newsletters. While as manyas 300,000 adults had read newspapers at the end of the 17th century, tentimes as many (3 million) read them at the end of the next century. Also
prices continued to fall during the next 200 years. Newspaper prices werereduced quickly through significant improvements in paper quality as well150

JOURNALISM PARADIGMS BEFORE 1945

as the technology of typesetting and printing that were made throughout the
19th century. Paper made of wood pulp was much cheaper than paper madeof flax. Newspapers were filled with more and more information by news
agencies. Prices, especially when compared with the offered information(amount and quality), reduced dramatically. Printing press machines printed
much faster than Gutenberg’s press. Wages rose in the late 19th century andas a result an increasing number of individuals could afford subscription. A
worker at Krupp’s steel firm had to pay 2.32% of his year’s wage in 1843 foran average newspaper subscription. This had fallen to 0.54% by the end of
the century. Indeed by the end of the 19th century the daily circulations for
all German newspapers are estimated at 20 million. This means, given thatup to three people read each copy, almost every citizen read newspapers.
Figure2. Price Reduction of Newspapers in 19 th Century
Subscription fee decline
1843=100%

In Marks (even before 1875)

100
16

90

14

80

12

70

10

60
50

8

40

6

30
4

20

1895

1885

1876

1870

1860

1852

1848

1840

1830

1820

0
1810

10

0
1800

2

fee (nominal) [1st y-axis]
fee compared with amount of information [1st y-axis]
fee compared with year’s average wages [2nd y-axis]

Changes in Journalism Paradigms
Modern journalism was not invented at once, but has continuously developed since the late 17th century. Five stipulations have to be fulfilled when
we want to speak of “modern” journalism: all of them can be characterised
as necessary but not sufficient.
First there has to be a serial press. “Journalism” derives from “journals” –i.e. periodical press. Journalism emerged from pre-modern professions: Somewere literati, some were clerks, others were correspondents of rich merchants,
some were secret agents of foreign states, and others were residents or dip-151

RUDOLF STÖBER

lomats. The earliest newspapers were directed at the patricians, high court
officials, rich merchants, and heads of states, high clergy etc, the ruling eliteof the early modern states: These ‘pre-journalists’ wrote for a media continuum ranging from personally addressed letters to impersonal news.
Therefore the second condition is that journalism had to emancipate itself from related professions, especially from literary authors. For a great many
literati who could not enter their desired profession for one reason or another, lacking funds, a patron and even a publisher, journalism remained avalued alternative well into the 19th century. However great their need, theliterati did not want to be ‘daily writers’ [Tagesschriftsteller]. Therefore, theyusually stood outside of the economic process of journalistic production. This
placed the potential of ‘journalism’ to be a profession in an ambiguous position that needed clarification: The book business and press business do
not operate with the same economic rules. A book publisher buys manuscripts written by external authors while newspapers largely depend on internal editorial staff. They build the nucleus of journalism.
This ambiguity leads to the third condition in that the press business had
to be separate from the book business. Indeed the emergence of the first
German journalists lasted two generations after John Carolus’ invention ofserial weeklies (and dailies). But most of the pre-modern states did not tolerate opinion printed in newspapers. Serial press was (and is) very easy toprosecute. Early (serial) modern newspapers were something like criminal
suspects who had to report to a police office day by day; so most papers
renounced the use of editorial columns until the middle of the 19th century.
This leads to a 4th condition: Modern journalism depends on the development of editorial characteristics. Editorial personnel have to write and edit
according to the publishers’ principles. In most German newspapers thedevelopment of editing principles lasted until the late 19th century. It largely
depended on the existence of free press laws. In 1874 all German journalists enjoyed an almost liberal press law for the first time.
These four conditions create the fifth. Journalists had to develop a notionof their own profession. This was completed in the early 20th century whenGerman journalists founded their first trade unions. Until the middle of the
19th century there had been no union at all and the first associations had
combined publishers and journalists. The first trade union, only for journalists, was founded 1910 was the “Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse” (RDP).
It is almost impossible to give a statistical survey on the development ofjournalism. During the 18th and 19th century journalists were not separated from
related professions. And most of the journalists did a part time job. The statisticalbureau of the Reich counted 5.500 “scholars, literati and journalists” at the endof the 19th century. During World War I between 5.000 and 12.000 journalists
existed. The statistical bureau of the Reich counted 6.246 journalists in the
Weimar Era. At the same time the trade union RDP argued, its 3.650 members
were equal to 90% of all journalists in Germany. In 1936 the Nazi-RDP counted
15.000 members, but only 6.000 of them did a full time job (Stöber 2000, 196).

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Until the 19th century journalism was a transit job, very often for academic
scholars. A study on journalists in northern Germany concluded that before
1848 most of the journalists had written a doctoral thesis, but after 1848 mostof them did not finish their academic studies (Brunöhler 1933; Engelsing 1966).
The most important newspaper of the early 19th century was the AZ from
Augsburg. Many of its editorial staff and most of its correspondents had aDoctorate (26,2%) or even the second academic thesis “Habilitation” (24,4%).
The high ratio of academic journalists in the 19th century is due to the illiberal political climate throughout the early century. Many academics had towork as journalists because they had no chance of getting a professorship at
the university. Even after 1874 many journalists of the quality press had been
members of the liberal and democratic opposition during the Revolution of1848 and the next years. 40% worked for less than five years at the AZ, 20%
stayed for 10 to 20 years, 23% stayed for more than 20 years. At least the lastsection can be claimed to be full time journalists (Heyck 1898).
A survey on the developments in journalism affirms this result: During
the 19th century the ratio of journalists, who remained journalists for all their
lifetime, increased (Requate 1995, 178). But we have to be aware that while
historians are pretty well informed on the ‘grand’ quality press their information on the small press is poor. Only famous journalists, those of important newspapers and of big cities had a fair chance to be remembered inbooks, biographies or archives of the secret services. Unimportant journalists usually stayed anonymous. So the next statistic is in no way representative for journalism as a whole, but only for “quality journalism”:
Table 1.

Journalists’ Secondary Jobs (before 1900) (Requate 1995)

No other job
Literati

pre 1848

1849-1870

1870-1890

after 1890

47%

64,5%

69,5%

71%

16,5%

13%

11,5%

11%

5%

5%

6,5%
3,5%

Publisher
Professor
Civil servants
Others

5,5%

2,5%

1,5%

7%

4%

3,5%

1%

23,5%

10,5%

8,5%

7,5%

Many journalists in non-quality papers started their career as typesetters or
printers. After 1860 many small papers were founded and the small press
made no distinction between journalists and publishers because many publishers were often their own journalists. If a small paper had both a publisher and a journalist, the latter usually had to be able to write on topicalinterests. These “stand alone” journalists were very common until the Weimar
Era. A statistical survey of the RDP counted 10% “stand alone” out of 3.200
journalists (Stöber 1992). On the other hand, the quality press improved thedifferentiation of the journalistic profession. The editorial staff of newspapers got bigger with more specialized journalists engaged in political, eco-153

RUDOLF STÖBER

nomic, cultural or sport journalism. In the Weimar Era at least four departments were in use at grand newspapers: the political, economic, entertainment and local department.
Last but not least we have to look at the political bias of German journalists. The survey on media history shows very clearly that partisan journalism
was almost unimportant until the 19th century. For example, some excellent
regional studies on the history of German press do provide us with statistical data on journalists in the 18th and early 19th century (Kurzweg 1999;
Greiling 2003). But they do not give any statistical data on the journalists’partisanship – because that was not, at the time, a category. Of course partisanship had existed before 1800. But it had had quite a different meaning.
When press-partisanship was mentioned before the 19th century it was usually characterized in the Thirty Years War as “pro-Swedish” or “pro-Catholics” and in the Seven Years War as “pro-Prussia” or “pro-Austria”.
As mentioned above the history of German journalism started in an era
when comment and opinion was more or less forbidden. Until the 19th century therefore, journalism mainly reported what had happened. The absenceof (modern) partisan journalism was a dominant feature in the early pressof almost any other state, too. But in Germany partisanship was also suppressed during long decades in the 19th century. After a short but importantintermezzo in the revolution of 1848 the high tide of partisan journalism beganwith the foundation of the Kaiserreich and the press law of 1874. Therefore,
Germany’s political system – as in other states, too – set up the frames ofpartisan journalism. And party press was, as almost everywhere else, a stadium of transition. In Germany this stadium just started later than in othercountries – due to the late beginning of modern political liberties.
The party press can be divided in three (or four) groups: 1st, newspapers
that voluntarily supported a political party; 2nd, newspapers that founded apolitical party; 3rd, newspapers belonging to a political party. A 4th category
is no party press at all but better characterized as “state press”: for example
the Nazi press between 1933 and 1945.
The 1st category was the most common. Therefore, most partisan journalist wrote for newspapers that did support a political party. Papers and journalists committed themselves to support a party, sometimes only during election campaigns, sometimes continuing throughout the years. The self-commitment was very common in the liberal and conservative press. After 1874
almost every bourgeois or middle class newspaper supported a party fromtime to time. The voluntary support characterized the press of the Catholic
Centre-Party, too. Nevertheless, all the voluntary supporters called themselves
independent. And all these ‘independent’ partisan journalists were very
important for their supported party, just because the parties were not wellorganized – until the 20th century.
The 2nd category is very small. Some prominent newspapers played a role
as a catalyst when parties where founded. Maybe the earliest German example
is the liberal “Deutsche Zeitung” (1847-1850). Another famous example is154

JOURNALISM PARADIGMS BEFORE 1945

the “Neue Preußische Zeitung” (1848-1939), nucleus of the conservative partyof Prussia. Another newspaper to mention is the “Social-Democrat” (18651871), central organ of the “Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein” – a forerunner of the German Social Democrat Party. A catalyst of the Centre-Party
was the “Germania” (1871-1938). And the “Rote Fahne” (1918-1933) supported the foundation of the communist party after World War I.
Lastly, newspapers created the 3rd category, which was most closely relatedwith political parties. These papers belonged to a political party or an organization that ran the newspapers instead of the party. This organizational pattern
was widely used by the social democrats, the communists and the Nazis.
But in every case there were voluntary supporters of the mentioned parties,
too.
Because the political system is closely related with the structure of theparty press, it shaped the partisan journalism. Between Imperial Germany
and the Weimar Republic five major groups of parties dominated the political landscape: liberal parties, conservatives, social democrats, the CentreParty and minority parties (French, Dane, Poles). The liberal journalists covered a wide range of their own political spectrum – from almost conservative ‘national-liberals’ to almost leftist ‘free-liberals’. Conservative journalists
on one side had to fight resentments against public opinion in their own
party and on the other side strong ties to the political administration boundmany journalists – especially of the small rural press. Journalists of the social democratic press were often part time trade unionists and/or part timepoliticians. Indeed many of them were members of parliament. Many writers of the Centre-Press were, especially in the beginning, priests and therefore part time journalists, too. Journalists of the minority press were also
deeply rooted in their social environment (Requate 1995, 290-324).
Between about 1900 and the Weimar Era approximately 50% of the press
did not belong or support any political party, 2-5% of the newspapers belonged to the social democrats, approximately 10% supported the CentreParty, about 20-25% called themselves conservative, and 15-20% supported
liberal parties. The minority press never counted for more than 3-4%. But
even before the start of World War I partisan journalism was already retreating. And during the Weimar era the quantitative importance of partisan journalism diminished further (Groth 1928).
Due to the late start of partisan journalism in Germany, many journalists
had developed a high esteem of opinion journalism since the 19th century.
But in a certain sense this perception was ideology. It arose from self-descriptions of some prominent journalists, unionists and scientists. The mostprominent of this group was Emil Dovifat, an influential member of the CentreParty, a unionist (member of the RDP), and one of the most prominent scientists in journalism studies in the Weimar Era. He merely created a mythological and normative perception of the ideal journalistic role model andspread the evaluation that opinion journalism is the best journalism of all.
This was an ideological judgment and was due to social conflicts between

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unionists and publishers in the Weimar Era. The journalists did not want tobe recognized as hired “prostitutes of opinion” (Stöber 1992).
On the other hand, during the Weimar Era the number of partisan journalists on the extreme left and right was growing. Nevertheless, the real
number of partisan journalists was much less important than a relatively small
but zealous group of journalists. Besides the hatred of Joseph Goebbels andthe Nazi-press against the Weimar Democracy, the rightist press of Alfred
Hugenberg grew more and more important. But the most important featureof his press empire was the news agency “Telegraphen Union”. Through this
‘Trojan horse’ almost half of the press subscribed to biased news during thelast years of the Weimar Era.
Therefore, after 1945 partisan journalism was discredited. From the AngloAmerican perspective it seemed to have been the leading paradigm of journalism in the Nazi Era and before. When after 1945 many foreign experts
thought of partisan journalism to be an important cause of the political andcultural catastrophe they were neither completely wrong nor wholly right.
The Anglo-American perception of the domination of partisan journalism in
pre 1945-times was not the whole truth. During long periods of the earlypress history partisanship did not matter at all. There had been no dramaticturns in journalism paradigms throughout history but there was a constantchange – due to technical, social, political and economic changes. This was
the same in Germany as it was in other countries, too.

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German Journalism after 1945
Reporting Instead of Influencing
Bernd Blöbaum

Introduction
In German society, the year 1945 not only marks the end of World War II
and of National Socialism; it also represents fundamental changes in important areas of society. The changes which began in that year also pertain tomass media and journalism. This historical date of 1945 not only marks abreak from the past and a new beginning in Germany, but is also associatedwith continuities and stabilizing factors, especially with regard to people andinstitutions. The social historian Wehler emphasizes in his study of Germansocietal history that there is no point zero in the historical process. He refers
to the fact, “that on the heap of rubble of the lost war and under supervisionof the Occupying Powers the options for action were extraordinarily limited; that especially after each catastrophic collapse the forces of persistenceof well-established and institutionalised traditions prove powerfully valid;that human strength to set off for new shores is very limited after such shocking experiences” (Wehler 2003: 973).
This analysis can also be applied to the media landscape in Germany inthe opening years of the post-war period and to journalism in particular. There
has not been a point zero for the mass media and 1945 does not mark a
new beginning for journalism that can be seen as independent of either theexperiences in the Weimar Republic until 1933 or of National Socialism (19331945). Similarly the paradigm of news journalism, which after the end of theSecond World War spread rapidly throughout West Germany, cannot solely
be attributed to the instructions of the western Allied Forces. A foundation,
which had already developed before 1945, was necessary for this diffusion.
This article discusses the elements of continuity and modernity in German
journalism that can be identified with regard to the news paradigm just after
1945, and its representative characteristics.
A secondary analysis must provide the basis for the argument because
empirical research about the history and development of journalistic forms
of presentation in Germany is very limited. It must further be noted that a

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systematic history of journalism is found neither for the period of militaryoccupation between 1945 and 1949 nor for the following years (Blöbaum
2002). Journalism research in Germany is a very young field of journalism
and communication science, of which the predominant aim is to provide thevocational qualification of journalists and which infrequently looks at the historical elements of journalism.

Journalism as a System
Journalism and the mass media, such as television, radio, the Internet, thepress, newspapers, and magazines are frequently regarded as synonyms.
Hence, journalism usually stands for media content. Likewise, journalists andjournalism in German scientific research are frequently treated as being synonymous. Thus journalists are reduced to communicators. This article proposes not to limit journalism to journalists and their actions, but to regard
journalism as a system interconnected with its environment in various ways.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann defined journalism on the basisof the theory of social systems as an analytical category constituted by journalism-specific structures and communications (cf. Luhmann 1984, Rühl 1980,
Blöbaum 1994). The nature of journalism is determined by its structures likeother functional systems of modern society, such as politics, science, andthe economy. The journalism system consists of three structural elements(Blöbaum 1994):• Journalistic organizations: mass media such as newspapers, TV programs and editorial offices, which are primarily arranged according to
topics, e.g. politics, economics, sports, and culture. These form thestructure of journalism at the organizational level.
• Journalistic roles: journalists work in professional roles for which they
are prepared during training and which are continually practiced in
vocational socialization. In the historical development of journalism, theprocesses of differentiation and consolidation of role elements characterize
this professional role. Differing from British and American journalism,
divisions of labour in the editor’s office regarding the role as well as theorganizational aspect have not developed along the lines of activities
seen in the United States and England: e.g. editor and reporter, copy
tester etc. (cf. Esser 1998). They have instead developed along topic andevent fields such as politics, economics, culture, sports, and local issues.
• Journalistic manuals: the organizations and the roles in journalism aswell as the manuals are designed for the production and processing of
information. This is their main function, regardless of the fact that programs can also pursue goals such as education and entertainment.

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Different forms of manuals can be distinguished with respect to journalism. Presentational manuals are forms and techniques for the presentation of contents (such as news, correspondent reports, comments,
interviews, features). At the same time there is a specific journalistic
manual for the collection of information (journalistic-editorial research):a selection manual, which provides a framework for the selection andprocessing of information; and a verification manual, which examines
content for correctness.
In the history of journalism in modern society, these journalistic structuralelements became differentiated in the 19th century and at the beginning of
the 20th century. They are customized for the function of the journalism system that is the current exchange of information for public communication.
Communication science research in Germany focuses predominantly on theprofessional role and analyses the attitudes, self-conceptions and role imagesof journalists. Frequently, political communication is at the centre of attention
when inquiring about the influence of journalists on political reporting. Limiting research to communicators and political communication leads to a deficit of findings about organizational elements and particularly about journalistic programs. When analysing reporting and thereby also news as a form ofpresentation many studies examine exchanged political content rather than
the actual form of its presentation. Thus, there is a lack of systematic studiesof the news paradigm and its implications for journalism in Germany.
The complex definition of journalism outlined here does not permit solely
viewing the news paradigm in isolation, but rather inserts it into the context
of the elements of the journalistic system. Since journalism – like any societal
system – is interconnected with the environment, the conditions necessary
to affect the development of news reporting come into view with the analysis of news as a presentational form. The same applies to journalism and to
the entire German society since there was not a completely new beginning
after 1945. It’s less about identifying fundamentally new phenomena starting from 1945, and more about transitions and continuities, which in sum
represent a modernization of journalistic structures. Therefore, the initialconditions are first described before changing the focus to news as the basisof information journalism after 1945 (for the following cf. Blöbaum 2002).

Initial Conditions for Developmentof Journalism after 1945
Journalism in the German post-war period is rooted in the phases of the
Weimar Republic and National Socialism. Even in the 19th century, the structural characteristics of modern journalism had already developed. Since thelatter half of the 19th century, the press organization in Germany operated in

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a strongly regionalized and localized manner. This is a fundamental characteristic of the present-day press environment. In addition to provincial andregional newspapers, a variety of gazettes and quality newspapers developed until 1933. The Weimar Republic was particularly characterized by awealth of such publications, which corresponded to the extremely fragmented
political party spectrum. Party newspapers and other party oriented newspapers were established and often quickly discontinued. The information
function of these media was clearly subordinate to agitation and influencingof opinions.
The evolution of the independent role of journalists in Germany was morerobust from the beginning of the 20th century. As journalism became a more
distinguishable trade, interest groups formed and a journalistic model developed. Retallack describes this process as professionalization: ”By 1920,
journalism was a vocation that had some, but not all of the hallmarks of afree profession” (Retallack 1993: 210). In contrast, the German historian
Requate sees an ”informal professionalization” (Requate 1995: 398) for journalists and refers to the heterogeneity of journalistic work processes andcontents. During the time of the Weimar Republic, large newspaper organizations maintained an advanced division of labour with journalists for individual reporting fields whereas at many regional newspapers the publisher
simultaneously held the position of the only editor and content for politicalparty newspapers was supplied by party members.
The powerful party press before 1933 actually attempted to inform theirreaders, except that, predominantly, the style of announcement journalism
was used. News selection and the form of presentation remained strongly
linked to political conviction and subordinate to party orientation. Media
shaped the market and were to fulfil different expectations: education,
mobilization, intermediation of information and entertainment. These heterogeneous performance expectations stood in the way of the developmentof a news paradigm, which grants priority to clear information. Instead, different motives for selection and forms of presentation existed side by side.
The time of National Socialism represents a large break for journalism but
did not constitute a complete new beginning. Control of the media and theirusurpation for propaganda purposes by regulating content did not allow space
for the flourishing of journalism during the Nazi era. National press politics
mandated compulsory membership in the “Reichsverband der Deutschen
Presse” (Imperial Federation of the German Press) and banned Jewish andcommunist (and partially social-democratic) journalists from the profession.
This effectively meant the abolition of the freedom of the press and the takeover of the media by the political system.
One feature of journalism was missing: Journalists were not independent
in their decisions. Both the content selection and the form of presentation
were regulated for long periods. The control of journalistic programs by theState and the requirement of journalists to provide propaganda did not permit the flourishing of the news paradigm.

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The cessation of the war in 1945 did not cause a corresponding break inthe mass media production. However, publication of daily newspapers
between 1945 and 1949 was bound to respective licensing by the four Occupying Powers (cf. Koszyk 1986, 1999). During these four years, the western Allied Forces licensed 156 new daily papers in Germany while in theSoviet zone, 21 daily papers received licenses until 1948. The occupying
powers also controlled the broadcasting stations that began transmitting radio programs in May 1945.
The licensing models used by the western Allied Forces were introduced
to prevent the media organizations from accumulating too much politicaljournalistic influence.
Newspapers were slim, often with only four pages, and were sometimes
published only two to four times a week. Thus, there was still little scopefor journalism to flourish. The situation started to improve from 1948 whenthe volume and the number of issues increased. The licensing phase ended
in 1949 and a lot of original publishers came back on the market with theirpapers.
The reconstruction of news agencies, which were set up in each zone ofoccupation by the Allied Forces, were vital for the development of the news
paradigm. They were, for lack of an intact infrastructure, the most importantresource for most of the mass media.
The mass media in addition to the agencies should above all perform two
services according to the ideas of the western Allied Forces: reporting about
the problems of reconstruction in post-war Germany and the relaying of
democratic principles. Apart from their information function mass media at
first were to perform a substantial educational service in Germany after 1945.
The terms “re-orientation” and “re-education” describe the education ofGermans to become democratic citizens.
The Americans, the British, and the French were suspicious of the noticeable influence of the State and politics on the media in Germany (cf. Esser
1999: 665f.), they attempted to embed in the pluralistic Anglo-American tradition by means of licensing and to direct the journalists by way of job training, training courses and schooling in order to implement the Allied conceptions of appropriate news reporting.
Despite all efforts toward a new beginning, the Allied press politics inpost-war Germany relied on a tradition of the party affiliation of the press
dating from the Weimar Republic. The British, in particular, predominantly
licensed party-affiliated newspapers. Party affiliation was also a characteristic of many journalists who, after 1945, re-entered into the profession. While
the journalistic elite of the Nazi era was barred from executive functions,below the leadership level there was no change in personnel. There was avaried mixture of journalists working in the editorial offices after the war:
imaginative newcomers without professional experience, former journalists
who were banned from their profession during National Socialist times, andveteran editors from the Weimar and Nazi eras. After 1945, journalists tried

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to adapt to the new circumstances. A systematic reappraisal of the past did
not occur for this profession.
An important characteristic of journalism in Germany remained in situ fromthe first phase of professionalisation throughout both the Weimar Republic
and the Nazi era in that journalism had always been regarded as a liberal
profession that did not require a formalized education and training. This is
in contrast to the situation in the United States where, since the beginning of
the 20th century, journalism schools have trained prospective journalists. The
principle of on-the-job training is dominant in Germany. This also leads toprofessional standards being predominantly acquired on the job and therefore in the context of vocational constraints.
However, the period of the licensed press did open several avenues forthe modernization of journalism. Young journalists, who entered into journalism after 1945, were not personally shaped by a politically motivated usageof their profession. This increased the chances for a viable independent journalism to develop which placed the dissemination of information into theforeground and the affiliation to party interests and political conviction to
the background. This was vital for the emancipation of journalism from special interests and for the flourishing of the news paradigm.
The interference of the western Allied Forces with the journalistic programs have probably had the most sustained effect with regard to the enforcement of a modern news paradigm in Germany. The supervision of
the press by the State in Germany before 1945 and its proximity to political parties was disconcerting for the Americans and the British. Therefore,
they substantially intervened with common journalistic practices in order
to install an independent journalism. On the one hand, they specified
defaults for reporting, thereby limiting the journalistic freedoms. Sourceswere restricted, and criticism was not permitted with regard to Allied occupation policy or the economic state of distress after 1945. On the other
hand, American and British press officers mandated defaults for the formsof reporting and presentation in the media. Thus, they initiated a modernization of German journalism. The news paradigm was literally prescribedto German journalists.
The implementation was a part of the Anglo-American press policy. A July
1945 memorandum of the British Control Commission for Germany (CCG)
states as default for the journalistic presentation of topics and events, that
German journalists would have to learn ”to present news objectively; to avoid
the tendentious writing of news; to distinguish, and separate, news fromcomment; to avoid the confusion produced by editorials on news pages; andto segregate such editorials, where they belong – in a clearly defined opinion page” (Meier 1999: 252). Guiding principles of this kind were given toGerman journalists by way of instructional booklets and guidelines. These
were of particular concern for those older journalists who had been socialized during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism with the idea thatmedia convey convictions and serve to influence and to agitate. The

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predefinition of fact-oriented information journalism meant that they had to
discard the most basic procedures they had learned.
A program was specified for German journalism, which reflected British
and American concepts. The media should primarily contain facts, and journalists should concentrate on reporting those facts. The editors in Germany
had trouble with this pattern of objective reporting for a long period. The
press officers frequently had to admonish the journalists after 1945 to adhere to the principles of news journalism and to clearly and visibly separate
opinion from news reports. As Meier’s analysis indicated, the party affiliatedlicensed newspapers, in particular, did not adhere to the defaults in election
times, but fell back into the political party journalism of the Weimar era. ”Thedesired separation from opinion and news report slowly approached the ideal
only over the course of the fifties” (Meier 1999: 253).
Even if the British and American press specialists did prescribe to German
editors the strict separation of opinions and news, they did not interfere with
the internal organization of the media nor did they enforce, according to themodel of Anglo-American journalism, a separation between news editing(news department) and editing of commentary (editorial department). Until
recently, it has been common in German journalism for news and commentary to be clearly distinguishable in content and layout despite having been
written by the same journalist. This separation between news and commentary did not become part of the media organization in Germany as an institution. The principle idea developed to be part of the journalistic attitude.
The enforcement of the news paradigm was a long process despite therigid defaults mandated by the Allied Forces after 1945. The dispatches andreports from the first years after the war document reveal just how arduous
it was for journalists to convert their editorial programs from intentions ofmanipulation to a transfer of factual information. Many texts seem stiff likeunadorned protocols. Others openly combine political intentions with pathos.
But it can be concluded that with time, contributions in the media became
more factual, information gained importance over propaganda and news also
became shorter. The news agencies, whose work came under special scrutiny of the press officers, had an important role in this development.
Detachment, comprehensiveness, objectivity and comprehensibility are
central characteristics of the news paradigm. It took some time for practicing
their use and then routinely using these elements.
Critical journalism was not exactly desired after 1945 but it was difficultfor editors to take an active role in the acquisition of information or even towork in an investigative manner. Thus, Allied press experts occasionallycriticized German journalists for lacking creativity and imagination in finding and using sources of information.
The learning process of German journalism was accompanied by a change
in the image of the audience. Over a long period, journalists had viewed
the recipients as receivers of messages. After 1945, German journalists had

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to adjust to view autonomous individuals as their audience, able to form theirown independent opinion on the basis of information and differing opinions.
The western Allied Forces certainly had a very large share in the establishment of factual news journalism. However, it can also be seen that besides this external pressure on one item of the journalistic program, elements
of information journalism had already gained a foothold in German media
long before 1945. At the end of the 19th century, the gazettes’ were oriented
toward the information needs of the readers they reported informatively inshort texts, emphasized current topics and were structured clearly.
The question remains as to the reason for German journalism adopting
the news paradigm so readily after 1945. The principal reason lies in the
Allied Forces in West Germany turning the Anglo-American concept of objective reporting into the leitmotif of journalistic operating principles. Thisdevelopment was promoted by the detachment of the mass media from party
affiliation, which was to have a lasting effect in Germany. The combinationof democratisation of society and its institutions, a parliamentary democracy,competition in the media market, the style-building role of the news agencies and altered expectations of media users further supported the processof the establishment of information journalism. All in all, the modernizationreferred to by the news paradigm signified increased journalistic autonomy.
Today, information journalism with its ideal of objective reporting is firmly
established in Germany. Journalists enjoy rights and privileges in researching and obtaining information. German authorities, for instance, are obligatedto disclose to journalists the information they request. Media laws refer tothe objectivity requirement. In interviews, journalists indicate that they primarily regard their role as neutral reporters. The writing of strictly fact-oriented news is among the indispensable and fundamental exercises both in
the training of journalists outside of the media enterprises as well as inside
the companies. The German Press Council, the body for the self-monitoringof the printed media, obligates journalists in its journalistic principles ”to verify
with due care the validity of news and written or pictorial information for
publication according to circumstances.”

The Changing of the News Paradigm
The news paradigm of the Anglo-American journalism tradition, through theprocess of engaging with the journalistic traditions in Germany after 1945,
gained a foothold before establishing itself as a pure form of news and information journalism. The news agencies, as suppliers of current news, andthe editorial offices in mass media organizations, are the guardians of thisjournalistic program (cf. Wilke 1999, Donsbach 1999).
Changes, however, can be identified with regard to news and information journalism. These changes were putting pressure on the systematically164

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structured, fact-oriented, and information transfer-oriented piece of news.
This process of change in journalism will only be briefly mentioned here.
Exclusivity and freshness of topics increasingly became important competitive factors with mass media. This can be seen, for example, in the process of political reporting from the capital city Berlin where because information is published so swiftly after discussions, press conferences, and journalistic-editorial research, there is often too little time remaining for theverification of facts and the thorough validation of sources. News agency
journalists are exposed to the same pressure. The desire for exclusivity, tosecure public attention at short notice, leads to some media and journalists
publishing rumours and speculations in central fields of events such as politics, economics, culture and sports without being able to specify respectable sources. In doing so, a factual orientation yields to a speculative orientation. Media marketing activities impair neutral reporting in the same manner because mass media frequently have organizing roles of events, which
they then cover. They therefore lack the necessary objective distance fromthese events required for objective reporting in terms of the news paradigm.
Moreover, news journalism is influenced by special interest groups’
instrumentalization and controlling of news reporting. Political parties andgroups from the spheres of politics and economics, but also culture and sports,
frequently utilize PR and media agencies to publicize their concerns in themass media. They use the formal elements of news writing such as structure
and linguistic forms to transport their interests. Such prepared offerings are
frequently published unedited.
A widespread view in German journalism is that entertaining and varied
topics and elements as well as dramatization and personalization are well
suited to win the loyalty of media users. This leads to a dilution of the news
paradigm in the form of infotainment.
Overall, these developments do not supersede the place of the news journalism paradigm. Objective news continues to serve as a point of reference.
However, as a paradigm it loses its brilliance.

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Central and Eastern Europe

The Antithesis of the Anglo-American
News Paradigm
News Practices in Soviet Journalism
Epp Lauk
The frightening thing was that it might all be true…
George Orwell

The character of the political regime of a society shapes the general contextual framework for the media performance and journalistic professionalism. It also frames the conditions for professional behaviour of each journalist, including the limits of their ability for individual decision-making.
This chapter will focus on the characteristics and contexts of the Soviet
type of journalism – journalism in a non-democratic ‘closed society’ under
the strict supervision of the Communist Party (CP) and the State – referring
to Estonia for detailed examples.
The media in Estonia and other Baltic nations initially adopted the AngloAmerican news paradigm in the 1920s (See Halliki Harro-Loit’s study, in thisvolume). The democratic tradition of journalism was destroyed along with thedestruction of the independent statehoods and the subsequent incorporationof the Baltic countries into the Soviet Union in 1940. The whole nature of themedia was distorted with the change of the political regime. The Soviet version of journalism was violently introduced. The media in the region witnessed
the destruction of the existing press system and professional organisation ofjournalists, the introduction of new personnel who were loyal to the Communist Party and the execution of strict supervision and censorship over all public information. The regaining of independence in 1991 made it necessary forjournalists to redefine their professional identity, and created favourable circumstances for re-discovering and re-learning the standards and conventionsof ‘Western’ journalism, including the Anglo-American news paradigm.

Concept of Soviet Journalism
Soviet journalism was a deviation from the Western understanding of journalism in all respects, including its functions in a society, genres, vocabulary,

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professional conventions and standards. The concept of the role and functionsof the mass media in the former Soviet Union was derived from the practiceof absolute superiority and omnipotence of the Communist Party in society.
The most important purpose of the press, first formulated by V.I. Lenin as
early as in 1902 (in his pamphlet “What is to be done?”) was to fight for thestrengthening of the power of the Communist Party. This function, together
with establishing the Communist regime, became a key tenet in the Communist Party ideology as well as one of the basic aims of journalism in theSoviet Union throughout its history. In post-World War II Communist bloc
countries the media were seen as both a direct extension of the party apparatus and as ‘an ideological weapon’ of the party with journalists defined as‘officers of the ideological front’ (Jakubowicz 1992:83).
The mass media were also excellent means for executing the Party’s projectof creating a new kind of human being – homo sovieticus – and to gain fullcontrol over his activities and thoughts. Furthermore, the ambition was todetermine how people ought to think and behave, and to prevent deviations from the ‘correct’ ideological line, as set by the Communist Party of theSoviet Union (CPSU).
Among the main features of homo sovieticus, as laid down in the Programme of the CPSU adopted at the XXII Congress (1961), were unconditional devotion to the idea of Communism, dutiful work for the society, thesense of collectivism, the merciless struggle against the enemies of Communism, and high moral qualities. George Orwell’s description of such an ideal
member of society in his “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is very close to reality:
The ideal set up by the Party was /—/ a nation of warriors and fanatics,
marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting– three hundred million people all with the same face (Orwell 1966:62).

The mass media’s mission was to act as a standard-setter that told the people
how to behave properly and say the right things; their task was to create “anideologically correct symbolic environment, filled with content designed tosocialize the audience to the ideas and values of Communism/–/” (Jakubowicz
1995: 23).
To achieve these goals and specifically, to secure and strengthen the status quo of the ruling party elite (nomenclatura), a complicated mechanismof supervision and control over all spheres of society was established. As
information is a vital precondition of power, the CPSU needed to attain complete control over the content and distribution of public information. Various different means and conditions were created for filtering, rationing, blocking, directing and manipulating the flow of public information.
It is generally believed that the all-embracing control was achieved withthe means of censorship. However, censorship was just one element of amuch larger and more complex mechanism of an organisational apparatus

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available to the Party for supervision and control. Concealment, hypocrisy,
demagoguery, denunciation and fear were among the constituent components of this mechanism. Thus, the main factor that shaped the nature ofSoviet journalism was not censorship, but the Soviet media concept per seand the “fruitful” conditions of the socialist order.

CPSU – The World’s Largest Communication Monopoly
The interests of the ‘paymaster’ are always reflected in the content of thenews media (cf. Altschull 1984). In the Soviet Union, it was the Communist
Party that oversaw all resources of the society and supervised all branchesof production, including the production and dissemination of information.
Thus, the economic control by the Party was built into the very organisationof the socialist economy. The Party allocated the resources, set the tasks andappointed the managers to carry them out. The communist media were directly and fully subsidised from the State budget. The ‘planned economy’guaranteed the necessary supplies for every publication or broadcast andtelevision station, whether or not it was officially identified as Party-managed (Dzirkals 1982: 87). The concept of the ‘planned economy’ presupposedcontinuous increase of production and the over-fulfilment of plans. This also
applied to the Soviet press. Circulation numbers were increased from year
to year, as were the production resources, irrespective of the actual demand.
The approval of the Central Committee of the CPSU was required to found
any media organ (including those formally subordinated to governmental
bodies or various economic or scientific organisations) wherever in the territory of the USSR, or to make changes in staffs, pay rates, layout or frequency of publication (Dzirkals 1982: 87). The huge mechanism of printing and distribution was also a State monopoly. Thus, as Lendvai (1981:25)
put it, “USSR Inc.” was “by far the largest communication corporation in
the world” with the Communist Party leadership acting as the supreme boardof directors of gigantic multi-media companies. Since such an arrangement
liberated the Soviet media from economic concerns as well as made any
economic competition impossible and unnecessary, the media were only
required to concentrate on active propaganda of the directives and aimsof the Communist Party. The economic control was interlaced with administrative as well as political supervision and control.

The Soviet Media Hierarchies
An important factor that enabled both the efficient supervision and direction of the flow of information was the hierarchical design of the whole Soviet

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media system. The hierarchy of the press mirrored the institutional structureof Soviet society. Vihalemm and Lauristin (1997:104) define five levels in
the hierarchy of the press with the upper level of the All-Union CP press,
with Pravda at the pinnacle, followed in importance by the Russian-language
CP press in the Soviet republics and the CP press in national languages. Then
Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) and other youth press and local
newspapers formed the third level. Finally on the bottom two levels are thecultural and scientific publications, the women’s and sports magazines, andlastly ‘Samizdat’ and other alternative publications. However, it was not only
the media channels that were set in a hierarchical structure for there also
existed hierarchies for sources, topics, events, genres, authors etc.
The most authoritative among the sources of information was thegovernment news agency TASS – the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union.
TASS and Pravda were the only sources of official information for the national media. TASS strained and filtered all the foreign information that was
published or aired by the Soviet press and broadcasting. TASS also operated
as “a kind of bloc gate-keeper, a communications centre transmitting, withholding or slanting information” when there were sudden, unexpectedswitches in Soviet policy or world affairs (Lendvai 1981:30-31). According
to Lendvai (Ibid. 30), there was a tacit agreement among the Communist bloc
countries that the news agency of one country reported events in anothercountry solely on the basis of releases by the agency in the country concerned. Lendvai also gives an example where the entire Eastern European
press waited for thirty-six hours for a TASS announcement about the deathof the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
The Soviet Pravda was a standard-setter and model of a Party organ forthe other Communist bloc countries as well. The organs of the Communist
Parties of Eastern Germany, Romania, Hungary, etc shared the same worldview and the same stereotypes and did not differ much from Pravda’s scaleof values and political priorities (Ibid. 92). However, certain deviations werestill possible as for example, the Romanian press was more balanced inpresentation of international news and the Hungarian Népszabadsag published relatively frequently materials on the issues of human interest (Ibid).
For the national and regional media within the Soviet Union in the languages other than Russian, the All-Union broadcasting with its main television
news broadcast ‘Vremya’ (The Time) and All-Union newspapers were thenext important level of sources. National news agencies, working in thelanguages of the Soviet ‘Republics’ were entitled to produce and distributeonly the news of national and local importance.
In the hierarchy of topics, the policy and ideology of the CPSU and theinternal policy of the Soviet Union were followed in importance by foreign
policy and international relations. ‘Correct’ treatment of the issues on thehistory of the CPSU and the USSR were also regarded as information of greatest
significance. Ideological, political and historical topics of All-Union importance could only be presented in one, official version that strictly heeded

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the communist orthodoxy. The producers of such canonised texts as well as
their sources explicitly spoke with the voice of the power holders.
On the lower levels of the hierarchies where the issues of economy, education, agriculture, science, sports etc were covered, more flexibility was permitted and looser control practiced, especially in the cultural segment of themedia. Some cultural publications, for example, such as Literaturnaja Gazeta(Literary Gazette) or Novyi Mir (New World) in Moscow, enjoyed a certain
degree of liberty to critically discuss societal issues. Nevertheless, their nationalcounterparts in the ‘Republics’ could still have problems with censorship while
attempting to publish translations from the Literaturnaja Gazeta or cartoons
taken from the Krokodil (Crocodile), the All-Soviet satirical magazine.

Mechanisms of Supervision and Control1
The CPSU was in the position of monopolistic control over the public wordthat included not only the press and electronic media, but also all kinds ofprinted matter, film production, theatre and cinema performances, exhibitions, advertising etc. In parallel with prevention of the hostile or undesirable opinions, the aim was also to control and direct the formation of opinion (cf. Gunther & Mughan 2000).
In the Soviet Union, the freedom of speech and other democratic freedoms
were declared in its Constitution and repeated in the ‘Constitutions’ of its
member ‘Republics’. However, these freedoms were guaranteed for the Soviet citizens only on the conditions that they were used for “the consolidation and development of the socialist order in accordance with the aims ofbuilding Communism” (Konstitutsioon 1988: 15). If these freedoms were used
in a way that might have been interpreted by authorities as agitation andpropaganda harmful to the Soviet system, the cases were treated according
to the Criminal law. The penalty for the ‘crime’ was imprisonment from six
months to seven years with or without internal exile for a period of two to
five years, or internal exile alone (Kriminaalkoodeks 1990:77).
Thus, officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, and the words
censor and censorship were used only in a historical context or concerning
capitalist countries. At the same time, according to some estimation, theinstitutionalised censorship employed at least 70,000 censors in the 1970s1980s throughout the Soviet Union (Dzirkals 1982: 92).
The CP monopoly of the media ownership, publishing, printing and distribution set the general context for the control over the content of the mass
media and the activities of the authors (journalists, writers, artists etc).
The Soviet mechanism of mass media supervision and control consisted,in general, of two major sectors: the Communist Party authorities hand inhand with the KGB (the Committee of State Security), which constituted the173

EPP LAUK“brain” of the system, and the State censorship administration, operating as
an “executive hand” (Lauk 1999:30).
The overall media policy and the appointments of central press editorsin-chief and top management of publishing houses were decided at the highest level of the CP hierarchy – the Politbureau and the Central Committee
Secretariat. The chief editors of the All-Union newspapers Pravda and Izvestija
were also members of the Central Committee. The Secretaries of the Central
Committee supervised and directed different segments of the media in cooperation with the Ministries and various Central Committee departments.
The largest among these departments was the Agitation and Propaganda
Department that supervised all central press organs, radio and television.
Respective local models were structured in a similar way in the national‘Republics’ of the USSR. However, appointments of the editors-in-chief ofany ‘Republic’ press had still to be approved in Moscow.
The KGB’s Fifth Department (until the late 1960s, the Second Department)
determined most of the topics and issues that were to be banned in the public
texts. This department in cooperation with the state censorship administration also prepared the Handbooks of Classified Data and checked the manuscripts of scientists in research institutions. In especially sensitive politicalcases where the ‘right’ interpretation was extremely important, disclosing
dissidents for example, KGB officers produced texts that were published as
editorial material or as a journalist’s contribution. Direct telephone lines
existed, connecting high-level Communist Party officials and KGB officers
with the editors-in-chief. The KGB also kept secret files on journalists andeven journalism teachers and students (cf. Sükösd 2000).
The most direct executive level of censorship was that of the Chief Administration for the Protection of the State Secrets in Print (from 1990 – theChief Administration for the Protection of the State Secrets in Press and the
Other Media). This organisation was more widely known by the abbreviation of its name in Russian – Glavlit. Similar administrations existed in all
Soviet ‘Republics’ and they were all subordinated to the Chief Administration in Moscow. Glavlit had censorship offices in all the bigger cities of thecountry, special officers in broadcasting and publishing organisations and inpostal services. Glavlit as a whole was subordinated to the Agitation and
Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB
at the All-Soviet level and at local levels. Organisationally Glavlit belonged
to the system of the Council of Ministers, but this was merely an economic
relationship. Glavlit addressed all reports, letters, complaints etc, to the Central
Committee and the KGB.
In addition, the responsibility for the practical censorship was put on theState Publishing, Printing and Book-Trade Committee and the State Television
and Broadcasting Committee, which in turn were subordinated to the Central Committee of the CP. The editors-in-chief and all publishers were accountable to and controlled by the Propaganda Department, the local (cityor district) party committee and Glavlit. In practice, other state institutions

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THE ANTITHESIS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEWS PARADIGM(ministries and their departments, local administrations, legal, cultural andeducational institutions etc) also functioned as the metastases of the cancerof censorship.
A central document guiding the work of censors and, from the 1950s
onwards, also of the chief editors was the Handbook of Classified Data, thelast issue of which was published in 1987 and consisted of 183 pages. A
general practice was to collect and burn all copies of the older version of
the Handbook when a new version was issued. Forbidden topics and facts
included disasters with human losses, everything that concerned the armed
forces, criminality and jails, cases of social unrest and protests, and of course,
censorship itself. The first time that the words censor and censorship were
publicly mentioned in the Estonian media was as late as 1987.
Glavlit was, during the Stalinist period directly responsible for the ‘correctness’ of the political content and wording of public texts. In the middleof the 1950s, the censorship of publications and broadcasts was made theresponsibility of the relevant chief editors. They were provided with the
Handbooks of Classified Data and other instructions, and had the responsibility for the ‘correct’ ideological line of their outlets. Glavlit censors only
gave the final permission for publishing or broadcasting. They communicated with the authors solely through the editors. Numerous complaints from
Glavlit to the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Estonian CP during the 1960s and 1970s indicate, for example, that the editors
often used this position for passing texts that were not ‘correct’, politicallyand ideologically. In the cases of complaints, the practice was to invite theeditors of the publications concerned to a ‘conversation’ (editors also called
the situation as an invitation to ‘the carpet’ or to ‘coffee’) at the Propaganda
Department where relevant instructions and reprimands were given. However, very few of such cases are documented, as well as the instructions andwarnings given over the telephone lines.
In the Stalinist years, Glavlit and the KGB were also busy with ‘cleaning
up’ the libraries, schools, scientific and cultural institutions, and other places
where printed matter was used or produced from ‘anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary and other harmful literature’, which was then burnt.2
Although the mechanism of the mass media control and supervision was
designed to be all embracing and all penetrating, there were also factors that
undermined the efficiency of the whole machinery, especially in the occupied nations and satellite countries. The goals of the Soviet media – to re-socialize and homogenize the population according to the values and interestsof the Communist Party and State – contradicted the collective experience andhistorical memory of people. They refused to identify with the “structures andinstitutions of social life developed by the communist state” (Jakubowicz
1992:88)3 and turned to the private sphere or other apolitical spheres of life
for safety and reliable information. The official media failed to meet the audience’s needs, but offered a ‘virtual reality’ that too obviously contradicted thereal life experience. According to an Estonian sociological survey in the early

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1980s, the readers’ interests were opposite to the official hierarchy of the topics. The most popular issues among the readers were those of family and home,nature, social welfare, ethics, culture, education. Politics and ideology camelast in the rankings (Vihalemm & Lauristin 1997:106-107).
An underground press (samizdat) developed, as an alternative, in manynations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine etc). In others,
like Estonia, the opposition discourse emerged within the official media,
especially in the cultural segment. After the end of Stalin’s reign, the strictness of the control somewhat loosened and an alternative, formally apolitical discourse started to develop alongside the ideological one. An intentionally cultivated metaphorical language became a definite way of expressing
resistance to the ideological oppression and propaganda (see more: Høyer,Lauk & Vihalemm 1993).
During the 1970s and early 1980s, several other segments of the official
media (local press, certain parts of the radio and television programmes)
followed suit. The frequent appearance of the ‘human dimension’ in eventhe most conservative Party newspapers is the best example of this trend.
For instance, in the portrait stories about outstanding workers or prominent
party members their personal human traits were strongly emphasised while
their official merits were given scant attention. In this way, in the official
media, the propagandistic content and oppositional content existed in parallel in the same outlets, simultaneously representing opposite discourses.
From the mid-1980s onwards, the opposition discourse began to surface
more frequently. As a consequence, a significant discursive change occurredin the public texts between 1988 and 1989 that definitely contributed to thelegitimisation of democracy in Estonia.

Bad News is Not News
News presentation in Soviet journalism was completely based on and derived from the main task of the Soviet media – brainwashing the populace
and glorifying the Communist Party’s undertakings. In the press, this propaganda was presented in journalistic formats, including the format of news.
Thus, the main function of the news was not to inform about what happened,but to illustrate the success of Party policy in its enterprise of building a
Communist society. This was also the leading principle for deciding what
was newsworthy. In practice, it meant that only good news was news andanything else was unimportant or even undesirable. In the news, facts werealways interpreted in accordance with party directives, and very often, interpretations replaced information. Omission of relevant information was awidespread practice in the Soviet news presentation. A TASS news item
published in the section of the All-Union news of the Estonian daily Noorte
Hääl in 1986 can serve as a typical example:

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THE ANTITHESIS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEWS PARADIGM

TASS. From Grodno. None of the kolkhozes4 of Grodno oblast has to worry
about the transportation of cattle to slaughterhouses anymore. This work is
now taken over by a specialized transport firm that was established at an
agricultural-industrial enterprise. Transport schedules and routes have been
worked out. In the kolkhozes platforms for loading the cattle have been built.
Now, three times less trucks are needed for the transportation of the slaughter cattle than before the introduction of the centralised transport service(Noorte Hääl 30.4. 1986).

Access to information was limited by expansive definitions of state secrets
and by the power of institutions to withhold information (Mickiewicz 1998:40).
If for example, reporting about a disaster with human losses could not be
avoided, it was done with maximum possible delay and only a minimum of
information was given. Thus, it was next to impossible to get an adequate
picture about what really had happened. Traditionally, a short announcement of the event was transmitted with a confirmation that competent authorities had started to deal with the case. Usually, very little if any information was added later.
There was the potential for the Soviet news policy to become more open
and diverse after glasnost – ‘speaking out loud as a policy’ (McNair 1988:131)– in 1985. However, the mass media remained Party controlled throughout
perestroika and glasnost. The supervising mechanisms were not removed,and glasnost was primarily viewed as an instrument in the hands of the CP
reformist leadership “to make the management mechanism work more flexibly and effectively” (Hochman 1988:36). As an effect of glasnost the restrictions that foreign correspondents had experienced in the Soviet Union werereduced and their conditions for reporting and making current affairs programs became better. There were, however, in 1986 only about forty western journalists in Moscow (McNair 1988:137). Perestroika leaders also set up
regular briefings with foreign and domestic journalists giving more information about political events than ever before. This change was a remarkable
contrast compared with the situation before glasnost, but still it did not meana radical breakthrough of a new information policy in the Soviet Union.

Chernobyl Catastrophe as a Test of the
New Information Policy
Soviet media coverage of the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power
station on April 26, 1986 can be viewed as both an example of supervised
and manipulated news coverage that was typical of Soviet journalism andan indicator of the failures of the glasnost efforts in the Soviet media policy.
Chernobyl released into the atmosphere substantially more radiation than
the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of177

EPP LAUKWorld War II. Radioactive contamination affected all Ukraine’s neighbouring countries and to lesser extent, most of Europe. Experts estimate that in
the decades after the disaster over five thousand individuals will die of cancer (Bittman 1988:11). An accidental radiation emission of this magnitude
warrants massive media coverage detailing information on the key points ofsocietal interest: what happened, when, where and why, post-event operations and possible effects on the natural environment and health for all thoseregions at risk. Estonia is approximately 1500 km from Chernobyl, and theForsmark Nuclear Power Plant near Stockholm a further 300 km. It was atmospheric radiation data from the latter almost 48 hours after the accident
that forced a terse TASS statement to be released to the world and read out
by an announcer on Moscow television at 9.02 pm on April 28 (Gregorovich1996). The statement did not contain any details:
An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of thereactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequencesof the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up. (Quoted by McNair 1988:140).

The same text was the first news item on the accident published in the Soviet press in the All-Union Izvestija on Tuesday 29th April. This was followedby another TASS statement on the next day that was also published in Pravda
and sent by TASS to all the media in the Soviet Union. Although Izvestija
was ready to publish the news as early as on 27 April “the editors /—/ wereordered to suppress a story providing more details of the event” as Professor David R. Marples argues, who interviewed the editorial board of Izvestija
in July 1987 (Marples 1996).
The following section throws light on how the four leading Estonian national dailies of that time5 reported on the accident during the succeeding
weeks, from April 27th to May 15th. Having TASS and All-Union newspapers
such as Pravda and Izvestija as their only sources of the news about
Chernobyl, these newspapers clearly reflect the official information policyof that time. The articles in all four papers frequently used the same wording. The following Table summarises the information that a reader could glean
from the Estonian dailies during the first weeks after the disaster.
It is evident that the importance and consequences of the disaster were
diminished and the aim was to reassure people. The date of the accident
appeared in the press eleven days after the accident and it was not for another seven days till the people in Estonia received their first local information concerning the catastrophe, on May 13th. The Estonian daily Noorte Hääl
and both Russian dailies published the same article under the title of “Specialists are Commenting” that was prepared by ETA (Estonian TelegraphAgency) correspondent K. Zahharov. Quoting the top officials of the Ministry of Health of Estonian SSR the article reassured that no danger existed
and the measurements showed that the radiation was within non-life threat-

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Table 1.

The Paucity of Information Released by the Estonian Newspapers
during the First Three Weeks after the Catastrophe

Where: Ukraine, the Chernobyl nuclear
power station 130 km north from Kiev

When: Saturday, April 26, at 1.23 by
Moscow time (revealed on the 11th day
after the disaster)

What:

Why:

• An accident, in which the 4th
nuclear reactor and some building
constructions have been damaged• Three other reactors undamaged,
but stopped• Only subsequent research will give
answer to this question• Perhaps, some unforeseeable
failures happened• Certain amount of radiation leaked• Two people were killed in theaccident• Over 100 people got injured byradiation• 197 people have been sent tohospitals, 49 of them have got to gohome already• 18 people are in difficult healthsituation• 36 are in difficult health situation• 6 are deadEnvironmental

Health:• The level of radiation has stabilised,
is closely watched• The level of radiation in Byelorussia
is permanently watched• The level of radiation does notexceed the safe norms• Near the reactor the level ofradiation is 10-15 milliroentgens(but not said when measured )• During the first couple of days thelevel of radiation decreased 3-4times• ‘Situation of the radiation’ in thewestern border areas of the USSR isnormal• On the territories of Ukraine and
Byelorussia the levels of radiations
are the same as before• Radiation around the power stationand the town of the station has
decreased 1.5 times• Radiation is decreasing

Post-Event

Operations:• Government commission headed by
the Vice-Chairman of the Council of
Ministers of the Soviet Union
comrade B.J. Shcherbina arrived• Well-known scientists, specialists
and leaders of ministeries and othercentral institutions have been
included into the commission• Liquidation of the consequences of
the accident continues• De-activation continues• The 4th reactor will be covered withconcrete• The 4th reactor is covered withthousands of tons of protective
materials• Special units with modern
technology and efficient equipment
have arrived and started to work
• The work “for carrying out thecomplex of technical measures”
continues• The water is not polluted(All the above quotes from Rahva Hääl ; Sovetskaja Estonija ; Noorte Hääl and Molodjozh
Estonii are translated by the author.)

ening limits. It was also reported that although the radiation level aroundthe power station at Chernobyl had increased about 4-6 times, it still was
not dangerous for people and was not harmful for the fauna and flora. Rahva

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Hääl published a similar article on the same day, but written by its own staff
member6 who interviewed the Chief Doctor of the Sanitary-Epidemiological
Institution of the Estonian SSR. The doctor confirmed that Estonia was notunder the danger of radiation.
It is fair to state that for three weeks after the disaster it was not possible
to gain an adequate picture of the events in the Estonian newspapers in either
Estonian or in Russian. Only two out of sixteen articles on Chernobyl published in Noorte Hääl and three out of fourteen in Rahva Hääl containedsome substantial facts about the real course of events (all presented in Table1). Russian language dailies published only two informative articles eachduring the first three weeks after the disaster. The rest were counterpropaganda articles disclosing the “avalanche of bourgeois propaganda lies”
in the provocative Western media, and information of how people all over
the Soviet Union were heroically helping those who suffered in connection
with the accident. The latter, however, did not contain any information about
the accident or the victims and were focussed, not on Chernobyl, but onother geographical locations.
Glasnost had promised more than it could deliver. The old patterns werestill there, and they were not quick to change. The old hierarchy of sources
had functioned perfectly. The direct voices of the authorities – TASS and the
All-Union media – had served as the only sources of information for the otherlevels of the press hierarchy, even in the immediate localities of the disaster– Byelorussia and Ukraine.
Radical changes would only occur with the collapse of the Communist
regime that caused the disintegration of the centralised media hierarchy, andthe liberation of the media from Communist Party supervision and finally,
created the conditions for a free press.

Ambiguous Role of Journalists
The ideal of a Soviet journalist was not based upon professional, but political and ideological values and standards. A “professional” Soviet journalist
was not allowed to be an unbiased transmitter of news. They were required
to maintain an “active” position and to be an advocate of the Communist
Party ideology (Lauk 1996: 95). The professional duty of any Soviet journalist was regarded to be the “daily concern about the strengthening of ideological influence over the masses” (Tepljuk 1989:122). The professionalismof Soviet journalists was measured by their faith and loyalty to the Party:“The level of political and party responsibility is a trait that characterises his
professional maturity and /–/ professional fitness” (Ibid: 101).
For Soviet journalists, their professional freedom was limited to an
Orwellian understanding of it: “It is the party that guarantees the journalist
the necessary freedom of action /–/. In using the freedom of activity, of-180

THE ANTITHESIS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEWS PARADIGM

fered by the party, the journalist must see to it that this freedom is realized
to the fullest extent in the interests of society. The party has a right to demand from the journalist ideological clarity, definite views and a principledmanner” (Tepljuk 1989: 114). In order to guarantee this, the leading positions in the media organisations were filled with people nominated by theCommunist Party, and in many cases, they were former party functionaries.
The primary aims of professional education were to provide young journalists with a correct ideological position and knowledge necessary for becoming an efficient propagandist. The duty of providing this education wasgiven to the Faculties of Journalism of the Universities and the Communist
Party Higher Education Colleges. These faculties “were the most carefully
watched and highly politicised of all departments. After all, they prepared
the political communicators of the future, and included among them were
often the representatives of the security organs using the cover of journalists” (Mickiewicz 1998:42). The vocational skills and mastery of creative work
came only as secondary professional requirements. However, such an idealof an orthodox party journalist was rarely achieved and journalists could evenperform a task opposite to that of spreading Party ideology. The Solidarity
press in Poland in 1980-1981 is the best-known example.
The contrast between the Soviet people’s everyday life and Communist
ideology was so obvious that the teaching of the ideologically accepted views
and interpretations of reality often directed the students to ‘read between
the lines’ and to critically evaluate both the reality and the ideology. Indeed‘teaching between the lines’ was also practiced in some Universities, as forexample in Tartu, Estonia (Høyer, Lauk & Vihalemm 1993: 219-220). Only
those journalists who belonged to the Soviet party nomenclatura as editorsin-chief, heads of political departments of media organisations or leading
political commentators, and who enjoyed respective privileges and salaries,
overtly expressed their devotion to the Communist Party.
Among the other journalists, as an Estonian example demonstrates (see:Lauk 1996), a small number of cynical conformists appeared, who expressed
their critical attitude through ridiculing the official ideology, but not goingso far to be blamed for anti-Soviet activity. A significant group of journalists
challenged the constraints of official ideology by transmitting their message‘between and behind the lines’, risking the attention of the censors and getting punished. Finally, the largest group of journalists did not have any strong
personal involvement in the system and did their work without problematizing
its political meaning. Many of these were not members of the Communist
Party (and, indeed, as a result were never promoted in their careers). They
felt themselves to be very much alike their audiences, and tried to use apolitical topics and ‘human’ language to speak to them.
The ideological pressure and control that forced journalists to express
loyalty to the paymaster on the one hand, and silent opposition in various
forms on the other, placed them in an ambiguous situation. It was not easy
to gain the confidence of the audiences without losing the trust of the au-

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thorities and vice versa. The borderline between non-contributing and opposing was always vague and journalists could easily be accused in not following the main principle of the Soviet media – partiinost – party-mindedness.
The consequences could be rather severe, from imprisonment or deportation to Siberia during the Stalinist years to temporary or permanent prohibition
to work as a journalist during the later decades up to the end of the 1980s.
“In the case when the activity of a journalist does not correspond to thedemands of the party, it is empowered to deprive him of the right to speakin its name or may choose other means of influence over him” (Tepljuk
1989:117). The highest degree of party punishment was the expulsion fromthe ranks of the CPSU. The acute danger of repressions sharpened journalists’sense of self-censorship and warned them from touching on sensitive issues.

Conclusions
Free market conditions and relatively extensive freedom of expression in
the democratic political systems create a favourable environment for thedevelopment of the function of social control of the press and the conceptof socially responsible journalism. Information practice reflects these functions in a news paradigm that values accuracy, details, objectivity, openness
etc. All these characteristics of the Western news paradigm hit a concrete
wall in the Soviet system where the precondition of the maintenance of theregime was control throughout the whole society. Therefore, the purpose of
the media in the Soviet Union – to strengthen the Communist Party’s power
and to make its policy unquestionable – replaced democratic functions withmanipulation, propaganda and disinformation. An extensive system of control over the content, production and distribution of public information was
built up to ensure that the audience would receive only the ‘right’ message
and alternative sources of information would be inaccessible.
As the case of Chernobyl demonstrates Soviet journalism was propaganda
journalism, even when it concerned a disaster of worldwide importance.
Instead of providing the world with accurate facts and accounts of what
happened, the Soviet media minimized the scope of the disaster and its
consequences. Only an official version of events, fabricated by TASS and‘authorised’ special correspondents from Pravda and Izvestija, was available
for people in the Soviet Union. Under the pressure of international public
opinion and the media the Soviet information tactics, after a while, became
more open and cooperative, but still remained cautious and guarded by theCommunist Party. The report on the accident, launched in August 1986, wasprepared exclusively by the Soviet experts (Marples 1996). The trial of six
key persons of the nuclear plant in July 1987 was mostly held in secret.
Although there were always (more or less successful) attempts at resistance from the lower levels, and in the mid-1980s the glasnost and perestroika

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THE ANTITHESIS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEWS PARADIGM

reforms initiated from the top, no radical change in the information policy
occurred until the basic tenets of communist orthodoxy had altered. The basic
concept of Soviet journalism, discussed above, and the environment in which
the Soviet media operated, created a distorted journalistic phenomenon –propaganda news and news without information that was clearly an antithesis of the western news paradigm.

Notes
1.
2.

3.
4.
5.

6.

This section is largely based on my article “Practice of Soviet Censorship in the Press”
published earlier in Nordicom-Information 1999, Vol. 21, No 3, pp 27-39.
Annual reports of censorship authorities of Estonia show that in the first year of Soviet
rule (1940-1941), over 200 000 copies of Estonian books had been destroyed. During
the four years after the WW II (1944-1948), almost half a million copies of books andperiodicals were burnt (Lauk 1999:29).
Jakubowicz (1992) describes it as ‘sociological vacuum’.
‘kolkhoz’ is the abbreviation of the Russian word for ‘collective farm’.
Rahva Hääl (The People’s Voice) and Sovetskaja Estonija (The Soviet Estonia) the mainorgans of the Estonian Communist Party in Estonian and Russian; Noorte Hääl (The Voiceof Youth) and Molodjozh Estonii (The Youth of Estonia) the main organs of the Estonian
Young Communists’ League in Estonian and Russian. The circulations of the four papers(for the population of ca 900,000 Estonian speakers and 500,000 Russian speakers) wereat the time: Rahva Hääl – 151,000; Noorte Hääl – 159,000; Sovetskaja Estonija – 46,000
and Molodjozh Estonii – 52,000. According to a survey in 1988, 60% of Estonians regularly read Rahva Hääl and 70% of Estonians were regular readers of Noorte Hääl (Vihalemm
2004: 299 – 304). People usually subscribed to both Estonian language dailies.
This article was the only one among all the articles on Chernobyl in four Estonian dailies
during the month that was written by a local staff journalist.

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Historical Development of theNews Format in Estonia 1920-1990
Halliki Harro-Loit

There have been many political regimes in Estonia since the 1920s through which
modern journalistic conventions have developed. One of the underlying hypotheses is that all forms of journalism are sensitive to their cultural and politicalcontexts. For not only is information retrieval affected by the kind of powerthat the sources of information wield, but news presentation is also regulated
by various political expectations, norms and conventions. The developmentof autonomous or professional journalistic techniques may be delayed underauthoritarian regimes or even more under totalitarian political regimes.
Although one may find some good examples of the “inverted-pyramid”
type of news stories from the 19th century Estonian newspapers – the use of
the pyramid structure was casual during most of the 20th century. In addition, during the Soviet time the whole concept of news genre was strongly
affected by political ideology. The modern news format was conventionalised only during the 1990s when Estonia again became an independent,
democratic and capitalist state and the majority of media organizations trained
their journalists in professional news writing.
The present study combines qualitative text analysis with quantitative
methods for the analysis of journalistic forms and content. Six selected years
throughout the 20th century represent different stages of professional development during different political regimes. The main body of my text will be
dedicated to an analysis of how and when the ‘inverted pyramid’, or the wider
technique of ‘focusing’ developed within Estonian journalism.

Historical Conditions of Journalism in Estonia
during the 20th Century
The Estonian language press began to appear regularly from the middle ofthe 19th century. The journalistic community From the 1880s, expanded ascompetition developed between the publications. The freedom of speech

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and the freedom of the press were first proclaimed by the Manifesto of Independence on 24 February 1918, and finally confirmed in the Estonian
Constitution in 1920. Rapid modernization of the press as an institution started
in the 1920s, when most of the preconditions for an autonomous field ofjournalism were present in the independent Estonian state.
The growth of the newspaper market peaked in 1933. In the meantime,as the result of this expansion and increased competition, several new publications were started. Esmaspäev (‘Monday’), the first tabloid, was launched
in 1922. The market became increasingly differentiated and publications
intended for readers with specific interests appeared. Radio programming
began from 1927. The big dailies therefore did not compete only amongst
themselves but started to vie for audiences with another mass medium.
Alongside the changes in orientation, typography and layout changed asfeatures of the Anglo-American newspaper model were imported to Estonia. In the 1920s considerable quantities of material on British, American andScandinavian journalism were dealt with in various publications including ahistory of journalism, the economy of news organisations, the freedom andstatus of journalism, news technology, access to information etc.
The constitutional crisis that had developed in Estonia in the wake of theinternational economic crash in 1929 ended up with a state of emergency
on Aug 11, 1933. Censorship was temporarily imposed three months later
over the daily and party press, and political organisations were stopped. In
March 1934, an authoritarian regime was established that took the press andradio under the government control. Political parties were forbidden and thus,
the party press destroyed. Although most of the former party newspapers
continued to publish, a political plurality of opinions was subdued. The State
Propaganda Department was founded for providing newspapers and radiowith official information and to supervise the press and broadcasting. The
new Constitution of 1936 enforced several restrictions of the freedom of press,
and the Press Act in 1938 imposed numerous limitations and regulations on
the press. Censorship, however, was not as strict as the censorship that immediately followed the Soviet occupation in summer of 1940.
The Third Reich and the Soviet Union agreed through the secret
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of late August 1939 that Estonia belonged to the‘Soviet’s sphere of interests’. The Soviet Union established military bases in
September 1939 and occupied Estonia in June 1940. A state coup by thecommunists was arranged in the same month and the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic became a part of the USSR.
The Soviet concept of media autonomy, journalistic practice and what would
be considered as news differed so much from previous practices as to beconsidered a totally new paradigm. All media was owned and operated by
the Communist Party or by the Communist youth organisation Komsomol.
Political comments and most of the international and national news in Estonian newspapers was produced and controlled centrally by TASS or by the
Estonian Telegraph Agency (ETA). (See Epp Lauk’s chapter for more details).

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The forty-seven years of continuous Soviet rule (1944-1991) can be divided
into four periods where political freedom differed slightly from one period toanother. The first period refers to the Stalinist tyranny with brutal repression
until 1956. The second period between 1956 and 1968 was called ‘the Thaw’,with less strict censorship. The third period 1969-1986 was labelled ‘Stagnation’, with room for some journalistic experiments. Formal control was strengthened again after the Prague Spring in 1968. But by the late 1970s, the Soviet
Union and its economy had weakened so much that a limited debate on public affairs became possible. The fourth period between 1987 and 1990, after
Glasnost, has been named the ‘New Awakening’ in the Baltic nations.
As the Soviet system gradually disintegrated, the room for journalistic
discourse widened. Having been few in number and brutally suppressed
during the Stalinist era, the professional journalistic community started to redevelop during the Thaw. By the 1970s an alternative journalistic discourse
gradually emerged in the official media, in parallel to the Soviet propaganda.
During the independence movement from 1988 the Estonian media were
gradually able to gain more autonomy. Censorship was abolished in theautumn of 1990, almost a year before actual Independence.

Database for the Quantitative Analysis
My research was carried out on the analysis of the daily paper with the largest circulation in the six selected years – Päevaleht in 1920 and 1931; Uus
Eesti in 1938; Noorte Hääl in 1971 and 1981. However 1999 was an exceptional year in the history of the Estonian press as for the first time the circulation of a popular tabloid, Sõnumileht was as great as the leading quality
daily, Eesti Päevaleht, so both were selected for analysis. All news items andarticles, 2407 items in total, published in the first week of October of theselected time cuts were analysed.

The Development of the Inverted Pyramid Structure
The development of the ‘inverted pyramid’ form of presentation is linked tothe use news wire in the late 19th century. The form is considered the archetype of fact-oriented and detached journalism (Høyer 1997). The inverted
pyramid format demands a focused and condensed technique, and morejournalistic activity in collecting necessary information compared to unstructured stories that reported events more or less as they happened. Reporters
had, to a great extent, traditionally relied on officially given information. The
inverted pyramid style, by contrast, requires a conscious prioritisation of facts,of plots and sub-plots and a more careful maintenance of the main facts inthe foreground of a news event. Chronology is in the process turned upside

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down. van Dijk (1988a) calls it the relevance principle compared to traditional stories where chronology was the main organising principle.
The chronological order better preserves the intentions and agenda of
information sources as well as the succession of disordered elements as they
unfold in the original event. The traditional convention for story telling is
known as a ‘diamond’. Here the order of events is arranged so that the culmination of actions occurs near the middle of the story, after an introductory
presentation of context and actors.
A third category may be called the ‘quadrangle’ (see Høyer and Nonseid
in this volume). The quadrangle, in contrast to the ‘diamond’ and the ‘inverted pyramid’, presents the news without any detectable dramaturgicalstructure or storyline. Except for the headline, the following example presents
this type of news story:
Tax for staircases
Staircases will bring an income of 2 million cents to the town.
As it is known, last summer the Town Administration of Tartu decided to impose
a tax for staircases that extend to the street. This decision had to be passed on
1 January this year. Meanwhile, lists of staircases, on which tax would be
imposed, were compiled. Now we hear that soon the Town Administration
will hold a meeting in order to affix the plan that tax will be imposed on staircases extending 30 cm into the street … Postimees, January 3. 1929

While metropolitan newspapers in the US conventionalised the inverted
pyramid of news presentation in the 19th century (Schudson, 1978: 78), thisnew genre strategy came to Europe much later. [See also Søren Kolstrup’s
earlier chapter on Denmark in this anthology]. As Svennik Høyer’s and John
Nonseid’s chapter on Norway demonstrates, between 1908 and 1930 the ‘inverted pyramid’ was more prominent in news wires than in the news stories
produced by the newspapers themselves.
The same trend could be detected in Estonian papers but according to
the findings of Melly Rüga (Rüga and Lauk, 2000) on the news discourse inan Estonian daily 1884-1913, and according to my own empirical findings(Harro 2002), it is clear that the use of the inverted pyramid structure wascasual in telegraph news. The inverted pyramid structure appears in Estonian newspapers mainly when news was translated from foreign newspapers and when news wires included more than three facts. An important point
here is that news wires regularly contained only one or two facts and thus
rarely gave any information of background or consequences.
Telegrams and announcements (messages in notice form, sometimes close
to advertising) were published in news sections. It is impossible to identify
either the “inverted pyramid” or any other structure element in such texts,
which will be evident from the following example:188

H I S T O R I C A L D E V E L O P M E N T O F T H E N E W S F O R M AT I N E S T O N I A 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 9 0

Draft of the law of language
On it’s meeting on the 9th of January the Estonian Government decided topresent the draft of a Language Act to the Parliament. Kaja, January 10. 1924

Therefore, while discussing the development of news genre it is importantto keep in mind the fact that during the periods when the journalistic staffs
were small, newspapers published a lot of raw information. Chart 1 demonstrates the amount of this raw material during different time cuts.
Chart 1.

Percentage of News Genre of the whole Newspaper Text andPercentage of Announcement Type of News in Estonian Leading
Dailies in 1920, 1931, 1938, 1971, 1981 and 1999
%

100
80
60
40
20
0
1920

1931

1938

1971

1981

Notices 3 5 . 6

8.4

12.1

2.9

2.8

1 9 9 9 Year
8.2

All news 7 6 . 8

59.5

69.7

54.0

42.9

70.3

As Chart 1 clearly demonstrates, the amount of notices or telegram type ofnews was especially high in the 1920s. Notices were typically published onnews pages and were not separated typographically. It indicates that a daily
paper often served as a public billboard, transmitting information rather than
generating news itself. Announcements from official sources were treatedas uncontroversial information, and not as a material for further editing orcomments.
The first definition of the news story, which appeared in an Estonian journal
for young people in 1924, defines ‘news’ as: “Messages about events andfacts that are interesting for the public. The messages should be truthful, shortand lively“ (Mändmets, 1924: 868). Story structure was not mentioned. Six
years later, Harald Vellner, the editor of the daily Waba Maa, gave the first
known description in Estonia of the inverted pyramid or the relevance principle in a public speech in 1930:(The) Estonian press is too much influenced by the German press that is lagging behind in news reporting technique…German news is biased. In America,
news items are constructed according to certain rules … News should be classified and the first sentence should say everything … Our press more and more

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HALLIKI HARRO-LOIT

follows the American news construction technique … Still, there is a lot ofanarchy, different parts of a message are not put into a hierarchical structure.
(Press trends in Estonia. Waba Maa, March 1st, 1930). (My italics – HHL)

In 1932 Vellner published a textbook titled: Reporter’s Handbook. The book
was a synthesis of different Anglo-American textbooks, a German textbook
and a London-based journal Press News, all published between 1914 and 1931.
The book briefly presented contemporary knowledge of reporting technique.
But, as will be demonstrated below, very little of this technique is found in
Estonian journalism in the 1930s. This is an indication that innovations, astheoretical knowledge, may diffuse fairly quickly while it takes more time
to adapt and internalise them as a convention of everyday practice. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, several “borderline cases” to the ‘inverted
pyramid’ are extant. The following example is quite typical of a borderline
news story for the 1920s and 1930s:
Water tax will be raised
At the last meeting of the town council on 29th of December long discussions
again broke out about the raise in the water tax. The discussions lasted fortwo hours. Finally the proposal of the town government was accepted. Before the discussions the mayor explained the situation, saying that the government would not decrease the percentage of the water-system loan. The
budget for a water-filtering system and a decision about the taxation of pubs
was also finally agreed.
The budgets of the town bank and pawnshop were accepted. The head of
the pawnshop was elected for another 3-year period. The meeting ended at
half past eleven. Postimees, December 31. 1927

In a modern structure this report would run as follows: “Water tax will beraised on December 29th. The town council accepted the town government’s
proposal to raise water tax to X marks per cubic meter....” The chronological order is broken in my reconstruction. Closer to the chronology of thedebate, the original example only informs us about the pending decision onwater taxes after two sentences.
1968 was the first year that the inverted pyramid news structure was
depicted graphically in an Estonian textbook. Even though the concept was
not yet conventionalised. News presentation was tightly controlled in theSoviet press and did not invite innovations. The next book on the news writing
technique came only in 1997 after journalism courses had become quite
common. The author was a young university teacher – Priit Pullerits – whose
ideas and teaching methods were strongly influenced by the training traditions in American journalism.
Chart 2 shows that the pyramid developed in the 1920s and peaked fora while in 1931. As the amount of news grew, quite considerably, in the late190

H I S T O R I C A L D E V E L O P M E N T O F T H E N E W S F O R M AT I N E S T O N I A 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 9 0

1930s, so too did the newspapers usage of newswire, combining different
pieces of translated news texts. This editing of newswire is probably one
reason why the percentage of news reported in the inverted pyramid structure decreased about ten percent from 1931 to in 1938.
Chart 2.

Share of Inverted Pyramid, Diamond and Quadrate Structure
among the Definable News Stories in Estonian Dailies in the
Composite Week in 1920, 1931, 1938, 1971, 1981 and 1999
%

100
80
60
40
20
0
1920

1931

1938

1971

1981

Quadrant 9 3 . 1

47.3

54.8

92.3

69.3

1999
1.3

Diamond

4.8

8.0

10.1

0.8

0.0

0.9

Invertedpyramid

2.1

44.7

35.1

6.8

30.7

98.8

The data also demonstrates that another reason, maybe that the censorship invoked in 1933 in unstructured news stories, was dominant in the
1920s and during the Soviet time. There was by contrast almost a balance
between ‘inverted pyramid’ stories and ‘unstructured’ in the 1930s. After
indepen-dence in 1991 the modern, American or international, news styleis the dominant form of presenting news. However, it is important to discuss various related journalistic methods, which contributed to the development of news format.
A focusing technique is according to van Dijk (1988a) a premise to the“inverted pyramid” structure. The methods journalists use while preparing a
news story are the selection of topics, summarisation of events or sub plots,
deletion of unrelated details, and then the addition of new facts and substitution of given facts with additional and relevant information. The underlying principle of selection here is relevance of facts that put the event in theforeground. By such mental preparations the outline of the story is lifted toa higher level of generality.
The first three steps in van Dijk’s relevance model can be combined as
one basic method, which I call ‘focusing’. Focusing denotes the mental preparations before a story is constructed in the “inverted pyramid” form. The useof this technique includes the conscious choice of an angle or a viewpoint,
and the ordering of relevant facts etc. The development of focusing as amethod is most easily identified by the steps in the development leading up

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to the inverted pyramid structure: first the conventions of different sorts ofstacked or decked headlines, then of different early forms of a ‘lead’.

The Development of Headlines in the Estonian Press
As with most of the conventional changes in journalism, the role of the headline developed gradually. Before World War I Estonian dailies arranged news
according to the traditional rubrics that categorised the text into ‘Home news’,‘Foreign news’, ‘News from Tallinn’, etc., as was common for many European newspapers. Headlines, until the middle of the 1920s, – to the extent
that they existed at all – referred either to the geographical place in which
the event took place, to the information source as in ‘Police news’, or to a
general topic like ‘The current situation of education’, ‘The question of repatriation’, ‘Peace-negotiations between Poland and Russia’, etc.
Another form of headline was constructed as an integrated part of the first
sentence in a news story, set in bold types, like: ‘In court …on 25th of October, the following cases will be heard…’ This is what we would call subtitles today. Single stories appeared with headlines only when they were
written in a column style, such as ‘editorial’, ‘commentary’ or ‘overview’.
Changes in headlines began in the 1920s. Headlines were used to highlight the main point of the story focusing on a certain angle, which added
news value to the story. The traditional headline ‘News from Tallinn’ forinstance was turned into a page indicator for where a reader could find local news presented as several diverse and independent stories, all with theirown headline. From the middle of the 1920s this development was taken a
step further. Headlines increasingly signalled a particular news angle in astory, which also changed its status to an independent article and was givena journalistic structure within format conventions.
The adaptation of a sub-headline was the start of the development ofsummarisation, in van Dijk’s terms, which gradually developed into a moreclearly distinct ‘lead’ At the beginning of the 1920s newspapers only occasionally used a sub-headline, not to summarise, but to add newsworthy facts,
which elaborated some of the introductory 5 W’s (who, what where, when,why). The following example with a deck or a sub-headline was rare in 1923:
Päevaleht, October 2. 1923
Headline: Cabman’s accident at the port.
Sub-headline: The horse has fallen into the sea

The headline and sub-headline together highlight the newsworthy facts. According to contemporary rules of news writing, the story would probably be presented by the lead: ”Cabman’s horse felt into the sea at Tallinn port yesterday.”192

H I S T O R I C A L D E V E L O P M E N T O F T H E N E W S F O R M AT I N E S T O N I A 1 9 2 0 - 1 9 9 0

In the second half of the 1920s, sub-headlines became longer. The purpose of the sub-headline was to provide a condensed overview of the matters covered in the article and not to focus on a given angle. The various
statements containing the sub-headlines were usually not linked together,or composed hierarchically, as can be seen from the next example:
Päevaleht, October 1. 1929
Headline: The shares of the Estonian Bank.
Sub-headlines: Will be on sale in October? – Wide circle of people should
buy the shares – The shares are not for speculation.

The use of long sub-headlines to summarise a story became more frequent
when newspapers started to publish extended news stories from the mid-1920s.
These stories included both background information and several sub-topics.
It was comfortable for the readers to be given a preview of the story. Only inthe early 1930s were subtitles beginning to be conventionalised. Chart 3 provides a statistical overview on the use of sub headlines in the different time cuts.
As seen from Chart 3, sub-headlines became very popular during the 1920s
when they were used to make long and complex articles more comprehensible.
Sub-headlines in news stories were used infrequently and casually during
the Soviet time with a lack of focusing. Headlines were more “artistic” in style,
like the ones found in feature-type stories. Headlines often lacked information of the contents.

The Sub-headline as a Forerunner of the Lead
Today the ‘lead’ is the first paragraph of the news article, often set apart fromthe body text in bold type. It summarises the most newsworthy facts. Different sub-headlines designed in a way that is nowadays recognised as the ‘lead’
were already in use by 1923. These stacked headlines are the first signs ofa more conventionalised summary lead.
Päevaleht, October 2. 1923
Headline: Estonian foreign trade in August 1923
Lead: Imports have been 2 309 026 pounds of goods, in value of 958 403 149
marks; exports have been 3 421 574,4 pounds of goods, in value of 627 291 519
marks. In sum the exports have been 65,5% of import. The leading import country
has been Germany, the leading export country has been England.

As one can see from the above example, the lead still functions as a summary and not as a focusing (selection and deletion) technique. In this earlylead the reader is given an abstract of the information, which was later ex-

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plained and spelt out in more details. Journalists did not highlight certain
facts as the most newsworthy – that the value of imports exceeded the valueof exports by 35% – in either the headline or in the first sentence.
Chart 3.

Percentages of the Stories that Included a Sub-headline in the
Estonian Dailies in the Composite Week of 1920, 1931, 1938,
1971, 1981 and 1999
%

30

20

10

0
N=100%

1920

1931

1938

1971

981

1999

410

596

547

278

212

634

By the end of the 1920s Estonian dailies had acquired summarisation techniques, and used reader-attractive headlines, sub-headlines and some earlyforms of ‘leads’ In some cases the sub-headlines substituted as a lead, but mostoften sub-headlines signalled various topics of an article. The larger dailies,
from the very end of the 1920s, more often employed a kind of lead, which
resembles the typical inverted pyramid news story, as we know it today, even
if these early ‘leads’ were a bit more longwinded than we are used to seeing.
Päevaleht, October 1. 1929
Headline: Three men suffered because of the explosion of an engine
Sub-headline: An accident with motorboat at the port of Narva
Lead: Narva, September, 30th. Yesterday at noon at the port of Narva, a gas
pipe on a motorboat, owned by Tallinn men, exploded. Three men were
injured in the face and hands. At the same time the petrol bottle in the boat
caught fire and the boat burst into flames. The fire was extinguished and three
men with bloody faces were taken to hospital. One of the men will probably
lose his eyesight. The others will only receive scars on face and hands.

As can be seen form Chart 4 it was only in the 1990s that Estonian press
started to use the lead structure systematically. The use of leads before the1990s was too casual to be taken as a convention. Even today the lead isused mainly to introduce extended news stories.
Extended news-stories about crime and accidents were constructed as inverted pyramids from the second half of the 1920s, but especially from the
beginning of the 1930s. There is a noticeable tendency to use leads as a fo-

194

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Chart 4.

”Lead” in Estonian Dailies in the Composite Week 1920, 1931,
1938, 1971, 1981, 1999 1
%

20
15
10
5
0
%

1920

1931

1938

1971

981

1999

0.2

3.0

3.1

2.5

4.2

17.4

cusing technique, from the 1920s, in crime and accident stories. In 1931, 7
stories out of 18 that started with leads were crime or accident news. Laterin the 1930s this tendency decreases. It is possible that this practice was nota conscious part of professional behaviour but originates in the dramatic elements present in these events. By comparison, a report of a town council
meeting demands a high degree of journalistic intervention – the selectionof a topic and an angle – for a story to be focused.

News Genre in the Soviet Estonian Press
As mentioned before, the news genre was an ideological tool under the Soviet
imposed system and therefore news value and focus were either pre-ordainedby the status of the information source or the story had no news value at all(see Epp Lauk’s chapter on censorship in the Soviet time). The news should
first of all be positive and support the socialist system. If something unexpected happened the text was more carefully controlled than usual, in order
not to reveal any secrets or untimely information. ‘News’, therefore, was notdesigned to convey really new information. As news-values were missing
most items that were presented as ‘news’ did not necessarily focus on current affairs but presented a list of procedural actions or rituals. The following example is a typical news story from the Soviet press:
Noorte Hääl, April 2. 1981
The Tallinn Pedagogical Institute arranged a daily course for teachers of theJõgeva region. Rector of the Institute, Rein Virkus opened the session. Vicerector Lembit Türnpuu chaired the plenary session. Professor Heino Liimets
presented a paper: “Do we mediate culture or subject?” A candidate of philosophy, Toomas Alatalu, gave a very interesting presentation about the 26th
Congress of the Communist Party and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.

195

HALLIKI HARRO-LOIT

After the plenary session, teachers were divided into ten sections and in addition to the university lecturers, students also presented their papers.
A daily course provided the Jõgeva district teachers with knowledge about
scientific research and young teachers training at the Pedagogical Institute.

In this quotation the elements of Soviet news-rhetoric is easily identified.
First, the whole article is positive about the event. Positive evaluation wasadded to the topic concerning the Communist Party. Positive evaluation was
furthermore emphasised by sentences like ‘Toomas Alatalu gave a very interesting presentation about the 26th Congress of the Communist Party andthe foreign policy of Soviet Union.’ Secondly, the main actors were named.
Anonymity was usually not allowed in the Soviet press.
Yet, the way the news-story was structured under Soviet regime was similar
to the ‘meeting chronicles’ in the 1920s and 1930s. The chronological order ofthe meeting set the structure of the story. Such news-stories do not containprofessional journalistic filters or independent evaluations and are therefore
comfortable tools for any authoritarian system or for powerful groups in society.
Important news could be significantly delayed or even denied for ideologicalreasons. News of unexpected events or accidents was never released immediately, as these had to be carefully scrutinised by censors. This was still thecase at the end of the 1980s when the news editor of Eesti Raadio (the national state radio) recalls an incident, in which the station received information about a breakage in the main water pipeline. He compiled a news story
but was not allowed to release it. He was told that the Central Committee of
the Communist Party was investigating the damages. Hours later the Party
officials provided a text for publication, which was identical to the one created by the editor (Nurmoja, 1993). A major train crash in the centre of Tallinn
in the 1980s was never reported, despite the numbers of eyewitnesses andpeople injured. This news story would have disclosed a failure in the Soviet
transportation system, which according to ideology was perfect.
Analysis of the news genres of the Soviet period clearly indicates that itcovered mainly foreign events and was produced chiefly by news agencies.
Qualitative analyses easily prove that the Soviet news genre lacked the main
aspect of focussing on the newsworthy event. The news genre might also
be vulnerable to any kind of manipulation. As factuality and the deletion ofdetails are natural to the news story it is very easy to give biased information and to disguise facts that are ideologically “unwanted”.

Concluding Remarks
Using content analysis and textual structures as coding units I have been able
to outline some general features of Estonian journalism through most of the20th century.

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Most of my data concern what I have called the focusing technique. Focusing and the foreground placement of certain aspects give the journalist amethod for reconstructing a real event into a modern standard news story.
It is clear from my study that for the major part of the 20th century Estonian
dailies mainly used different kinds of a summarisation technique, but notthe ‘inverted pyramid’ Focusing appeared randomly. This suggests that journalists used it only when the drama of the original event – crime and accidents – was suitable for the ‘inverted pyramid’ format. This news structure
was conventionalised only in the 1990s.
It was clear from my own observations while collecting this material thatseveral tendencies were at work, often simultaneously. The development ofprofessionalism (using literature, imported concepts and techniques) clearly
had a variable impact on the development of news presentation. The increased use of international news wires obviously had some of the same
effects of modernising the newspaper text. However, the effects of changing political regimes were by far the most easily detected. In the early 1920s
newspapers were still passive, ready to transmit received information rather
than actively constructing stories from collected information. This clearlychanged at the beginning of the next decade. The authoritarian period
between 1933 and 1940, did not stop the progress in the modernising tendencies of journalism, but slowed it down. The focusing technique was amisfit in the Soviet news paradigm. The ultimate responsibility for reportingand highlighting important events rested with party officials, not with journalists. As a natural consequence the inverted pyramid could only develop
into a convention after Independence in the 1990s.

Note
1.

Data for 1999 is provided as an average of two dailies (Eesti Päevaleht and Sõnumileht)
as the convention of using of “lead” was different in different dailies.

197

From Participating to Informing
The Transition of Journalism
in the Russian Regional Press
Jukka Pietiläinen
Introduction
Soviet journalism was one of the vernacular forms of journalism according
to Barnhurst and Nerone (2001) but in part it took over traits of the literary
journalism from Tsarist Russia. Soviet journalism was introduced in the 1920s
with the purpose of creating a new kind of journalism, which could serve
the new Soviet society (cf. McReynolds 1991; Lenoe 1998; Brooks 1989); it
received its final form in the 1970s and the 1980s.
In the 1920s Soviet journalism was still not far from contemporary Western journalism (McReynolds 1991, 284) but since then it remained largely
outside the development, which took place in Western journalism, mainly
because Soviet journalism was primarily based on political and administrative regulations, not on commercial considerations.
Soviet journalism collapsed with the disintegration of the Soviet system
and new forms started to develop on the basis of Soviet and older traditions
and foreign influence. Since 1991 Russian journalism has become closer tothe Western news journalism in significant ways. The development has been
most visible in the economic press of Moscow, but it has also happened at
the regional level although a complete metamorphosis has yet to occur. This
article is based on analysis of journalism in newspapers of the Republic ofKarelia in Russia (cf Pietiläinen 2002). The empirical analysis focuses on the
traditionally dominant newspaper of Petrozavodsk. This paper was called
Leninskaya pravda (Leninist Truth) in the Soviet era, changed its name to
Severnyi Kurier (Northern Courier) in 1991 and finally to Kurier Karelii(Karelian Courier) in 2001. In addition to newspapers in Russian the analysis included newspapers published in Finnish and Karelian. The Finnish
language newspaper Karjalan Sanomat (News of Karelia) that was in theSoviet era Neuvosto-Karjala (Soviet Karelia) is of particular importance sincehaving had regular co-operation with Finnish journalists the diffusion of thenews paradigm can be easily traced.1

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Journalism in the Soviet Press
Soviet journalism functioned as a collective agitator, propagandist and organiser, presenting the experience of the best working practices, criticisingthose lagging behind and organising workers for better results. Various official texts had a lot more importance and visibility than their frequency would
have indicated. First page topics of a regional paper covered themes likemeetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union(CPSU); campaigns to increase the efficiency of the agricultural-industrial
complex; discussions between party leader and foreign delegates and preparations for the congresses of the CPSU.
Even more important was the large amount of text provided by the nonstaff authors. The Soviet doctrine emphasised the participation of “the people”
in the making of journalism. According to this view only those personallyinvolved in production could report objectively on the real state of affairs in
one or another field of economy (Inkeles 1950, 179-180). As a rule non-staff
authors were required to write between 40% and 60% of the material.
Letters to the editor were relatively rare in the pages of Soviet newspapers. They were often used as material for journalistic stories, and were
published with an answer to the problem indicated in the letter, or werereported in the journalistic review of the letters. Public discussion with conflicting opinions was rare in Soviet newspapers.
Among the basic elements were cyclical stories like the sowing season in
the spring and the harvesting in the autumn and various campaigns and plans.
Reports of their fulfilment were published regularly, often pointing out the
shortcomings in some factory or institution.
A News paradigm was not completely uncommon to Soviet journalism.
Soviet textbooks mentioned zametka (notice) as one of the genres of theSoviet press. It was, however, applied only to short news stories that reported
only the event and nothing else. Usually, the purpose of the story was to tell
about successes or shortcomings (Zhanry... 1972, 24).
According to Murray (1992, 1994), several typical genres of the Soviet press
lost their raison d’être and became redundant. The short front-page news
item, the zametka, appeared with much less frequency in 1987 and wasusually published on the second page. A new type of article that was closer
to the Western news story replaced the zametka. The new Russian definition of zametka is practically the same as that of a short Western news story,
even a picture of an inverted pyramid is published in the textbook(Informatsionnye zhanry… 1995, 7).
During the last few years of the Soviet system, journalism widened thelimits of public discussion and challenged the system. It was in many respects a period when the best features of the Soviet journalistic theory camein to reality as a place for discussions, conflicting opinions and problem stories. But few solutions were provided. Journalism was nevertheless discrediting the system and therefore prepared the way for its collapse in 1991.

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Journalism after the Collapse of the Soviet System
After the collapse of the Soviet system, journalism and media have started
to develop in a market economy. In the regional press the major changes
started to happen at the beginning of the 1990s. The end of the 1980s had
been a time of lively discussions, but by 1991 more emphasis was paid tonews items. These were positioned on the first page where they took theplace of ideological articles.
The orientation of journalists has also changed. Journalists of theperestroika-era were primarily interested in relations with the public and tosome extent fulfilled the function of a civil society, while the post-perestroika
journalists are primarily concerned with the commercial sphere (Sosnovskaya
2000, 194).
The government support for the press decreased and real costs started to
be charged for newsprint, postage and other material and services. Newspapers suddenly lacked resources which led to the textual, non-graphic, advertising which was very visible on the pages. It was usual to praise products and to inform where they could be purchased. At the same time thenumber of newspapers oriented towards the general public increased significantly in most of the large and medium-size cities, while national newspapers lost their favoured position (Pietiläinen 2001; Pietiläinen 2002).
The Western model was the closest at hand following the discrediting of
the Soviet model (Murray 1992, 111). The post-Soviet press, or at least partof it, was eager to adopt Western models and aspired to appear neutral andobjective (Murray 1994, 144).
The subjective presentation of news, from a personal point of view, wasthe first bold step in the direction of unbiased coverage and a challenge to thestate-dominated message (Mickiewicz 2000, 107). During the glasnost era,
“journalists adopted an egocentric view of themselves as missionaries, for whom
expressing whatever they had on their minds was by far more important thansatisfying the information demands of the audience” (Pankin 2001) and evennow “many journalists understand press freedom primarily as the freedom toexpress subjective convictions publicly” (Voltmer 2000, 479).
The difficulty in adopting new practices was clearly indicated by the criticism of the Kommersant newspaper where the policy was that a newspaper
should have a consistent editorial slant and a consistent style in each article
and texts are often rewritten. Kagarlitsky (1998) pointed out that journalists
who consider themselves creative quickly bail out of Kommersant.
Kommersant declares in its Web pages that its model has become a norm
for the Russian press. At the beginning of the 1990s Kommersant was almost like a foreign paper. Stories were placed strictly in sections, they wereconstructed on the model of an inverted pyramid, headlines told the mostimportant news and “only facts were presented, not any kind of evaluations,moral statements and especially not a personal, author’s or citizen’s, position” (Webpage of Kommersant, 2002).

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Western news agencies also played a role in spreading Western news
values although Russian news agencies remained the most important(Rantanen 2000, 260-265). This was rather similar to the situation at the
beginning of the 20th century (Palmer 1998). Also new private news agencies
were forerunners in setting the standard of news writing (Rantanen 2000,
261). According to a recent study on Russian news agencies, over 97% of
the stories of the ITAR-TASS news agency and 92%-96% of those of Interfax
and RIA Novosti followed the principle of the inverted pyramid and over
80% of stories had direct citations (Lashchuk 2003, 16-17). The most common deviations from the pyramid structure were the presence of several
equally important news items in a story although the alluring or intriguingheadline mentioned only one of them (ibid.).
In Karelia, the Finnish-language newspaper Karjalan Sanomat approachedthe news paradigm more rapidly and more completely than Severnyi Kurier,mainly because of the more direct influence of Finnish journalistic culture.
On the other hand, the new papers that started after the collapse of the Soviet
system were not tied to Soviet practices but promoted an idea of the subjective view to news.
At least when in contact with Western scholars and colleagues, Russianjournalists have become more careful in describing their success in combining PR-campaign and advertisement selling with journalism. If at the beginning of the 1990s they were eager to relate these new aspects, by the end of
the decade they regularly denied it. It is likely that the change has happened
with the development of PR and advertisement as separate professions aswell as a practical expedient. One example is that of a representative of amajor Russian PR-agency who told Finnish businessmen in a seminar in 2001
not to give money to journalists in order to get the story published but tofind other ways to attract their attention.

Old and New Journalism
The transformation of journalism was largely complete by the second halfof the 1990s. The newspapers of 2003 differed little from the newspapers of
1997, while both of them were quite different from newspapers of 1991 oreven those of 1993. New Russian journalism is a mixture of Soviet practices,
Western influence and Russian journalistic traditions. The market economy
has become an important element in the development of the press and its
role will certainly become more important as the commercialisation of thepress progresses.
Contemporary Russian journalists link professionalism to themes like “theimportance of providing accurate factual information, an openness to new(often western) ideas and practices and a growing recognition of the audience” (Davis, Hammond & Nizamova 1998, 84). Many journalists however202

FROM PARTICIPATING TO INFORMING“see ‘educating’ the public as a legitimate, even vital part of their jobs” (Belin
2001, 338) and a similar view has been found among Finnish-language radio journalists in Russian Karelia (Remsu (2001). On the other hand, theposition of journalists in their workplace has changed. At the end of the 1990s“journalists rarely formed and defended their own positions, but preferredto support the position of the owner of the publication”, in line with the Soviet
spirit of corporatism (Zassoursky 2004, 93). The differences between publications are, however, great and there is not yet a professional culture basedon shared standards of journalism and media roles (Gross 2004, 131).
Among the older journalists, the “commitment to a serving role in the public
interest and restriction to mere facts are regarded as a devaluation of theirprofessional status” (Voltmer 2000, 478) and “for many journalists giving up
the traditional Russian forms means a restriction of their newly gained freedom” (Geisslinger 1997, 411). Not surprisingly, a Russian survey of regional
journalists revealed that they considered their prestige to be highest during
glasnost (42%) or even before glasnost (26.5%), compared with the few(14.5%) who thought that the profession had the most prestige in 1994 (Journalists and journalism... 1995, 39).
“Another distinction between traditional Russian and Western journalismis the importance of timeliness. For Western journalists actuality is one of
the most prominent news values (…); for Russian journalists it is only of
marginal relevance.” (Voltmer 2000, 478). The same was noticed in a Finnish study on the concept of news in Russia. Käyhkö states that while Russian news criteria are quantitatively close to Western ones the main difference is that qualitatively the press does not construct a unified picture of theworld and that the important items and elements vary between quality newspapers in Moscow (1998, 99). One of the major news criteria is originality.
The key aspect for Russian journalists wanting to cover something, that otherjournalists have not, is not the concept of a scoop, but to find their own uniquepoint of view to the news event.
A recent textbook emphasises this point declaring that journalists have
moved from from communicators to interpreters of information. The journalistic product is not a news story but a news event which has been packed
in a publicist’s text. According to this view the publicist is not an observer ofa described event but an equal participant of it. A personalised relationshipto news has been augmented by the increased competition between media(Kroichik 2000, 127-130).
In another textbook on journalistic genres, news criteria (what happened,
where, when, why, how) is presented as one of the variants of a notice(zametka). However, the second variant of notice, allows commenting on
the news e.g. telling about its meaning and connecting it to a wider context.
Even if the author emphasises the importance of separating news and views,
the argument remains that newspapers should have both facts and points ofview (Tertychnyi 2000, 72-75). Moreover, this kind of short news has been
defined only as one of the informational genres of the press (the others are203

JUKKA PIETILÄINEN

analytical and artistic-publicist genres) and although informational genres form
the major part of media texts, the more popular are those of reportage orthe informative report (otchet) (ibid. 52-84).
The role of information has caused divided opinions among Russian journalists and scholars. For example, a recent dissertation deplored that newspapers have started to give preference to facts instead of analysis and thatjournalists write the majority of the material (Akhmetzyanov 1999).
However, “domination of ideological conviction over informative reliability” (Michnik 1998) remains one of the characteristic features of Russian journalism. “Ideological conviction” is no longer communist partisanship, but
support for some politician, political party or idea. This kind of system assigns to the audience mostly the roles of ‘pupils’, citizens, partisans and followers (Jakubowicz 1999, 26).
In Russian journalism ideological conviction is often easily visible and not
hidden in the selection of topics, sources and frames, as is usually the casein northern European journalism. One of the examples of this has been the“authored news programmes” (Dunn 1998), where news is filtered throughthe personality of a commenting journalist. They were a tempting option for
top-level Russian journalists. Recently their importance has, however, been
decreasing because of the procedures which have been called the “silencing of last independent television channels”. “Independent” in a Russian
context is applied to “media which are against the government and attack
authorities” (Voltmer 2000, 479). According to Gross (2003, 82) this adversarial
relationship is “not professional in nature but political, even personal.” Thedecrease of adversial relationship has reduced the importance of the leading personalities of news broadcasts and therefore paved the way towards amore objective-style. This does not necessarily mean that the bias has disappeared but the role of the newscaster has been made much less important and the bias therefore more invisible.
During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, several media experts have expresseda fear of the return to totalitarianism but in newspapers this kind of fear may
only be about the content and point of view, not the style or function of thepress. There is no return to the Soviet model in which the official documents
and texts by outside authors would have been published. There are news
stories about Putin, not about his speeches.
The media is oriented towards entertainment and actually the most important question of a freedom of expression concerns which film or which
concert to show.2 Soviet films are returning to Russian television but nationally produced foreign format programmes like “Who wants to be a millionaire”, “Wheel of fortune” and survival games are extremely popular. In general it seems that popular forms of Russian media and journalism are closer
to their Western counterparts while partisan practises have survived betterin elite journalism (see Pietiläinen 2000a and 2000b).

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Old and New Journalism in PracticeOn the basis of a newspaper sample of the years 2001 and 2003 newspapers use a mixture of old and new practices and in one instance were combined in one news story. Open opinions and moral judgements have become rare, but many stories still end up with “conclusions”, even if they are
no more as instructive as was the case in the Soviet era. Apparently, they
are not constructed so that they could be cut in the middle.
The role of the journalist (or the newspaper) is often emphasised, by words
like “as I was told...” or “a journalist of Severnyi Kurier called...” and expressions like “as was told to the correspondent of ITAR-TASS in the press service of…” are also common. They indicate the source, but do not require theuse of citations or the mention of named persons. It seems that Russian journalism does not need to indicate sources and use citations to the same extent as northern European journalism. For example, a sport news story tells
what has happened and the result, but without a comment from either asportsman or a coach.
All the stories now have their own headlines, compared to 80% in the
1980s. The stories usually start with concrete facts, but it is still possible tostart a story by describing the situation or source as in “As news agency ITARTASS informs...” It is also usual to refer to the headline in the first paragraph.
Thus it would appear that headlines are not edited at the last moment without the author of the story. Even the stories of the press services have started
to resemble news stories.
It is clear that in short stories some kind of pyramid structure has become
dominant:
Sick children
Only about 17 percent of children are absolutely healthy in Karelia. As thecorrespondent of “Rosbalt” reports, these data were published by the minister of health of Karelia Valery Voinich in the meeting of the government of
the republic on the health centre system for children on Monday.
According to the words of Valery Voinich, about 64 percent of young citizensof the republic had some kind of deflection of health, 18 percent of them havesome kind of chronic illness... (Kurier Karelii 11.4.2003, first page)

This story came from a news agency. A similar news structure is common in
shorter stories (up to 150-200 words) by journalists as well. It is remarkablethat while the meeting was held on the Monday, the article was not printed
till the Friday, three days late according to some news standards. A sense of
speed is not among the news criteria of the Russian press, at least when it
comes to stories that do not have a strict timeline. In this story, the activerole of journalist is also remarkable. Also the headline is not very informative but more like a label for it.

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In longer stories the pyramid structure does not have any major relevance,even if the content of the stories do have elements of the news paradigm.
An interview is published entirely in question-answer format without interpretation or framing and reportage is a usual form of a longer story. A typicalexample of this is a first page story about the session of the local parliament:
To support – the countryside, to return – to the issue about the army
About 30 issues were discussed by the members of parliament of the republic
in its session yesterday
By Nail Shabiev
Majority of them did not cause any discussion. The members of the parliament agreed, for example, about the changes in the law of RK “About the
government support for the small enterprises in the Republic of Karelia”...
(Kurier Karelii 11.4.2003, first page)The major headline has an idea of news although its major content remains
unclear. The strapline and the beginning of the story, however, report only
facts, which are by no means “news” although they might be important toknow. Unanimous decisions, lack of political battle and number of issues
discussed would hardly be recognised as news by a North European journalist.
The recognition of news does not develop as quickly as the simple practise of writing stories in news form. Models such as ‘conflict’ have not yet
completely developed and been applied in the making of the stories. Alsoin news agency materials stories with different, conflicting opinions makeonly 1-9% of all stories (Lashchuk 2003, 17).
In some stories quotation marks are used and their role is often the sameas in northern European journalism, to add suspicion or to discredit the citedwords: “I was told that ‘the problem is discussed’ and that it will be solved,
at the latest before the end of April” (Kurier Karelii 11.4.2001).

Increase of News Narrative
One way to analyse how newspaper texts have changed is to focus on thevariety of voices present in the text and their relationships. The narrative
force field approach presented by Kunelius (1996) has been applied in theanalysis of the narrative structures of the stories. It is based on analysis of
the transparency and the identifiability of the voice of the story itself on the
one hand, and on the other, the analysis of the independence or dependence of the story on outside voices. The movement between these narrative
situations is also analysed.
As a result, six common types of narrative structure have been found.

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1. The first type of structure represents narrative transparency and an independent voice. In these stories there is no quotation and the voiceof the story does not speak from its own position as an actor (e.g. byusing ‘I’ or ‘we’ forms).
2. The second type represents the Western professional news structure
where the narrative moves between the transparent voice of the story
and reported speech (including reported speech without direct citations). In some cases this structure might be incomplete, having only
one long citation from the source.
3. The third type comprises identifiable commentary accompanied by reported speech. This could be called ‘news from the author’s position’in which reported speech is mixed with visible comments or participation of the reporter.
4. The fourth type is pure commentary, which includes an independentand identifiable voice of the story.
5. The fifth type includes interviews in which both voices are identifiable (interviews in question – answer form),
6. The sixth type includes only stories and comments from outside authors
7. Some more complex stories could not be included in these categories.
Table 1.

Space of Different Narrative Structures in Leninskaya pravda/
Severnyi Kurier/Kurier Karelii (%)

Journalistic
description

Modernstyle
journalistic

News from
author’s
position

Comment,
editorial
style

Interview,
both voices
visiblePlain
foreign
text

Other

1985

24.0

14.4

12.7

9.6

2.6

28.9

7.8

1987

22.2

12.6

12.0

6.5

7.0

35.3

4.4

1989

18.4

7.7

19.4

9.2

5.8

32.4

7.1

1991

25.3

13.1

10.8

7.7

10.0

28.8

4.3

1993

16.0

22.6

11.8

8.9

12.5

23.4

4.8

1995

18.4

26.2

14.2

9.5

11.8

15.6

4.3

1997

17.7

30.7

15.9

5.8

7.0

20.7

2.2

1999

24.5

18.5

21.8

8.8

9.7

12.6

4.1

2001

25.3

26.3

12.7

2.4

8.8

19.6

4.9

2003

15.7

36.8

10.1

7.3

18.4

11.0

0.7

Narrative
structure

Based on sample of two weeks (1985-1999) and of one week (2001-2003)

The change in narrative structures has happened slowly and it has not been
unidirectional. The clearest difference is between the Soviet (1985-1989/1991)
and post-Soviet (from 1991/1993 onward) periods. In the post-Soviet period,

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there are more interviews, more professional news narratives and less ‘purenews’ (category 1), less use of texts from outside authors and less mixtureof news and commentary.
A closer look reveals some interesting points, e.g. in 1985 the majority(57%) of the professional news narratives came from news agencies (mostof them were foreign news by TASS), while in 1999-2003 the most of themwere written by staff journalists and only less than 10-20% came from news
agencies. Therefore, the decline of this kind of material at the end of the
1980s was due to the decline of news agency material. The one remnant ofthe ‘author’s position’ that seems to have most resisted the passage of timeis the practise of calling local people or conditions “us” or “our” as in “ourhockey players” (meaning Karelian or Russian hockey players) or “in ourcity” (meaning Petrozavodsk).
The analysis of narrative structures does not directly take into account thepyramid structure, but in general it can be found in the first two narrative
styles and to a lesser degree in the third style. It is seems reasonable thatwithin these categories the pyramid structure (or its elements) has become
more common.
In Karjalan Sanomat the increase in the professional news narrative has
been more rapid and more complete than in Severnyi Kurier The share of
the professional news narrative and its less developed forms has reachedover half of the space. It has increased mainly at the cost of both completely
foreign text and journalistic monologue, but also at the cost of the opinionated news form (Pietiläinen 2002, 424-425).
In general, the move has been away from texts by both outside authors
and identifiable narrative voices and towards narrative transparency andindependence. The use of foreign voices in news narrative has not yet developed to a similar level, as is the case in northern European journalism
although the commentator role is clearly declining.

Discussion
Russian newspapers are in the process of being Americanised, even at theregional level, as has happened elsewhere in Europe. The process has beenamazingly rapid and it is only understandable that some practices of an earlier
time still remain.
In Russia, as elsewhere, this move is criticised as a loss of opinionated journalism, major articles of discussion and literary critique. Contemporary Russia
very much resembles France at the end of the 19th century (Chalaby 1996a,309). It seems reasonable to expect that market development will push Russian journalism in the same direction as has happened, for example, in France(Napoli 2001; Chalaby 1996a, 1996b, 1998). That will mean the spread of the208

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news paradigm, less newspapers but more factual information and less opinions of an individual journalist but a stronger position of journalism in society.
It seems reasonable that the diffusion of the news paradigm takes time.
Even if the Putin era has marked some possible setbacks in the development of independent television journalism on the level of structures andcontrol, it has not had any major influence on the practice of journalism.
The ‘Euronews’ channel that the state-owned channel Kultura (Culture) transmits in Russian represents a new kind of presentation and orientation towards news. Although the viewing figures of this channel are not large, itcertainly has an influence on journalists. The news paradigm is largely imported from abroad and the relationship to foreign cultural imports has an
influence on the level of its popularity in contemporary Russia.
Both journalism and those working in it need to change their attitude
towards facts and they have to internalise a completely different position
towards the world; not the one of a participant, but that of an invisible spectator. There might be several factors such as the competition between the
media which may be obstacles to this change.
Also the orientation to the truth-value of facts needs to be changed before the news narrative can be considered to be similar with northern European journalism. Pure facts in invisible and independent narration are notenough in order to present the news, but quotations and foreign voices areneeded as well. It might be that the traditional genre system of Russian journalism, which does not include a news report genre, is one of the obstacles
to this. Another obstacle might be the working conditions in that facts andinterviewees are difficult to find (cf Sosnovskaya 2000). However, the position of the journalist is the major factor, as northern European journalists would
rather not file a story than write it from their own position without sources.
This is still significantly not the case in Russian journalism, even though it
has declined during recent years.

Notes
1.

2.

I do not use expressions like “Western journalism” in comparison with “Soviet” or “Russian journalism” but compare Russian journalism with northern European journalism which
I know the best. The empirical material for this article is based on newspapers publishedin Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia, mainly from the newspaper
Leninskaya Pravda / Severnyi Kurier / Kurier Karelii. The methods and more empirical
data are reported in Pietiläinen 2002.
This statement comes from Igor Yakovenko, the Secretary General of Russian Union of
Journalists, in a seminar in February 2004.

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Between East and Westor Simply “Made in Poland”?
The Many Different Stylesof Today’s Polish Journalism*
Katharina Hadamik
The media system in Poland has changed remarkably since the fall of communism. The practice of censorship has been abolished, previous monopolistic structures in the press and broadcasting have been dismantled, and new
players have been admitted to the media market. In the context of the media’s extensive transformation Polish journalism has undergone a number ofalterations. It has shed its image as a vehicle for communist propaganda and– by providing new freedoms – it is perceived more than ever as an attractive
and well-regarded profession. The reconstruction of Polish journalism andits values, standards and practices within a post Cold War context is a complex
process and is still in flux. The evolving new paradigm of Polish journalism
comprises a mix of long-standing traditions and original approaches going
hand in hand with an adaptation to “Western” standards and global trends.
When the communist era came to an end in Poland, and elsewhere inCentral and Eastern Europe, it seemed that as a consequence journalism andthe journalistic practices that were shaped by the communist system for morethan 40 years would also undergo severe changes. The direction of thechanges also seemed to be predetermined. It was a commonly held assumption that after decades of the Cold War the abandonment of communism would
naturally lead to democracy, the rule of law and a free market economy. It
had also been considered that for the media and journalism in post-communist countries that an adaptation of Western models and patterns was a natural and desirable option. This teleological perspective has been widespread,certainly in the West but also in Central and Eastern Europe.1 There was also
the increasing feeling that assistance from outside was needed to assist in
the systemic changes and democratic reforms.
It was a huge wave of know-how transfer from the West that flooded
Central and Eastern Europe almost immediately after political changes occurred. It consisted also of hundreds if not thousands of Western experts who
set out towards the East to foster the rebuilding of media landscapes and thereshaping of the journalist profession. The obvious assumption (putative selfevidence) underlying the expectations that a particular type of journalism as

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practiced in the West but embedded in a different historical and culturalcontext and representing a different journalistic culture could easily be applicable to Polish reality and adopted by Polish journalists turned out tobe questionable. The Polish case, but also experiences made in the 1990s inother Central and Eastern European countries, showed that Western efforts
of exporting its own media system and its own journalistic philosophy were
only conditionally successful in this region. Although foreign media aid,
especially that of financial and technical support, had been undoubtedly
necessary and was welcome in Poland and elsewhere in the former Eastern
bloc, assistance from the West also encountered different kinds of barriers,
structural, cultural and also psychological. As Janusz Adamowski, Directorof the Institute of Journalism at Warsaw University concluded: “Many foreign experts did not want to teach us but to instruct. They did not intend to
modify what existed; instead they wanted to destroy everything and to introduce something that did not fit in here at all. What we needed was someone
who would help to build on and assist in repairing the roof.”2 A lack of knowledge of Polish history, the cultural background, the country and its people,
not to mention the language, caused many misunderstandings. Wojchiech
Maziarski, a journalist of the first independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza3
captured the deep irritation felt by many Polish journalists: “Western journalists decided to be good to us, assuming that we are people coming fromthe bush and it is necessary to enlighten us” (See: Kwiatkowski 1995: 18).
Perhaps, this has been the biggest misapprehension regarding foreign aid
as Western experts anticipated a vacuum that they were supposed to fill. They
did not realize that Poland and its journalists have had long standing professional traditions and a rich journalism culture.
An understanding of the reconstruction of post Cold War Polish journalism requires a more complex approach than simply seeing 1989 as the year
when the oppressed times of the communist era changed to the victorious
times of independence. Such a black-and-white division is ill suited for defining the multi-faceted and intricate media-scape that prevails in Poland. Inorder to determine the characteristics and gain an insight into the culture
and practice of Polish journalism it is essential to study its fundamental aspects within the history of the profession in Poland and its cultural context.

The Roots of Polish Journalism
As in many other European countries, journalism in Poland has historically
been strongly linked with the fields of literature and politics. In 1861, forexample, the Polish general encyclopaedia defined journalism as “a branchof periodical literature, totally devoted to politics” (Nalecz 1982: 22). Thus,in the 19th century, it was largely common that the biggest and most important newspapers and journals were edited and published by writers, publi-

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BETWEEN EAST AND WEST OR SIMPLY “MADE IN POLAND”?

cists,4 and political and social activists (Lojek 1988: 28-47). The great importance of politics in Polish press and journalism was to a high degree interrelated with the partition of the country when it was shared between Russia,
Prussia and Austria in 1795. Poland did not exist on the map of Europe for
123 years. In this historical context, the Polish press became a national institution, preserving the Polish identity, its culture and language, and also providing a political forum. “Dispersed in 120 cities, the press was a synonym
for Poland, often the only organizer of Polish intellectual, social, cultural,and even sometimes political life. /.../ Until Poland was reconstituted in 1918,
the press served as a ‘parliament’ by publishing the speeches of Polishmembers of the various imperial parliaments” (Johnson 1999: 10).
The evolution of journalism as an autonomous profession began slowly
in the 1860s. The professionalization process comprised several elements:
1) honoraria became the main source of income for journalists; 2) the degree of specialization increased gradually, dividing journalists into politicalcommentators, currents news editors, feature writers and reporters; 3) newnews genres emerged, including introductory editorials, news agency reports,
local news, interviews, literary articles, and reviews; 4) the actuality factor
started to gain importance. Especially in the beginning of this professional
evolution, the term journalist was associated with a very low social status.
Even by working up to 12 hours a day and spending all this time in theeditorial office, journalists were then mostly considered as contributors to
the technical side of the production (Gajlewicz 1998: 11-12; Paczkowski 1980:
337; Nalecz 1982: 19-52: Curry 1990: 17).
The elite consisted of literati and publicists, including Henryk Sienkiewicz,
the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature (1905), and Boleslaw Prus (Nalecz
1982: 22), were all prominent personalities with an individual style of expression and a mission to serve their non-existing nation and the Polish society.
It was later generations of Polish journalists who slowly began to be proudof their profession and started to identify with it. A clear signal of this change
was several initiatives to establish professional organizations. Several of them– sometimes in co-operation with the literati – came into being between 1892
and the beginning of the First World War (Myslinski 1988a: 81; Nalecz 1982:
19-52).
The process of professionalization was completed in the so-called interwar period between Polish independence in 1918 and the German invasionin 1939. Journalism became an acceptable and respected element in societal
life, independent and influential professional organizations were establishedand journalists successfully fought for their rights and recognition as an autonomous professional group. Furthermore, the process of professional differentiation continued and standards of professional ethics were developed.
Eventually, a systematic preparation for journalistic work and appropriate training for newcomers were introduced at this time. While many countries proudly refer to their long-standing tradition in journalism education,
including the USA, it is not widely known that Poland was among the early

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KATHARINA HADAMIK

pioneers. The year 1917 is regarded as the beginning of higher journalism
training in Poland. First, the School of Journalism was established in Warsaw, followed by the Warsaw School for Political Sciences that shortly after
opened its department for publicist science and journalism. Journalism schools
were also founded in the following years in Cracow and Poznan.5
Looking at the roots of the profession in Poland, it can be concluded thatbetween the 1860s and 1930s Polish journalism underwent a dynamic, severe and far-reaching process of modernization, including self-organization,differentiation and education. This process of professionalization was, however, different in several aspects from the professional model Anglo-American style (Chalaby 1996: 303-326). Firstly, the Polish approach to professionalization did not eliminate the traditional gap between commentators andpublicists on the one side and “technical” journalists, responsible for gathering and rewriting news as well as for production, on the other side. It was
still those in the first group who remained in the top ranks of the professional hierarchy. Secondly, journalism continued to be interconnected withthe world of literature and arts. It remained common practice that literati andcritics regularly collaborated with newspapers and journals. Thirdly, despite
a process of commercialisation of the press that had already started in the1870s but was limited through a lack of capital and high levels of illiteracy(Curry 1990: 69), Polish newspapers often remained either directly attached
to or at least associated with certain political groups, organizations or societal
movements. The period between the First and the Second World War is renowned for the emergence of excellent and famous publicists who represented specific political and societal movements. Almost every political group
had members who combined their functions as representatives of the party,
the parliament or the state with their work as journalists (See: Wladyka 1988:
127-128; Paczkowski 1980: 29-33 and 328-338). Finally, for many decades
Polish journalists fulfilled a special mission for the benefit of their nation.
They “were not only representatives of various political factions [...], but they
were also representatives of the national interest and national culture during the entire Partition period” (Curry 1990: 4).
As a result a clear demarcation line was not set between journalists as anautonomous group and other professionals who traditionally occupied andclaimed this field. The evolution of Polish journalism had a strong literary,
intellectual and political connotation and those features shaped the professional culture for many decades.

Polish Journalism in the Communist Era (1945-1989)
The role that was allocated to journalists in communist systems is well known.
Journalists were considered members of the so-called ideological front. Boththe media and its employees were supposed to serve the ruling communist214

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST OR SIMPLY “MADE IN POLAND”?

elites and to help influence and control society. Due to the straight division
into two blocs (free Western world versus Communism) in the Cold War era,
the media systems and journalists of communication science were also divided into two seemingly homogenous units (See: Siebert, Peterson andSchramm 1956). Yet, just as it was never true for the West, the picture of ahomogeneous bloc in the East never mirrored reality. There existed, among
the countries behind the Iron Curtain many differences, especially in relation to journalism.
There is no doubt that Polish journalists struggled with censorship for
decades. At times those who held ideas contrary to the communist regime
were even persecuted and punished mercilessly as happened for instanceafter the imposition of the martial law in December 1981. Many hundreds ofjournalists that were actively involved or associated with the Solidarity movement were expelled from their profession. Nonetheless, despite such periods of suppression Polish journalists were allowed more scope and greater
possibilities to carry out their profession in a decent manner. “One of themost consistently open media systems under communist rule was found in
Poland. (...) many topics that were taboo elsewhere were vigorously discussed in the Polish media” (Johnson 1999: 28)
The press landscape in the People’s Republic of Poland was much lessuniform than conventionally anticipated in a communist state. This even held
true for the official state controlled press that approached different target groups
in different ways. Polish readers could not only find blunt party propaganda
in their newspapers but also distinguished reports and essays as well as entertaining, even sensational news (Pisarek 1999: 136-137; Curry 1990: 70).
Also oppositional thoughts and criticism could be detected in some publications. “For a long time it used to be the only open window to the Western world for its neighbours. All this was mirrored in the press and the mass
media” (Klossowicz 1999: 248).
Another phenomenon of Poland’s communist press landscape was a small
enclave that always existed even in the politically most rigid times, the Catholic
weekly Tygodnik Powszechny and other Catholic publications. Tygodnik
Powszechny – although also censored – was renowned for the excellenceof its articles (Mielczarek 1998: 243). It was always regarded as the publication of the Polish Intelligentsia and a forum for alternative thoughts (Gielzynski
2001: 21-22). Finally it was in Poland, among all countries of the former Soviet
bloc, where a wide range of underground publications that entered circulation as from the 1970s broke the near monopoly of state information.6
It is important to stress that the media situation in communist Poland differed from the expected norm of the Eastern bloc. There not only existed relative
media freedoms but Polish journalists had also formed a strong professionalgroup that succeeded in protecting themselves from the authorities for many
decades (see: Curry 1990). Their putative role as members of the ideologicalfront had never really matched the reality. “In describing their role, Polishjournalists in the seventies emphasized that they were experts first and then215

KATHARINA HADAMIK

communists and not an amalgam of the two or simply professionals in serviceof the Party” (Ibid: 6). Even in the 1980’s, after many hundreds of journalists
who supported the Solidarity movement were prohibited from practicing theirprofession after the imposition of martial law in 1981 and moved to work forunderground publications, and less than half of the working professionals
possessed a communist party membership card (Ibid: 28).
By carrying out their professional tasks, Polish journalists of this era followed traditional patterns and stayed connected to the fields of politics andliterature/culture. In their role as political actors, they either served the ruling
elite as commentators and advisors in policy-making or they challenged thesystem by supporting oppositional movements and publishing semi-legal or
illegal articles. Curry (1990: 204) who conducted an extended study on Polishjournalists came to the following conclusion: “ ‘Journalism’ in Poland is simply
not the same as journalism in the United States or even Western Europe, thechief sources of our image of media professionals. Given their own self-definition of the profession, Polish journalists need to distribute and broker information and opinions. They need to lead the population.” Some Polish journalists became active politicians, among them: the first Polish non-communist
prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Furthermore, journalists’ political impact
was also eminent through intervening and solving problems. According toWalery Pisarek7, one of Poland’s most outstanding experts in media research,
there was a lively model of combative journalism in terms of defending the
weak8 although this did not mean that journalists were allowed to criticize thecommunist system as such. Yet, it was possible to address poor management
on local levels on shortages of supplies and general problems like alcoholism. All important newspapers and magazines had extended sections dealing
with reader’s letters. When journalists picked up complaints addressed, bymembers of the public, to the press, then the chance was very high that these
problems were solved rapidly. Culture and literature, those fields that had served
as means to preserve Poland’s identity in the 19th century, retained a high profilein the journalism of communist Poland fulfilling the vital societal function ofreflecting oppositional views. This was especially the case in the various cultural publications used to smuggle forbidden contents between the lines(Klossowicz 1999: 247-250). The close relationship between journalism andliterature was also mirrored in journalistic expression. The journalists’ elite of
the 1970s, for example, was nationally known for two particular features: anindividual position on issues and the literary style of writing (Curry 1990: 148).

After 1989 – An Unleashed Journalism
That Has to Be Tamed
The systemic transformation following the historic Round Table9 negotiations
in early 1989 naturally had effects on journalism and journalists in Poland.

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BETWEEN EAST AND WEST OR SIMPLY “MADE IN POLAND”?

The first important changes in Polish editorial offices could be observed fromthe summer of 1989. Even before the Workers’ Publishing Cooperative (RSW),a gigantic press combine controlled by the communist ruling elite, was wound
up, the editors-in-chief and their deputies at about a hundred newspapers
were dismissed. Staff changes also took place at the state radio and television as well as at the Polish Press Agency. The editorial offices did not
only witness the mass return of those journalists closely associated with the
Solidarity movement who worked underground. A new generation of journalists appeared on the scene, too. Increasingly free of censorship – it hadpractically ceased to exist since the summer of 1989 before eventually being abolished in April 1990 – the media became attractive to many young
people. It was a combination of the returnees and the new entrants to theprofession who took control of both the established editorial offices and at
the various newly founded newspapers, magazines and pirate radio stations.
A considerable number of long-serving employees, especially those closely
associated with the communist nomenclature, were either forced to leave
the media or resigned (Bajka 2000: 45; Hadamik 2001: 40-43; Frankiewicz.
1994: 5).
The replacement of media people brought a wind of change to Polisheditorial offices. The official, somewhat stilted writing style that prevailed in a
number of Polish newspapers and magazines became livelier and less formal.
The new guard, open to new ideas and easily accepting the new rules of amarket driven press, started to experiment with new styles and formats(Frankiewicz 1994: 5). The selection of news also altered. Journalists chose
topics that were closer to the reader’s interests and they also did not hesitate
to take up topics considered a taboo in the past. Bajka (2000: 45) called thisnew guard the group of “angry young rebels”. These journalists, especiallythose who established the first independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, werethe main force in the development of the new style of journalism.
The new freedoms of an uncensored and uncontrolled media were undoubtedly widely appreciated. There were, however, many professionals andnot only within the media who observed the developments in journalismwith some concern. Whereas formerly established standards and attitudes
seemed to have been discarded overnight, new rules were largely missing.
This created a situation of uncontrolled journalism – with many problematicside effects. It is especially true for the first years of the transformation thatreporting in Poland was often labelled as emotional and unprofessional andaggressive (Bochenski 1997: 13; Oledzki 1998: 294). Accusations were a daily
occurrence and allegations were largely false, unchecked and biased (See:Weidemann 1999: 50; Zakowski 1999: 265-266; Margueritte 1995: 10). “Suddenly numerous young journalists appeared out of nowhere, although it isdifficult to say if in fact they were journalists. These young people with aminimum of professional media experience began to comment on politics.
Practically everyone appeared at press conferences, shouted ridiculous questions at the presidents and was convinced they were the best journalists in

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the world. It was frightening!” (Monika Olejnik. Cited by Kwiatkowski 1995:
39).
This was not only due to the lack of experience and professional skillsby the newcomers or the specific background (the combative approach) of
those journalists associated with the underground press. It is more the casethat all Polish journalists – be they newcomers, the returnees or the old guard– made the most out of their seemingly unlimited freedoms. A process ofawareness developed in due course that certain standards must be observed to maintain the professionalism of journalism. Several factors contributed to this process: the passing of the media charter in 1996, with a fundamental code of ethics for journalists (Zakowski 1999: 267-269); the intense
debates within the publications of the journalists’ associations or in the professional magazine press (See: Lis 1998; Paradowska 1998; Skalski 1998) andan increasing conviction that journalism required systematic training.10

What Changed, What Remained
Since 1989 Polish journalism has undergone numerous changes. It has become more competitive and there is more pressure on time, as the news
needs to be made public much quicker. In the past, the lack of pressure to
be exclusive and restrictions on information made it less important to work
for a “scoop”. In the past presentation had been the most important elementof a news article.11
Contemporary Polish journalists are now, like their Western colleagues,
under constant time pressure and on the hunt for the next top story. Journalism has become more up-to-date, more event-determined and more customer oriented as the readership have increasingly less time to read anddemand information that is easy to digest. Consequently, news and reports
in newspapers and magazines have become shorter and information has been
packaged in a more reader-friendly way. Certain elements of the press thatwere popular and regarded as important in the past have lost their previous
prominence. For example and with few exceptions, the cultural press thatwas famous for hiding ‘oppositional’ thoughts between the lines has notsurvived the process of transformation (Klossowicz 1999: 253). Furthermore,in all Polish media (press, radio, TV) it can be observed that different Western formats serve as a reference. Sometimes they are just imitations (forexample, the magazine Cosmopolitan, or TV shows like Big Brother) andsometimes magazines, shows or soap operas that have been developed for
the Polish market.
Although Polish journalism has changed, some traditional and characteristicfeatures and patterns have remained that contrast to the philosophy of theAnglo-American professional model: First, Polish journalists are still inclined,
as a study by Bajka infers (2000: 52), to take a position and to present their218

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own view. In this way advocacy journalism and political engagement are notdeemed to be unprofessional (Gross, P. 1999. 169), and many would still seemto agree with Melchior Wankiewicz’ statement “There, where no engagement
exists, nothing exists” (cited by Owsiany 1996: 25).12 Secondly, the ability not
only to gather and package information but also to analyse reality and to express
this to the public, preferably in an outstanding individual way, is still regarded
as a very important professional skill. “We do not like dry journalism. Our best
journalists are definitely not famous for their fact-centred journalism,” Janusz
Adamowski, Director of the Institute of Journalism at Warsaw University declared in an interview in 2003.13 Polish journalists, in comparison with their
US-American or British colleagues, generally tend to give their story an individual touch by playing with words, creating pictures, using associations andproviding interpretations. The beauty of expression of the Polish language,
which due to its identity-giving role in the past has been always considered anational treasure, is still regarded as an important asset.

A British and a Polish Version of the Same Story
In 1994, Conell and Galasinski (1995: 50-73) undertook the attempt to identify similarities and differences between British and Polish news reporting.
In their explorative study they analysed the coverage of the International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) that took place in September 1994 in Cairo, in two quality newspapers: The Guardian (British)
and Gazeta Wyborcza (Polish). Arguing that a correct and neutral coverageof essential facts is widely regarded as the universal approach in professional
journalism, Connell and Galasinski analysed which facts actually entered thenewspapers and how they were presented. Although only exemplary andthus not representative, this little study showed how diverse professional
approaches can be and how culture-related they are. The beginnings of both
articles were characterized by contrast. While Gazeta Wyborcza’s opening
was soft – an extended, aesthetic, very atmospheric and dynamic description of Cairo – The Guardian’s opening of the story was hard, telling thereader immediately about the events at the conference. Both articles referredin their coverage to the conflict between anti-abortionists and pro-abortionist that dominated the conference. According to Conell and Galasinski, thestyle of the newspapers was very different. Gazeta Wyborcza’s reporting wasmuch more indirect, the opposing sides were presented in less detail; theirpoints of view were vague. The Guardian presented both sides and theirarguments elaborately, among other things by using quotes. Conell andGalasinski concluded that the analysed articles, covering the same event,differed significantly from each other. Gazeta Wyborcza told its readers astory: the structure was narrative; the facts were chosen accordingly to thewhole design of article; the text consisted also of interpretations which in

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turn corresponded to different episodes told in the story. Guardian’s article
had a more evolutionary character: It presented a conflict, discussed it, andeventually identified possible solutions – an aspect which was totally neglected in the Polish coverage (Conell & Galasinski 1995: 71).

Publicist Writing, a Branch of Journalism
The example of Gazeta Wyborcza in Conell’s and Galasinski’s study should
not lead to the conclusion that events are covered per se this way in the
Polish media. Hard news and less narrative writing are not only common
but also dominant (Bortonowski 1999: 53; Sporakowski 1996: 10-11). The
chosen example should rather indicate that a special format of presenting
journalistic items co-exists besides conventional journalism (Bauer 1996: 114115; Pisarek 2002: 241-256).
“Information constitutes about 70 percent of all materials allocated in thepress. There remain 30 per cent for solving problems, publicist writing, feature article, reportage and other genres, in which your individuality can cometo light” (Bortonowski 1999. 53). This statement from a recent practical guidereveals that a hierarchic gap exists between news and news reports that areconsidered as basic skills, and genres like reportage, publicist essays, feature articles, and comments that are regarded as sophisticated and professionally challenging (Nieczyperowicz, 1996). The existing gap is also mirrored in other practical manuals addressing future journalists. The practicalhandbook ABC for Journalists by Nieczyperowicz (1996), for example, devotes merely nine pages to information-centred news and news reports, butmore than sixty-five pages to the other genres.
Publicist writing and approaching topics in this way has always been an
independent branch of journalism in Poland. It may be argued that being a
product of the historical roots of the profession, it has in the meantime become
an outdated14 format. Nonetheless, it is embedded in Polish journalism culture
and still constitutes a definite component of it. A clear proof that the skills ofa publicist matter a lot to journalists of contemporary Poland is that mastersof this discipline are frequently asked to reveal their experiences in media
workshops of professional journals (See: Paradowska 1999: 44; Bogucka 2000:
30-31; Unger 1998: 48-49; Majcherek 2000: 36-37; Szczygiel 1998: 30-32).

Role Models and Authorities
The journalists who, at the top of their profession, and thus serve as role models
for contemporary Polish journalists are a mixture of those who have already220

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST OR SIMPLY “MADE IN POLAND”?

worked during the interwar period, in the state controlled environment ofcommunism and those who entered the profession after 1989 (Bajka 2000:
56). Polish journalists who rank highest in today’s professional hierarchy are
either highly visible journalists who anchor TV news programmes and TV political magazines or publicists who are famous for their brilliant analyses andcritical articles (See: Pisarek1995: 161; Bajka 2000: 56-57). The first group,
representing the current generation, includes prominent journalists like Monika
Olejnik who was selected as journalist of the year in 1999, and Tomasz Lis
one year later (See: Grand 1999 and 2000).
The second group consists of well-known current political commentators and publicists like Adam Michnik or Janina Paradowska as well as journalism legends like Ryszard Kapuscinski15 and Hanna Krall16. In the year 1999,
the popular monthly magazine press concluded a survey among media people asking them to nominate the most important Polish journalists of the 20th
century (Najwieksi 1999: 24). The result was interesting: Six of the top tenrole models belonged to a generation that started their professional career
during the interwar period (1918-1945) of Poland. Amongst the relatively
younger generation that started their career after 1945 there were Ryszard
Kapuscinski (he was elected as the journalist of the century), Hanna Krall,
Jan Nowak-Jezioranski (who for many years was the director of Radio Free
Europe), and the famous dissident Adam Michnik (who after 1989 became
co-founder of the successful daily Gazeta Wyborcza).
Belonging to the old guard of journalists does not have a negative connotation. On the contrary, many journalists who were already ranked on top
positions in the communist era are still regarded as masters of the profession. According to some observers, it is primarily the old generation that
constitutes the real craftsmen of the profession.17 Tomasz Lis, the very popularanchorman of the news programme Fakt and representative of the newgeneration, praised those journalists who entered the profession in the communist period and who mostly struggled with the system: “God thanks, they
exist, because it is possible to copy someone, to listen to them, and to learn
from them” (Lis 1998: 39).

An Unsolved Question:
How Much Objectivity is Necessary
External observers frequently conclude that “Western style objective reporting” (Hiebert 1999: 110) has not become the predominant news paradigm
in post-communist countries, and that the golden rule of modern journalismof reporting in an objective manner and drawing a clear line between facts
and opinion, has been often ignored (Weidemann 1999: 50; Margueritte 1995:
4). Furthermore it is widely discussed in Poland, if and to what extent objectivity and the separation of facts and opinion are indispensable and if

221KATHARINA HADAMIK

journalists can be objective at all. The professional imperatives of modern
journalism are in conflict with the long-standing Polish tradition of advocacy
and interventionist journalism. The views within the Polish journalist community on this issue vary considerably and mirror the ambiguity of professional positions. On the one hand, for example, in the introduction of the1996 published guide ABC for journalists it is stated that, “journalism is notand has never been objective. Engagement and the author’s comment are
its essence, because it is the task of journalists to repair the reality” (Magowska
1996: 6). On the other hand, however, in a survey among Polish journalists
a group of the interviewees explicitly stressed that journalists have “to try to
be the most objective, and not select news according to what pleases” them,that “a professional journalist always strives for objectivity”, and that a journalist is a person “for whom such terms as impartiality, objectivity, honesty,
integrity, exactitude, compactness” are familiar (Oledzki 1998: 282). Walery
Pisarek, for many years director of Osrodek Badan Prasoznawczych (OBP)
the famous press research centre in Cracow, observed a discrepancy between
normative hypotheses and everyday practice. Pisarek pointed out that although the new ethical codes stress to a much higher degree than in thepast that readers must be able to distinguish between news and opinion, it
has become even more difficult to find news in contemporary Polish newspapers that does not encompass comments (Pisarek 2002: 253).

Conclusion
During the last fifteen years of transformation Polish journalism has not
become a particular Western model or concept18 that has been ‘The profession’ as its news paradigms changed and developed in a multi-layered process. This took place by redefining tasks, experimenting with the new freedoms
and possibilities, learning from mistakes, maintaining original formats andgenres, and also by adapting some practices which are applied by journalist
colleagues in the West. The result of this mode of transformational evolution is a mixture of old and new: On the one hand, a number of traditionaltreasures of the Polish journalism culture have been preserved; on the other
hand journalism practice in Poland underwent a process of modernization
by adapting to global developments and trends.
Looking at the practice in Polish newsrooms, it can be concluded that somefeatures still prevail that do not match with what is considered professional
according to the model of modern journalism Anglo-American style. The
actions of taking a point of view, expressing a position and paying a lot
attention to an aesthetic and expressive writing style are crucial elements of
the work of publicist journalism – a branch of journalism that is deeply rooted* The Author is responsible for the translation of all Polish quotes in this text.

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BETWEEN EAST AND WEST OR SIMPLY “MADE IN POLAND”?

in the Polish press but hardly known and evaluated in other journalism cultures. Publicist journalism constitutes an original element of the professional
philosophy in Poland and is able to co-exist with the conventional fact-oriented formats of Western models.

Notes
1.

This applies especially for countries that traditionally had a strong orientation towards
the Western World (see Lauristin 1997: 25). One other teleological perspective for thedevelopment in Central and Eastern Europe has been based on discussions and conceptsof dissidents and oppositional movements. It has been the creation of a new type of civilsociety respectively the so-called third way between socialism and capitalism.
2. Interview between the author and Prof. Dr. Janusz Adamowski, carried out on November 10, 2003 in Warsaw.
3. Wojchiech Maziarski, was a journalist of the first independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza(Election Newspaper) that was founded in May 1989 before the first, more or less, freeelections. It soon became Poland’s most successful daily.
4. A publicist, in Poland, is a writer with creative / artistic skills who publicizes on a regularbasis in the print media. The main task of a publicist consists of analyzing the reality andin the assembly and presentation of arguments. The main tasks of the journalist, on theother hand, are the collection and presentation of facts to the public. Therefore a basic
knowledge of events and creative writing skills are regarded as indispensable for publicists.
5. It was characteristic of the training formats of the pioneer years that the focus of the training
was placed on practical skills. Ten years later, however, this approach was reconsidered
as many professionals criticized the prevailing practical orientation and proposed to upgrade journalism training at university level. This happened in 1927 when the Higher
Journalism School in Warsaw was founded. It rapidly gained a high reputation throughemploying the most famous journalists of the time as lecturers. (See: Gajlewicz 1998: 1112; Paczkowski 1980: 337; Nalecz 1982: 19-52).
6. These publications fulfilled a vital organizational function for the Solidarity movement
and formed an important forum for political and ideological discussions of Poland’s problems and future prospects. The debates were an important element for the preparationof the systemic transformation. (See: Holzer 1997: 65).
7. Interview with Prof. Dr. Walery Pisarek carried out on November 12, 2003 in Cracov.
8. One notable example of the moral duty of defending the weak was the foundation of
the Committee for the Defense of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotników/KOR) in 1976
by a group of leading Polish intellectuals and journalists, among them Jacek Kuron andAdam Michnik. Its members provided legal assistance and practical help to workers (andtheir families) who had been arrested and sentenced to jail for up to ten years after protesting against price increases (Bingen 2001 : 11).
9. The Round Table negotiations in Warsaw, between the Communist Party and the representatives of the Solidarity movement, lasted from February to April 1989. It was during
these negotiations that the opponents agreed on a compromise in order to initiate reforms of the country. The Round Table concept served as a model in other Central European countries.
10. Journalism training has been a booming business in Poland since the beginning of the
1990s. Other than the established study programs at state universities, which struggled
to get rid off their communist past, many new state and privately run schools mushroomed
across the country. In 2002, more than 30 journalism schools existed in Poland. The imageof the institutions is mixed. Future journalists are often advised, by the professional community, to study anything but journalism since the programs at universities are often
regarded as too theoretical. Nonetheless, journalism studies are amongst the most popu-

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11.

12.
13.
14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

224

lar courses in Poland especially at the universities where the demand for places exceeds
the supply. (Bajka 2000: 46-47; Planeta 2002: 14-17). Furthermore, in order to ensure aminimum on standards in journalism training, a new institution, the State Commission
for Accreditation, started work in 2002.
“This decision about how to say things is not only the basis of what will give an article
power and popularity but also what will camouflage its intent and allow it to pass throughcensorship and still be understood by readers.” (Curry 1990: 114)
Melchior Wankiewicz was an important journalist from the interwar period (1918-1939)
who became famous due to his political engagement.
Interview with Prof. Dr. Janusz Adamowski carried out on November 10, 2003 in Warsaw.
Critical positions in this respect are sometimes taken by the young generation of journalists. The columnist of the journal press, Mariusz Ziomiecki (1999: 72), argued that a publicist article is a “deterrent for busy readers. (...) Publicist writing is not only a genre thatis sluggish, but also frighteningly boring.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski, born 1932, is regarded as the pre-eminent Polish writer and reporter.
He became famous as foreign correspondent who reported allover the world. In the 1970s
Kapuscinski began to publish a series of books that increasingly showed his craftsmanship. To his most famous books belong The Emperor and Imperium See: http://
www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_kapuscinski_ryszard.
Hanna Krall, born 1937, specialized as a reporter in describing the everyday lives andsituations of apparently ordinary people. In the 1970s Krall started to publish books, herbest-known work became Shielding the Flame. Krall became especially famous for using
the techniques of reporting in her fictional or fictionalized writing. See: http://
www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_krall_hanna.
Many journalists who have been pushed aside by the new entrants at the beginning of
the 1990s, are at least tolerated by the young generation today, often even highly respected as professional experts (Bajka 2000: 58-59).
Sparks (1995: 11) has accurately pointed out that in “neither structural features (...) nor
the characteristics of media is there a single uniform ‘western model’ against which we
can compare the development of the mass media of the former communist countries”.
Also in respect to journalism, the reality of Western countries does not provide one single model that could serve as prime example. Instead, we can observe a remarkable variety
in journalism and journalistic practices (see: Kopper & Mancini 2003).

Alternative Perspectives

The Industrialization of NewsThe American Experience
Hanno Hardt

The industrialization of news has its roots in the social and economic spectacles of urbanization, immigration, and commercialisation that characterize
life in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The process isvigorously supported by the owners of the press as news becomes a commodity and subject to the demands of an expanding market (cf Fritz Machlup1962). Consequently, journalism completes a historic transition from an intensely personal, even political, endeavour to a commercial product for
consumption by mass audiences. This change is accompanied by the emergence of marketing strategies that will eventually affect the nature of news
itself, as the press, in particular, focuses on select middle-class readers as
potential consumers.
In The Form of News, Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, 73) describe this shift
in terms of market forces that eventually transformed the press, when “theeditor’s newspaper gave way to the publisher’s newspaper.” They suggestthat the “line between newsgathering and manufacturing, which had divided
the tasks of editing from printing in the editor’s newspaper, became moremarked, and the work of advertising, circulation, and finance became relatively autonomous from both editing and printing” (Ibid. 74). Indeed, proprietors of the press, more often than not, began to think in terms of maximizing profits, which also meant the industrialization of the newsgatheringand production process. Today, newspapers’ advertising departments haveerased such boundaries to be involved in the editorial production processwith demands on journalists and the production of news (Leonard, 1995).
The success of such demands has resulted in a working definition of news
that includes promotional messages or sales information, which had been
hitherto rejected as “free advertising” by editors and reporters.
The industrialization of news and its consequences for a societal discourse
is a historical outcome of the successful merger of capitalism and democracy, which defines the social, cultural, and economic determinants of an
American vision of society. It is a vision that embraces technological progressin the name of democratic goals.

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A review of journalism as an industrial practice in the realm of the American
ideal, reveals that democracy relies on the intent and generosity of those incontrol of economic power, for whom culture – including the media – becomes a business and participation a financial investment (cf. Hanno Hardt
1992). Since news is vital for securing the commodification of society, its
production – in the spirit of standardization – remains a major ideologicalcommitment to reinforcing the dominant social, economic, and political order.
The process of industrialization, as outlined in this chapter, occurs in two
interrelated arenas of production; the output of news by media institutions(with the help of news workers) and the construction of news by individuals on the basis of their exposure to the products of media organizations. It
is a complicated, ideologically charged process that involves the management of perception and the explication of worldviews under changing historical conditions.
The idea of news,1 initially identified with the needs and desires of community life and materialized in the pages of the local newspaper, represents
an organized form of information gathering and dissemination that characterizes the press as a social, cultural, and political institution. Established andnurtured in small towns and villages, the American newspaper – unlike its
European predecessors – is an intensely communal, if not personal institution, for which news serves to promote local loyalties while satisfying individual curiosity about the ways of the world. It plays a central role in the
representation of an American life, particularly at a time, when the roles ofeditor and publisher were either synonymous, or publishers acted on theirstrong convictions regarding the obligations of the press to the community.
Indeed, the presence of a partisan press – either in the form of party newspapers or strong editorial leadership – had cultivated subjective, experiential, and therefore often relevant approaches to news coverage that faded
quickly with the economic demands of mass markets.
Among the classic examples in American press history, for instance, isJoseph Pulitzer, who announced upon buying the New York World that it
would be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than to that of thepurse potentates” with the resolve to “battle for the people with earnest sincerity” (Mott, 1950, 434). He created a new journalism, based on a news policythat involved good reporting, colourful stories, crusades for popular causes,
and stunts (like Nelly Bly’s journey around the world) as well as great illustrations and solid editorials; it was helped, in general, by promotional campaigns and an inexpensive per copy price. But his best intentions – and thoseof other publishers with community-minded ideas about the role of theirnewspapers vis-à-vis the masses – always remained subject to economic
considerations, including cost efficiency in the production and presentationof news. After all, mass circulation guarantees higher advertising rates and,thus, offers greater profits to engage in even greater service.
As a contemporary observer Francis F. Leupp suggests, the “circulationmust be pushed, and the advertising patronage increased. More circulation

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can be secured only by keeping the public stirred up... A craving for excitement was first aroused in the public and then satisfied by the same handthat had aroused it” (cited in Dicken-Garcia, 1989. 63). Under these circumstances, news becomes an effective means of arousing and satisfying the
curiosity of the masses as it is applied to create audiences for advertisers.
More specifically, news is professionally treated information (by journalists)
on its way from sources to readers or audiences. It relies on rapidity (or timeliness), which becomes part of its definition as the twentieth century reveals
its preoccupation with speed, which characterizes each subsequent mediumof public communication. The industrialization of news is a consequence ofcommercial opportunity and technological advancement at a specific historicalmoment, when diverse demands for information combine with a need for
personal identity and political (or collective) goals of social control. The press(like radio and television much later) becomes an ideal instrument of social
engineering with its potential for reaching large numbers of individuals inall parts of the vast country almost instantaneously, while news provides theconsummate context for identifying and controlling the image of the world.
However, the notion of industrialization (of news) refers not only to thepotential of industrial production, but also to the social, political, and cultural consequences of news making in modern America. Thus, industrialization also means effecting Weltanschauung and self-image of society in its
own attempts to understand its existence in the world. It is, in the final analysis,
the industrialization of perception that signals a significant break in the social and cultural history of information and society.
Technologically, newspapers could be produced in large quantities since
the latter part of the nineteenth century due to the introduction of the cylinder (1840s) and “sextuple” (1889) presses, accompanied by the introductionof the linotype (1886), as well as typewriters (1881) and telephones (1890s)
that followed the use of the telegraph (since the 1840s) in American newsrooms. In other words, before the beginning of World War I the machineryof news production was fully installed for the challenges of the twentiethcentury, which would become the century of information. The subsequent
introduction of photography, radio, television, and the Internet become significant chapters in the evolution of social communication, as the industrialization of news responds to the potential of new technologies.
At the same time, each technological break in the unfolding of modernday journalism contains the threat of change and effects the form of the news
narrative with the rivalry between word and picture, print and radio, or radio and moving images (like television), for instance. It concerns primarily
those who produce the news and their professional ideology, e.g., journalists and reporters, while management embraces each advantage gained
through new media technologies.
Technological advancement in a capitalist society is a response to demands
for more goods or information. An increasing urban population, due to immigration – mostly from Europe – and migration from rural areas and the229

HANNO HARDTSouth, in particular, as well as an increasing literacy rate, provide the socialand cultural context for the development of a metropolitan press. But technological advancement also helps change the nature of news, from an ideafucused to an event-centred approach (Ibid. 63) that reflects the abilities ofeditorial staffs to observe and report events rapidly, even over long distances.
The blatant partisanship of earlier years was being abandoned (after the Civil
War) for a celebration of the event as an objective outcome of a chain offactual circumstances that could be observed and reported.
Despite these changes and a rapid settlement across the country, newspapers remain local or regional in their outlook or editorial intent with theircontinuing focus on the individual, reflecting the tradition of the community
newspaper rather than the potential of a national press. They become, in
effect, caricatures of the small-town press, with the style and intimacy of thelocal gossip, the pride of the local businessman, and the parochialism of thelocal politician projected onto an oversized locality with a diverse population, whose existence under various economic conditions generates different needs and interests regarding news. The United States knows no nationalpress, unlike other countries. Instead, it relies on the strength of metropolitan newspapers beyond their geographical centres, and the service of news
agencies, to provide a desirable level of conformity with their widespread
adoption by local and regional newspapers. Implicit in this observation is
the notion that news, like journalism in general, is a specific cultural form,
whose production and content vary in different social and cultural settings.
The initial, institutional vehicle for the delivery of the news in its modern, American form, is the penny press –beginning in the mid 1830s2 – amass circulation product, sold cheaply by newsboys, which revolutionizes
the more expensive, subscription-based commercial or political newspaperof the time. Penny papers soon had a larger appeal and attracted more advertising. Moreover, by addressing the common reader instead of the interested political or business elite, the content of the press, including its advertising, shifts to socialize the reading public into a market-driven, capitalist
system of communication that caters to the interest of a commercial class inthe buying behaviour and purchasing power of the reader.
Now, the owner of a major newspaper is, by and large, a businessman,who, according Edward A. Ross, “finds it hard to see why he should run his
property on different lines from the hotel proprietor, the vaudeville manager, or the owner of an amusement park” (1910, 304). Thus, the democratisation of the press – more newspapers for more readers – is, at the sametime, a calculated political process of incorporation into an economicallydriven system of mass communication, which, eventually, will embrace andcontrol the political spheres. Or, as Gaye Tuchman (1978, 210) expands on
this idea, news “confirms the legitimacy of the state by hiding the state’s
intimate involvement with, and support of, corporate capitalism.”
The rise of the penny press is accompanied by the rise of the reporter inthe battle for market control, because only the reporter is ultimately capable230

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of creating and presenting news in ways that will distinguish newspapers
from each other and, finally, appeal to the reader (Salcetti 1995, 48-74). Thisdivision of labour, with editors and reporters sharing the task of editorial
production, marks the beginning of specialization and an increasing isolation in the modern workplace as it cuts across types of newspapers withappeals to different and pronounced class interests.
The second half of the nineteenth century contains the most sweepingchanges of the press that would dominate the development of media throughmost of the next century. As Dicken-Garcia (1989, 184) summarizes thesedevelopments, “In an era that stressed business goals, and during which thepress increasingly took on a corporate structure, discussions defined journalism as a business first and foremost ... Terms such as ‘manufacturing,’‘product,’ and ‘commodity’ in reference to news gathering and news permeated even those discussions that did not address the profit motive.”
Thus, the historical stage is set for the standardization of the news-making process, which is determined not by the citizen as reader, for instance,
but by the (intimate) relationship between the reporter and the (institutional)
source and a shared belief in an objectively visible (and recordable) world.
It is driven by an event-orientation of the news and a focus on the individual
as a potential source of revelations about good or evil.
In this context, objectivity rises to an important professional canon ofAmerican journalism as a “strategic ritual” (Tuchman, 1972). The standardsof objectivity, which are rooted in a “mirror” phase of interpreting American
journalism, constitute key elements of a “reflection” theory that insists on aworld “out there” about which media (with the aid of reporters) will construct objective narratives. These standards of objectivity also become themeasure for the work of news agencies. Indeed, the objectivity of wire services is credited by some authors with the growth of “unbiased” reporting(Siebert et al, 1963, 60), others see its value in a reduction of costs by serving several clients (Bagdikian, 1971; Gans, 1979), without any agreement
about the chronology of these events, however (Schiller, 1981, 3-4).
The process of “news broking,” as Richard A. Schwarzlose (1990, ix) names
the process of collecting and distributing general news dispatches, calls not
only on the technological capabilities of the communication system, but
produces a style of writing that helps facilitate the processing of large quantities of information for multiple and diverse outlets. Thus, the “AP style”(with its convenient inverted pyramid form for effortless writing and editing) creates a recognizable wire news narrative – and a widely used genre
with the participation of large numbers of newspapers in news exchanges.
There is an emphasis on bare facts, and news presentation – which differs significantly from that of individual newspapers – is shaped by the early
managers of the Associated Press, for instance. According to Menahem
Blondheim (1994, 195), they are not “journalists but news vendors, and tothem news represented merely a ‘saleable commodity,’ not different from ‘astring of onions.’” In fact, by the 1920s, the Associated Press considered “day-231

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to-day news … the essential commodity”, realizing also that more sophisticated technologies had made news “a more perishable commodity than ever”(Gramling, 1940, 313). With the arrival of United Press and Hearst International News Service prior to World War I, the liveliness of stories had increased as a result of competition; at the turn to the twenty-first century,competition had ceased remarkably, but the need for news agency products
remains high with the Associated Press leading the field of suppliers.
Encouraged by a general turn to science during the final decades of thenineteenth century, which breeds a scientific outlook on the world, the ideaof the fact, and the objectivity of scientific observation become constructive
visions of a social existence that are carried forward into everyday life andin particular into the work of journalism. The proximity to science strengthens the self-defined position of journalism as a merchant of facts, even after
claims of impartiality are exposed as impossible goals or “perfect nonsense”
by such critics as William Corbett who suggest that the power of beliefs orbiases typically guides journalistic work (cited in Stephens, 1988). Indeed,as George Gerbner (1964) suggests, “there is no fundamentally non-ideological, apolitical, non-partisan, news gathering and reporting system.” Infact, “all news is views” (Ibid. 495). And journalistic objectivity is the expression of a technical rationality that makes its entry into the social andcultural arena of society during the age of certainty. Although modified more
recently by quests for balance or fairness, objectivity, nevertheless, continues to remain an important reference point in the professional catalogue ofjournalistic practices.
The strategic ritual of objectivity is accompanied by attention to the formor style of news. As American journalism comes of age with the introduction of the penny press, news becomes its most important product, and its
construction, recently mindful of accuracy and timeliness, helps create apopular genre that will sell newspapers in large numbers and on a daily basis.
In the following decades of industrialization and urbanization and into
the twentieth century, the discourse of journalism begins to change from apersonal narrative, featuring the expressive skills of the reporter as writer tothe impersonal account that relies on the professional skills of the journalist
as chronicler of events. Although the standard 5W-H summary lead (who,what, when, where, why and how) is eventually modified in the 1940s under the rise of interpretation and features in the press; there is also the venerable tradition of the inverted pyramid in news writing. But newspaper style
books and college-level journalism courses remain the major contexts inwhich news writing is reinvented and expressed in formulas that typicallyfavour short sentences, short paragraphs, and simple words (not more than
two syllables, if possible). The result is a language of news prose, according
to Tuchman (1978) that “contains a special relationship to the everyday world,
for, like any other language, it both frames and accomplishes discourse. It isperception and it guides perception; it reconstitutes the everyday world.”232

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Thus, socialized into a professional discourse that combines the celebrationof the fact with the efficiency of the journalistic form (the news story) andknowledge of audience (or reader) demands, journalists reproduce a visionof their environment that relies on a routine practice of gathering and packaging facts. The predominant practices of the Associated Press, in particular, as
an early participant in the creation of a news culture in the United States,
promote social, political, and cultural integration and provide the larger thematic frame for the construction of a reality in which readers would find theirplace as citizens, neighbours, and individuals. They also influence the development of objectivity as a journalistic standard (Emery & Emery 1988, 217).
Yet, economic considerations remain important, and not only in the UnitedStates. Boyd-Barrett (1978) observes in the British context that, “the way inwhich the [news] agencies developed in response to market forces, and theirstrategies of conflict and co-operation in the struggle for economic security,
are consistently under-emphasized.” Even earlier in the twentieth century,
the realization of a more radical change of the British press, in general, surfaced as well. A 1911 account suggests that “the capitalists, whether individuals or corporations, who, during the first decade of the present reign,
have acquired almost a monopoly of the newspaper press, are the lineal
descendants of the resolute adventurers, literary or commercial, who began
to create the press even before the fall of the Stuarts and the freedom ofspeech following on constitutional kingship had made it possible quite tocomplete their work…” The newspaper, it has been said, has been from thefirst a commercial undertaking. Its promoters, however, often had othermotives, such as the support of a party, the advocacy of a cause, etc. Today
political championship or attack is largely subordinated to improving thedividends of shareholders in the venture” (Escott, 1911). An expanding news
industry in the 1920s – likewise in England – sees “the rise of a new type ofentrepreneurial proprietor for whom newspapers were primarily a commercial proposition,” according to Murdock and Golding (1978), who relate Lord
Thomson’s later remarks to the 1961 Royal Commission on the Press that his
purpose was to run newspapers as business to make money. “That is what
you do business for.”By the mid-1920s it had become clear that journalism worldwide had takena turn towards commercialisation. Thus, the first international survey of journalists by the International Labour Office in Geneva concludes in 1928 that,“industrial methods have penetrated into all branches of journalism. . . . A
new phenomenon is looming in the newspaper world and tends to accentuate this character of capitalistic enterprise: it is a process of concentration,
the formation of vast trusts aiming at controlling all or a part of the press”(International Labour Office).
A generation later, a modern assault on objectivity occurs in the UnitedStates, when the lines between fact and fiction are blurred with the “newjournalism” of Tom Wolfe and others in the 1960s, for instance, which descents on the course of industrializing news. The latter emerges as a crea-233

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tive, highly subjective and individualized, that is authored, product beyond
traditional notions of news that had risen from the earlier part of the twentieth century. Trafficking in the world of facts remains important, but borrowing techniques from the novel becomes a legitimate way of facilitating
the production of news as a social narrative. It reflects what Philip Rahv (1978,19) identifies as the “urge toward and immersion in experience” as a unifying principle in American writing. It is also a reminder of the “I” form ofearlier, nineteenth century news writing, which grew out of the personal
experience of the journalist, making news an eyewitness account.
But its independent approach, while innovative, entertaining, or eveninformative, contradicts the industrial nature of news and becomes moredifficult to control. Consequently, the “new journalism” remains an excessive professional practice, which quietly retreats into the history books as amodern example of the common origins of newspapers and the novel.
Lennard Davis (1983, 51) calls it the “news/novel discourse”, which he dates
back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although novelists continue
to borrow from journalistic methods and topics, the process of industrialization regains speed, and news resumes its traditional role in American society.
However, not without other, conceptual changes that relate to appeal and/or relevance to readers, for instance. While news, in its original form refers
to the public events ranging from the affairs of government or commerce tothe activities of the community, its modern version crosses into entertainment and advertising to cater to the desires of a public that wants to be amused– to speak with Neil Postman (1985) – and a media organization that wants
to sell consumers to its advertising clients. After all, as the nineteenth century
journalism historian Frederic Hudon (1872, 470) already proclaims, advertisements constitute “practical city news,” and “each advertiser is a reporter.”Moreover, readers are drawn into a repetitive, formulaic construction of
the world that reproduces and reinforces a specific understanding of theirrelations to others and to themselves. Such constructions begin with a geography of information, or with the familiarity of space, in which the news
discourse (of press or broadcasting) occurs. That is, the sequencing of content, the designations of specific spaces for news or opinion, domestic eventsor foreign news, the location of crossword puzzle or weather report combine to form a reliable mapping of ‘facts” that matter.
The result is a constituted, reinforced, and re-described territory of social
knowledge on which the individual roams among familiar signs of life. It isalso a form of standardization, which involves the design and layout of newspapers by following strict rules about the categorization of news (e.g., local,
national, international, sports, business, etc.), as well as the placement ofservices within the newspaper (e.g., from front page news to the editorial
page, or the crossword puzzle). These rules are rarely violated, since readers demand easy access to information or entertainment and rely on thefamiliarity of the reading environment. The resulting condition of intimacy
or even trust becomes a foundation for selling ideas (or ideologies) more234

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effectively. Therefore, the form of the medium as well as the content, in theirstandardized or commodified ways, combine to constitute the modern newspaper (or broadcast news program), which became, particularly after WorldWar II, the model for democratic media systems in Western Europe.
Differently expressed, the conception of news extends beyond the process of gathering and reproducing factual (of fictional) accounts to include
the embeddedness of the specific account as it evolves from the design ofthe medium and the surrounding narratives. News, in this sense, is a continuous flow of information (in all forms or genres) that benefits from its
context, rather than a series of distinct, identifiable items.
The decreasing number of independent news outlets, combined withincreasing corporate control of public communication, with local news
monopolies prevailing on the American scene (cf. Bagdikian, 1997), translates not only into fewer choices for individuals looking for genuine differences. It also means increasing control over the industrialization of news andinformation generally. For instance, considerations of news as a commodity– typical of news agencies, like the Associated Press – has spread to larger
and more prestigious newspapers (like The New York Times, or the Washington Post) and broadcasting organizations (like CNN), which sell their news
at home and abroad, as well as to chain operations (like Gannett), which
exchange news among their media outlets. The result is an increasing homogeneity of the news content in American media.
With limited news sources, from a lack of access to print media for economic reasons to fewer sites of news production, in general, and with limited intellectual resources, due to poor educational standards, reader perceptions of the world are either restricted or more easily controlled. The
repetition of style and form together with the conventional use of news
sources that reflect a specific political, economic, or social authority, provide limited and, therefore, predictable options for constructing a particularvision of the world.
Thus, the history of journalism in the United States – and elsewhere byextension of its social, political and economic conditions – is also a history
of industrialization. It ranges from the waning sovereignty of the journalist
as intellectual worker to an increasing dependence as news-worker andincludes the rising standardization of news sources and the processes ofgathering and presenting news under a new definition of journalism as customer service. The latter creates a form of journalism that is not only predictable (and therefore safe), but also contained (and not adversarial or evenrevolutionary), since it refers to a specific social setting, class, or cultural
condition. As such, journalism responds to rather than challenges the social,economic, or political environment; it acknowledges requests for information and satisfies demands for social knowledge, not unlike libraries or searchengines on the Internet.
Journalism has undergone fundamental definitional changes during thelast decades of the twentieth century, when advertising and public relations

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become legitimate journalistic practices in the interest of serving a specific,
information-oriented clientele. By elevating public relations as a social orpolitical institution to a legitimate producer of news, journalism undermines
its previous professional standards, which concentrate on facts and a search
for truths and a fierce independence from advertising policies and practices,to embrace a new understanding of journalism that celebrates submission
rather than independence; journalism is reduced to a service industry operating with a vocabulary of middle-class interests.
With these developments arrive changes in the concept of news itself,
not just in terms of extending the definition of news to future events, butalso in terms of content, form, and appearance with the emergence of “soft”
news, headline news, or infotainment, the impact of broadcast language on
print news, and the use of colour in newspapers to imitate television screens.
These developments are a result of the changing nature of society, andconstitute adjustments to the product (news) that reflect the commercial
interest in the success of public communication; while reaching the masses
remains a desirable goal of electronic media, targeting selected groups (ofmiddle-class consumers) has become he preferred strategy of print (newspaper) media in their attempts to secure a potential market. In these attempts
media have discovered what Horace Greeley already knew in the mid-nineteenth century when he advised a friend on the verge of publishing a country newspaper that “the subject of deepest interest to an average human being
is himself; next to that he is most concerned about his neighbours. Asia andthe Tongo Islands stand a long way after these in his regard...” (cited in
Lippmann, 1922, 210).
Consequently, over a century later, media focus increasingly on the individual with issues of health, personal relations, consumer tips, and lifestyledisplacing genuine news reporting. The emerging understanding of news is
a perception of self in need of improvement, in competition with neighbours,
and ignorant of the (foreign) affairs of the state. The ultimate definition ofnews centres on the well being of the self, isolates the individual from thepolitical realm, and caters to physical and psychological needs that can beserved by the market.
In other words, news becomes a key element in the production of readers
or audiences and their delivery to advertisers. Disposable income and status
are important determinants of newspaper content, for instance, and the typeof news or information that is generated for the purpose of attracting andkeeping readers, while electronic media and television specifically, cater tothe curiosity of individuals about themselves and others and aid in the standardization of taste cultures. Thus, the concerns about the conduct of an
emerging, modern media system at the end of the nineteenth century regarding sensationalism, invasion of privacy, and trivialization have become
acutely contemporary issues as media engage in journalism as show business.
The success of the industrial process is tied to the need to control forpolitical and economic reasons; it finds support in the technological advance-236

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ment of communication systems, which permits instantaneous, large-scaledissemination of news, and in the social-psychological condition of individuals, who must rely in their access to news on conformist constructions of theworld, including perceptions of their own lives.
Insisting on the liberating tradition of enlightenment and the independence of thought, media, paradoxically, engage in the process of industrialization of news in ways that deprive the enlightened individual of choice andreinforce dependence on specific versions of news (or of the world). News
workers, or intellectuals engaged in the process of news communication,
suffer the same fate. Their professional practice is limited by the interests of
the ownership and directed to serve the reader/audience as consumer rather
than as citizen. Their communicative competence remains focused on thetask of advertising excess and selling consumption as freedom of choice,while their own sense of what is news, or how it should be presented, ismarginalized, if not suppressed as a matter of professional survival.
Ettema and Glasser (1983, 183) observe correctly that, “news remains anessential form of knowledge about the social world – though a form met
with deepening distrust within that world.” But their proposition that
Habermas’ understanding of solidarity contains an “explicitly moral purpose
for the news media – an opportunity for journalists to participate in the craftingof a moral order worthy of their open and candid support” becomes animposition for a media system that is driven by commercial demands rather
than by the call of a moral order and served by a profession that is identified
with corporate goals rather than with independent visions of what news ought
to be.
Perceptions of the world rely on versions of truth, objectivity, or realitythat continue to be offered by a media industry, whose mission from within
the dominant ideological structure is to secure consent by guiding the imagination of the masses (cf. Hardt, 2004).

Notes
1.

2.

The development of the concept of news has been described by Frank Mott who wrote:
Newes originally meant novelties ... Its use in the more limited meaning of tidings wascommon, however, in the sixteenth century, when it was used in the plural, as ‘these
newes.’ But it was often used in the singular by 1600 with an emphasis on ‘the newnessof news.
The first penny paper was the New York Sun, followed by the Evening Transcript, andthe New York Herald; penny papers quickly sprang up in other urban areas with similar
success, beginning in the mid- 1830s.

237News Ideology
in The Twentieth Century1
Kevin G. Barnhurst

Introduction
Scholars, journalists, and the public share a picture of journalism at the end of
the twentieth century. It is a high-pressure activity, in its production processes
and its presentation. Coverage is fragmented and episodic, focused on the now,on latest update available. The imperatives of marketing and the limits in theattention span of audiences drive journalism to the briefest forms, following
the trends elsewhere in popular culture. Despite its being shorter, there is just
too much news, too many events flooding the 24/7 cycle of reporting thatreaches through digital networks of communication. Competition among news
media pushes journalists to focus more on people, on so-called news-youcan-use, and on local angles. In sum, news today is more densely populated,
more action-packed, more up-to-date, more localized, more event-centred, andabove all much briefer. Such is the commonsense view.
Two experiences more than a decade ago startled me out of that view.
First, while working on a content analysis, coders on a news project began
to complain. They had read with enthusiasm the newspaper stories from theearly 1900s, even though they had to hand-crank the old machine readers
through microfilm rolls containing scratched or negative images. When theyturned to news from the late twentieth century, they called the stories longand boring, and, even though they had paper copies, they said the samecoding work now seemed overly complicated. My second experience involved broadcast news. While listening to U.S. National Public Radio (NPR),
I began to notice journalists interviewing each other. Instead of talking to,say, an Israeli, the host in Washington, D.C. would get the U.S. reporter in
Tel Aviv on the line and ask questions. Without any taped actualities, only
the scratchy connection of the telephone line (or transmission) gave the story
any realism. The host played the reporter’s role, and the reporter acted as
the source. Once I had noticed this role reversal on the radio, I began to see
it wherever I turned, and especially when watching the evening networknews and nightly local newscasts.

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These activities seemed to contradict what defines news. The newspaper
reports were longer, not shorter, and the broadcast reports focused on journalists, not on other persons. When I would mention the contradiction to
students, colleagues, and neighbours, they would give me puzzled looks atfirst, but later come back to say they had started noticing the same thing.
Something odd was afoot, and I wanted to find out what. Contradictions
between commonsense and experience can reveal interesting changes, butcommon knowledge is intriguing in other ways. Everyday notions often hide
deep-seated ideologies, the shared beliefs that groups use to shape theirworld, and ideologies almost always involve contradictions. Ideological processes are often at the heart of paradigm shifts as well.
Suspecting a contradiction led me into a large project (Barnhurst 1991),
begun in the late 1980s and now comprised of a dozen studies so far (andavailable on line; see Barnhurst forthcoming). In our studies, my colleagues
and I have been examining commonsense assumptions about U.S. journalism, couched in terms journalists understand. We studied different media
separately – newspapers, television, radio, and the Internet – we took measurements that journalists take of their own work (column inches and stories,
sound bites and packages), and we observed the five W’s, the elements ofnews they use themselves: who, what, when, where, and why. Once theresults were in, I then interviewed journalists about their beliefs, showed
them the results of the studies, and asked them for their thoughts.
This essay gives an overview of the project. It begins by reviewing thecurrent state of knowledge about ideology and ideological processes. Little
is known about how ideologies shape the texts that groups circulate. The
literature review points to some key questions and debates, proposing how
a study of news can shed light on them. The essay then summarizes the results for the length of news stories and for two of the five W’s: the who andthe what. For each of these three aspects of news, an outline of commonsense
views, as found in popular discussions and among journalists, precedes asummary of results from content analyses designed to measure the trends innews content. My aim is to document whether systematic differences exist
between widely accepted notions of news and the texts journalists create,
and the three aspects illustrate the pattern found throughout our studies.
Finally, the essay returns to the question of ideology in light of the evidence
showing those differences. Where contradictions occur, the discussion section explores the institutional settings and work routines – the conditions of
production – that give rise to them, drawing on the sociological literatureand my own interviews. The essay concludes by suggesting some of theconsequences the contradictions produce for journalists, audiences, andsociety.

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The Ideology Concept
Ideology, which began as the study of ideas from a scientific rather thanmetaphysical perspective, has had a long and bifurcated career in history,
political economy, sociology, literary criticism, and cultural studies. In my surveyof the literature on ideology, two books proved especially useful, the assessment of sociologist Jorge Larrain (1979) and the landmark overview of Terry
Eagleton (1991). Since Karl Marx employed the term, it has had two principal
meanings, one broad and descriptive and the other limited and critical, bothof them under attack. Clifford Geertz (1973: 194) characterizes the two definitions as a choice between the “tendentious or mindlessly empirical”.
The broad meaning, preferred among some social scientists (e.g., Barnett
and Silverman 1979), defines ideology as any set of shared ideas that orderand direct group life. Unlike a culture or a worldview, which may encompass all of the group’s beliefs and activities, ideology operates within the
narrower zone of ideas that define, justify, and channel power. Notions involving power – who should wield it and how – have a particularly tortuous
existence, often involving open conflict or covert deception and illusion asgroups seek to downplay or ignore their own power relations. The negative
dimension of ideology gives rise to the second definition.
The narrower meaning, preferred among critical scholars and in cultural
studies, defines ideology as the particular set of shared ideas that obscure
how powerful groups dominate others. This sense of ideology also predominates in ordinary speech. Eagleton (1991: xiii) calls it, “what persuades men
and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin”,
and he lists six ways that “meaning sustains domination”: by promoting thedominant group’s view of things, making it seem natural, treating it as theuniversal case, denigrating other views, excluding anyone who holds them,and obscuring all of the above operations (Ibid: 5). The last strategy, sometimes called mystification, involves more than the premeditated action of
one group upon others. Instead, each person re-enacts the group’s ideology
during any interpersonal contact, according to Louis Althusser (1984). Hailing another person, for example, also calls up and re-inscribes a set of power
relations for the hailer and the hailed. Althusser calls the process interpellation. As Stuart Hall puts it, people are “spoken by, as well as speaking, theirculture” (Hall 1980: 30). As a result, everyone may participate in his or her
own subjugation to the ideological arena (Foucault 1980), but dominantgroups benefit. They sustain their position through hegemony, the maintenance of domination through means other than violence or direct state control (Gramsci 1971).
In its narrower meaning, the contradiction at the heart of ideology is the
distance between one’s own performance and the mendacity of power.
Eagleton says these hidden falsehoods are of three orders: epistemic, functional, and genetic (1991: 24-25). Epistemic falsehoods are unwarranted
beliefs about the world, functional falsehoods are the unjust benefits and241

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consequences of those beliefs, and genetic falsehoods are their illegitimate
origins. Examining the types of distortions involved in ideological processes
shifts the analysis away from criticism, which can become a broadside attack on a group’s ideas, and toward critique, which attempts to enter into
the group’s perspective and find the sources and sense-making that produce
patterns of prevarication. Studies that attend to the pattern of distortion in
ideas sustaining hegemonic power are critical (and sometimes tendentious,in Geertz’s phrase).
Studies that attend to the ideas that groups share about power, without
specific regard to the patterns of distortion involved, are descriptive (and open
to Geertz’s charge of being “mindlessly empirical”). Although the literaturesuggests that studies of ideology are of two types, critical and descriptive,that distinction may not bear out in practice. One challenge for research isto observe where description leaves off or blends into critique. An important part of analysing ideology is to attend to the imagery associated withpower, the picture of power relations (Mitchell 1986).
Little is known, however, of how ideology shapes texts. Recent work in
the analysis of discourse has suggested doing fine-grained studies of ideological processes, to show “what they actually look like” (van Dijk 1998: 7).
Such semantic analyses must accompany study of the “contexts, situations,participants” and their pattern of power relations (Ibid 12). Theorists suggest
the media, as technical and institutional actors that can reach across space
and time, play a pivotal role in transmitting the symbolic and economic values
underlying ideology (Marcuse 1964; Thompson 1990). For some scholars,
the media bear particular responsibility for severing ideologies from their
original, physical locales, enhancing the power of dominant groups (Hawkes
2003). The media also provide the crucible for what Pierre Bourdieu callssocial alchemy, the process that transforms “arbitrary relations into legitimate”
ones (Bourdieu 1977: 195). Mass cultural texts do not simply impose power
relations but also offer substantial incentives needed to win ideological adherence from an audience (Jameson 1981). Most scholars agree that a central
concern is the connection between the ideological process and the relationsof production (or between the superstructure and base, in Marxian terms).
Studying ideology involves some risks. One is that, on the one hand, a
study that treats patterns of domination as neutral processes may suffer from
relativism, ignoring injustice in an effort to remain objective or above thefray. On the other hand, any claim that a group’s ideas contain some formof false consciousness positions the scholar as all-seeing or outside history.
Jameson criticized the content analysis of George Lukács, Jacques Derrida,
and others, “which explores the inscription of ideology in an ensemble ofpurely formal categories”, unmasking “such categories and their ideologicalconsequences” (Jameson 1981 note 2: 283). He calls the impulse driving theircritical practices “an immanent one”, because the methods ignore the wider
context and assume that the formal properties “always and everywhere bear
the same ideological charge” (Ibid: 283).

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Another risk is that any claim about what others believe may suffer fromthe hubris of assuming the scholar has access to the real reality, a pitfall
especially likely for those conducting statistical analysis (Hawkes 2003), butalso for those claiming to identify distortions. A classic way of describing
this risk comes from a French scholar of the Enlightenment, Claude Adrien
Helvetius, who “pointed out that insects living on grass eaten by sheep were
liable to look on the sheep as ferocious predators but on the wolves, whopreyed on the sheep, as entirely beneficent” (McLellan 1986: 5). The analyst
may avoid these pitfalls by taking wherever possible the viewpoint of thegroup and revealing his or her own perspective, interests, and allegiances.
An aspect of ideology sometimes overlooked is that even its dark or negative side – the duplicity and unfairness in power distribution – implies the
opposite, the shared vision of Utopia a group imagines (Mannheim 1985/
1936). Fredric Jameson (1981) proposes that any study of ideology containtwo parts, an analysis of how the form and content of texts legitimate class
domination (ideology) and also an analysis of how they embody universal
values that produce solidarity (Utopia).
Although some critics see little chance of escaping the iron grip of ideology (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), most authors are more sanguine. The
study of ideology then becomes an intervention, proposing a cure or a solution. The fact that, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) suggests, commonsense is
the ground where ideology intervenes, itself opens the opportunity for what
Hall calls “formative and educative tasks” to effect “a profound revision of
the whole social foundation” (Hall 1980: 36). The belief that empirical research or critique can influence commonsense is a hopeful one, expressing
confidence in the group under study. The challenge is to reveal to the groupthe “real motives” that “remain unknown” to individual actors, in the words
of Fredrick Engels (quoted in Williams 1983: 155). Eagleton (1991: 223) suggests that the process can transform ideological consciousness but requires“active political struggle”.
The literature of ideology suggests several aims for the present study. One
is to explore the boundary between descriptive and critical definitions. Another is, wherever distortions seem apparent, to pay close attention to theorder of falsehood involved and to adopt the role of offering critique fromwithin rather than criticism from without. A lacuna in the literature is thepaucity of close analyses of the texts involved, and research on the media
can make an important contribution. Due caution is needed to avoid the risksof relativism, immanence, and hubris. Study involving group members must
supplement close content analysis of the text, and the historical context andconditions of production require attention as well. The research must also
look for the positive side, the vision of Utopia that even the most dishonest
ideologies imply and the ways these also build social solidarity. Finally, ideological research should reveal its own political agenda and expected outcomes.

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News Definitions
The next sections examine three commonsense aspects of news, describing
the logic behind them and citing examples of journalists who invoke them.
The results of content analyses of the aspects follow, to show whether the
texts that journalists produce contradict their assumptions about what they
are doing. I return to the ideological analysis later, after documenting thebackground of common sense and any pattern of contradictions.

LengthCommon sense insists that everything is going faster these days. Radio andtelevision have picked up their pace, requiring shorter attention spans. Other
technologies – faxes, electronic mail, and text messaging on cell phones –allow speedier communication. Television commercials have gone from a
one-minute standard in the 1960s to fifteen seconds, telling mini-stories inan abbreviated style first developed for music videos.
Journalists assume that daily news has gone along with the trend. When
Andy Glass, until recently a columnist for the Cox newspaper chain, began
working as a journalist at the New Haven (Connecticut) Journal Courier inthe 1950s, news came in on a teleprinter hooked to a teletype machine that
set the type and justified it in columns. “It was virtually impossible to edit,” hesays, and so “stories tended to be longer” back then. “You couldn’t go in andcut a paragraph, other than to go to the stone and physically throw the typeaway after it had been set” (Glass: 2001, n.p.). Since then, changes in technology have allowed editors to make stories shorter, according to his argument.
Critics point to the impact of USA Today, which began in 1982. Science
writer James Gleick, in his book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, summarized this view: “USA Today caters to your more modern
reading habits by keeping copy short. Other newspapers have catered tothem by going out of business” (Gleick 1999: 140). In the late 1980s, attention to shorter TV sound-bites during election campaigns furthered the impression that news was getting shorter (see Hallin 1992). Here again technology plays a role, as faster, more-flexible video replaced slower film techniques. Critics cite a related trend: the rise of images everywhere. As pictures became more prominent, they squeezed out words. In magazines,
according to the New York Times, “the 4,000-word article has become a relic,first replaced by the 800-word quick take and then further boiled down to a
400-word blurb that is little more than a long caption” (Carr 2002: C-8).
Following the trend in magazines, critics say, daily news has gotten shorter.
These arguments make sense and seem to have the support of evidence:common experience among audiences, direct involvement in productive
processes by journalists, and observations of the outcomes by critics. The
pattern seems clear, and so it may seem quixotic to question the texts jour-244NEWS IDEOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

nalists produce within media organizations. That step, however, reveals acontradiction. A series of analyses measuring the content of journalism texts
shows that news – at least in the United States – is getting longer.
For newspapers, we examined the changes in two different studies of thecontents over a century. One measured the number of stories that fit on thepage (Barnhurst and Nerone 1991). We selected three newspapers for study:
the San Francisco Chronicle, to represent metropolitan dailies; the Springfield,
Illinois, State Journal-Register, to represent smaller urban dailies; and thePeterborough (formerly Contoocook) Transcript, of New Hampshire, to represent small-town weeklies. No selection of newspapers is representative of
all the U.S. press, but these three papers covered a range of newspaper sizes– small, medium, and large – and geographic locations, including the West
Coast, Midwest, and East Coast of the country. We sampled a reconstructedweek of the dailies and a reconstructed month (four issues) of the weekly,balanced among the four yearly seasons, at ten-year intervals. As part of thelarger study, we took a simple count of the number of items and the numberof stories (groups of items related to the same event) on front pages.
The front pages clearly became less dense, with fewer items and stories.
In 1885, the newspapers ran about fifty items and about twenty-five stories
on their front pages. In 1985, they ran about nine items in six stories. The
average number of items (such as images, heads, and blocks of text) on thefront page declined from a high of 58 for the Transcript of 1885 to a low of
7.29 for the Chronicle of 1985. The average number of stories on front pages
declined from a high of 32.3 for the Register in 1895 to a low of 5.25 for theTranscript in 1985. These data show a dramatic decline in the number ofstories that newspapers publish on their front pages, which, after some ups
and downs early in the century, have fallen steadily since the 1930s. Butother factors might account for the changes. Over the same period, the physical dimensions of newspaper pages shrank, and publishers also enlarged
the sizes of type and illustrations.
To eliminate other factors, we ran another study that measured the lengthof individual stories (Barnhurst and Mutz 1997). Very few U.S. newspapers
published continuously over a century, but we identified three others withdiffering circulations originating in geographically dispersed cities of varying sizes: the Portland Oregonian, serving a small city on the West Coast;
the Chicago Tribune, reaching a wider region in the Midwest; and the New
York Times, distributing eventually to a national audience from the East Coast.
We drew independent samples from random weeks at twenty-year intervals,
drawn to include a balanced number of stories on three different topics. We
studied accidents, crime, and jobs – topics general enough to persist over along time period but narrow enough to allow reliable coding. As part of thelarger study, coders rated the length of each article on a five-point scale,from very brief to very long (their coding proved highly reliable on this item).
The news stories clearly got longer from 1894 to 1994. The overall trend
was positive and statistically significant, and for each topic and each newspa-

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per the average length of articles increased. Stories in the New York Times tended
to be longer than those in the other two newspapers. Across all three newspapers, jobs stories also tended to be longer, and accident stories shorter. But
regardless of the differences between topics and newspapers, all the articles
grew longer gradually and consistently, and statistical tests confirmed the trend.
U.S. newspapers did grow bulkier, with more pages and sections, during the
century, but the results held up even after correcting for the more ample space
available in what journalists call the news hole by the end of the century. The
trend toward longer stories was in every case highly significant. Newspaper
journalists wrote longer stories, and editors and publishers allowed stories toexpand in length, despite what they believed they were doing.
But what about television news? Overall, news reports on television havealso grown longer. Studies of national broadcasts show that the number ofnews stories has declined (Riffe 1996; Riffe and Holm 1999; Riffe and Budianto2001). The overall length of newscasts shrank, however, just as newspaper
front pages did. One study that measured story length found that the average report on the network evening news declined from the 1960s to the 1980s,
but most of the change resulted from the shrinking sound bites for sources(Hallin 1992). The length of television news reports then grew from the 1980s
to the 1990s (Jones S. n.d.). To explore more closely what journalists themselves did within their texts since the 1960s, when television news came into
its own in the United States, we conducted two studies, one to examine thecontent of their stories and another to look at the ways they presented themselves visually – an important dimension in television.
The first study replicated the original sound-bite research, but this time
focusing on what journalists said, rather than on what politicians said (Steele
and Barnhurst 1996). The original study of U.S. news from the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, included political stories during quadrennial elections from 1968 to 1988. Using the original sample videotapes,
we took several measurements of length for journalist speech: how long theywent on each time they talked, how often they talked in a report, and whatshare of the total time they spent talking in a report. By these measures combined, journalists gained ground. Although their segments of speech ran
slightly shorter over time, they spoke more than twice as often, and theirshare of the average election report grew significantly. In other words, when
the sound bite for sources became a household term, the debates among
media critics and journalists obscured another trend: journalists themselves
were consistently talking more throughout the period since the 1960s. One
final note on the study: it found that over the period the substance of journalist speech shifted in focus away from giving information and toward
expressing opinions about events.
The second study used the same sample again, but added the 1992 election and measured the visual aspects of the journalists’ text (Barnhurst andSteele 1997). Over the period, the number of times journalists appeared onscreen more than doubled. In the 1960s, a typical report included the news

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anchor alone reading the text and perhaps showing a filmed actuality, anda correspondent appeared in only half the stories. By the 1990s, the anchor
would appear twice during an election story, usually at the beginning andat the end, and the reporter who was covering the campaign would appear
twice during the middle of the story. That means the correspondents wereappearing four times as often as they did twenty years earlier.
Whether examined in their textual utterances or in their visual presences,
journalists became more prominent and took more of the viewer’s time. Theirlonger speech and on-screen time during news reports accompanied thedeclining number of news stories in a typical evening newscast, in which
the average report grew somewhat longer.
Newspapers and television are main sources for daily news in the UnitedStates, but both were losing audience numbers (circulation and ratings) during
the last quarter of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, other venues grew inauthority and popularity. To discover whether the trends toward longer news
extended to newer venues, I conducted two additional studies, one of public radio and one of the Internet.
The first study examined National Public Radio (NRP) news in the context
of its institutional development in U.S. history (Barnhurst 2003a). In the 1970s,
the network established its main news programs, “Morning Edition” and “AllThings Considered,” and began to reach an audience of commuters during
the morning and afternoon rush hour traffic in major cities. Affiliate stations
existed in every state and expanded to blanket many rural areas. The two
programs have consistently enlarged their audience numbers and their authority
as national news outlets. From the earliest broadcasts, NPR news programs
preferred extended reporting, rather than the kind of headline service available on most of commercial radio. NPR informational programming tended totake alternative and creative forms at first, but as news operations grew, attracting establishment journalists and mainstream audiences, one might reasonably expect to find that the formats for news stories became more standard
and perhaps shorter. A study of NPR seemed one likely place to find a counter-example to the trends in television and newspapers.
The research drew a randomly reconstructed week for each election year
from 1980 through 2000, and as part of the comprehensive study, coders
also measured the length of each day’s broadcasts, reports, and individual
speech acts. Because transcripts and audiotapes provided actual measurements of length, the coding proved highly reliable.
In every dimension, journalism on NPR lengthened. The broadcasts expanded from ninety minutes to two hours. Contrary to expectation, the lengthof all kinds of reports grew over the period. Political coverage grew longer
as well, so that reports in 2000 were a third longer than in 1980. Speech acts
during all reports on NPR declined by about a fifth in length, and the sameoccurred within political coverage. The length of journalist speech, however,remained about the same, so that they became more prominent as others’
sound bites shrank. Their speech grew longer relative to others’ speech.

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In the substance of their talk, the NPR journalists shifted away from giving information and from asking questions. Instead, they moved toward
expressing opinions, just as had occurred on television news. The data also
show that the journalists talked to each other more. Journalists interviewed
other journalists more often, as the frequency and share of reporters acting
as sources or experts more than doubled. In other dimensions of speech,
providing background information declined by half, and offering interpretations of events more than doubled. In short, journalists became more prominent on NPR, talking more in longer stories.
The second study examined another new venue for news, the Internet(Barnhurst in press). On-line information is so new that historical analysis is
impossible. To allow some comparison to previous trends, the research sampled on-line sites from three newspapers studied previously (Barnhurst andMutz 1997). The three represent a range in the spectrum of the on-line press.
The New York Times attempts to reproduce the authoritative quality of its
print edition in an interactive setting, the Chicago Tribune comes closer to acomprehensive city-based web portal, and the Portland Oregonian exists as
a separate news site that provides local content without being fully integrated
into either a city portal or its interactive setting.
The study drew a purposive sample of stories during three consecutive
weeks in July 2001, a period selected to avoid the predictable distortions ofmajor holidays and other regularly occurring major events. The sampling ofstories followed the protocol established in the previous study, and coders
used the same procedures, rating the length of stories using the same scalewith similar reliability.
As the newspapers moved onto the Internet, their stories continued to
grow longer, following the trend established over the previous century. By
2001, news stories had grown even longer, as measured on the scale. The
increase matched an earlier jump in the 1970s and continued the trend that
had levelled off between 1974 and 1994. Although the Internet environment
can accommodate unlimited amounts of text, on-line users must scroll or
click through screens to read, a process that discourages lengthiness. In otherwords, the technology did not itself push the news text in either direction.
U.S. newspapers have tended to reproduce their print copy on line, and acomparison of printed and on-line versions of the stories in the study confirmed that there were very few changes. The study concluded that the trend
toward longer stories has continued, even as news organizations ventured
into cyberspace.
In newspapers, on television, on public radio, and on web sites, the news
has grown longer during the past century. The trends found within the texts(visual, audio, and printed) contradict widespread assumptions among audiences, critics, and journalists about the first aspect under study, the lengthof news stories. The contradictions between common sense and observed
textual products deserve further ideological analysis.

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A growing element in the media landscape of the past quarter century has
been so-called people news. The trend began in magazines during the 1970s,
spread to newspaper human-interest stories, and became the focus of primetime shows on television in the 1990s. Time, Inc., founded People Weekly inMarch 1974, and the Family Circle group brought out its first edition of Us
magazine in late 1976. Other media outlets followed suit, increasing thenumber of people feature coverage. By the 1990s, a growth area for U.S.
television networks was the news magazine, a genre oriented to people stories (Committee 1998). News can not happen without people, and the assumption is that daily journalism increased attention to people, going alongwith the rest of the media.
These widespread beliefs do not turn up in the texts journalists produce.
Studies show that people have been disappearing from the front page for
decades (Danielson and Lasorsa 1997). References to people have fallen bymore than a quarter since 1900. Here the same caveats apply, because pages
have gotten smaller, and fewer stories now fit on them. To find out whether
the numbers of persons declined within stories required further study. Several of my studies with colleagues, described earlier in this essay, also included a measurement of the who, counting the number of appearances of
persons per story to avoid the problems of other research.
In our study covering a century of newspaper content (Barnhurst and Mutz
1997), we coded every individual and group in each story and indicatedwhether reporters merely named or also identified each one in other ways.
Coders noted what role each person played, such as actor or victim in thestory, official directly or indirectly involved, expert observer, or bystander.
We found that fewer named individuals appeared in newspaper stories in
the course of the century. In 1894, the typical newspaper article referred byname to more than one person, but by 1994 only about one story out offour referred to an individual by name alone. As named individuals disappeared, groups became more prominent. Over the period, the number ofgroups went up by more than half, and when mentioning individuals, reporters more often used group affiliation as a form of identification. Fewerindividuals stood alone.
In the roles they played in the news stories, individual actors or victims
declined, while official sources increased. A century ago, outside experts
almost never appeared in the news, and an official source turned up in only
one of every four stories. Today, fully one fifth of the actors or victims havedisappeared from the average story, replaced by experts and officials. Almost every story includes an official source, and outside experts appear in
one fifth of the stories. The changes understate the magnitude of these changes
because, at the same time, stories grew longer. From the perspective of thereader, the landscape of grey text had become depopulated beyond what

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these average figures suggest. The results show why other studies have foundthat persons have been vanishing from the front pages.
Studies of other news outlets show similar trends. On television, experts
multiplied. In the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, the numberof analysts, consultants, and the like almost tripled on the three national
broadcast networks (Soley 1992). The well-known sound-bite study, documenting the decline in politicians’ speech on television from 1968 to 1988
(Hallin 1992), also observed a large growth in what journalists call wrap
comments, the concluding words that summarize the correspondent’s expert
conclusions. My own detailed study of journalist speech on National PublicRadio also found more journalists acting as experts (Barnhurst 2003a). NPR
journalists began interviewing each other on the air, and the share of talk by
all experts, journalists and others combined, grew from 15 to more than 25
percent of all speech from 1980 to 2000. Meanwhile, reporters shifted awayfrom using as sources the citizens involved directly in the events being covered (Barnhurst 2003b).
On the Internet, the trends for the who of news continued. My follow-up
study that looked at web editions in 2001 found the patterns for U.S. newspapers continuing (Barnhurst in press). Named individuals have all but vanished from the stories, and groups continued the upward trend that had
paused briefly in the 1970s. Reporters described individuals according togroup affiliation even more often. The number of officials kept growing, andmore than two officials appeared in the average story (the internet data also
include political stories). Officials and other sources now outnumber individual actors in the average story.
Once again, the impression – of more reporting on people and personalities – does not square with news content, which included fewer people
overall but emphasized group affiliations, official status, and expertise. Sucha contradiction suggests the operation of ideological processes in the background.

What
Since the early twentieth century, the number of news outlets has grown.
Although many newspapers have closed their doors, radio expanded its news
reporting, and then television news came on the scene. The outlets for news
grew with the advent of cable and satellite systems. The conveyances fornews also multiplied over the century. Early in the century, telegraph lines
expanded their reach, air flight made airmail possible, and transoceanic cables
were laid and the first transcontinental telephone calls placed in North
America. Later fax and Teletype machines allowed instant document transmission. The reach of news organizations grew as well. By mid-century, thenews-wire services had built networks that circled the planet. Although somenewspaper and television network bureaus began to shrink late in the cen-250

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tury, the rise of the Internet and cellular telecommunications gave reporters
access to ever more remote events.
The multiplying modes of communication (physical and virtual), the growing number of news conveyances, and the expanding reach of news gathering suggest a common place assumption: that the public today can get access to more events than ever before. When people believe a thing to betrue, they tend to act on that belief, and it becomes true in its consequences.
In the case of news events, public opinion polls report that more U.S. Americans, especially those attentive to news, feel overloaded (Pew 2000). Thereseems to be just too much going on. Critics argue that “people are intellectually and emotionally capable of absorbing only so much” (Rosenblum 1981,
14). And some studies indicate that television news has become more episodic, that is, more focused on events (Iyengar 1991).
Journalists call the flow of events a deluge, a glut, or a blizzard. Even a
century ago, when Will Irwin, the famed muckraker for the San Francisco
Chronicle and the New York Sun, wrote an assessment of U.S. journalism, ahuge number of events entered the flow of news. “Every night”, he said,“there happen in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago a thousand events
which fit the definition of news”, and then he added with great confidence,“information on most of them reaches the newspaper offices” (Irwin 1969:34). Fifty years later, the wire editor of the morning Peoria Star in Illinois
reported receiving twelve thousand inches of wire copy during the week. A
well-known study of news described his work as gatekeeping, what journalists do to manage the flow of occurrences (Reese and Ballinger 2001).
Commonsense, critical observations, and practitioner knowledge suggestthat news has become more centred on events. The growth in technology
and communication points to more events being covered in news reports,
people say they feel overwhelmed, critics and some studies agree, and journalists say they are covering more. The texts that journalists produce, however, show the opposite. Fewer events get reported.
Studies that demonstrate the declining number of articles and items on
the front page imply that fewer events get reported, but longer stories mightthemselves include more events. To find out whether each newspaper story
combined multiple events, our one-hundred-year study counted them
(Barnhurst and Mutz 1997). We found that the number of events per article
declined significantly, regardless of which newspaper we examined. The twolarge newspapers in the study, the New York Times and Chicago Tribune,
moved strongly away from including more than one event in a story, andeven at the smaller Portland Oregonian, the trend was significant. Events incrime stories stayed about the same, but accident stories included fewer
events, and the number within stories about employment declined sharply.
No topic went against the trend. The general consistency for newspapers
and topics indicates a pervasive change.
We then turned to television. One way to measure broadcast event coverage is simply by counting the number of stories in the average show. The

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thirty-year analysis of ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news cited earlier founda consistent decline on all three networks, toward fewer and fewer items
each year (Riffe and Budianto 2001). “World News Tonight” on ABC, for example, included a dozen stories on average in 1970, but had fewer than eightin 2000. The negative trends were statistically very strong.
But once again, it seems possible that the number of stories might notgive a complete picture of how many events they include. Another way to
examine event coverage is to look inside each story to take stock of theelements of news reporting. In our twenty-year study of network newscasts(Steele and Barnhurst 1996), we measured how often journalists gave information about current events and found that event coverage continued thetrends found in print. On U.S. network news, the share of event coverage
went down in journalist voice-overs, stand-ups, and other speech. In 1968,
they stuck entirely to giving information about occurrences at least a thirdof the times they spoke on the air, but that share of event coverage declined
over the next two decades. The data followed a sawtooth pattern, going up
and down – the study looked at four-year intervals during national elections– but the negative trend was statistically significant. Television journalists
became less involved in the basic informational task of communication,
spending a greater share of their activity on other things, such as offering
opinions, showing agreement, and voicing reactions.
On the radio, NPR news faced less market competition and fewer advertising pressures, but its programs also followed the trend (Barnhurst 2003b).
The 1980 election was the first when “Morning Edition” and “All Things
Considered” were both on the air. Over the next few elections, NPR journalists managed to stick to informing the audience about events nearly half –or even more – of the times they spoke. But then a steep decline began,
dropping the share of information to nearly a third. The averages went up
and down for the next few elections, but the pattern was clear and significant. The archetypal activity for journalists – reporting what was happening– declined during the NPR political coverage. From 1980 to 2000, NPR journalists moved away from the denotative focus on events.
Again the texts of U.S. news reporting contradict the common palce assumptions that the public, news workers, and critics share. Although ample
evidence and argument seems to suggest a greater access to more news
events, the texts journalists have produced during the last century have increasingly done just the opposite. Here again the contradiction suggests theneed to explore what ideological processes might be at work.
Although I cannot go into detail about them here, the where and when ofnews followed the same pattern. Common belief suggests a growing emphasis on the local (even stories about the U.S. invasion of Iraq took a hometown
angle) and a growing emphasis on the now (the immediate, latest events,
especially on the internet). These assumptions also fail to pan out within the
texts of reporting. My studies with colleagues cited earlier in this essay demonstrate that news stories during the past century have moved away from the252NEWS IDEOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

immediate surroundings and toward ever-larger domains. The reports havealso shifted more and more away from the present, to speak in the future tense.
A similar pattern, although much more pronounced, occurred in the how andwhy of news. A standing criticism since the Commission on Freedom of thePress (1947) assessment at mid-century has been the failure of news to put
events in a context that gives them meaning. Journalists and critics continue
to cite the lack of explanatory reporting, and they say that faster, briefer news
limits their ability to fill that need. But measurements of news texts show dramatic increases in analysis, and interpretation, if not explanation.
Across the board, journalists, critics, the public, and even some researchers
assume the five Ws of news to be one thing, but common belief in eachcase proves contrary to what journalists have done in the texts they produced.
In the course of the century, news became less densely populated, less eventpacked, less up-to-date, less localized, and much less brief. The contradiction
is stark and runs deep, with strong statistical significance across news media
and news topics.

Ideology in Context
Some scholars consider news a natural response to biological needs, springing from the urge within the human organism to survive by keeping the world
under surveillance (Shoemaker 1996). Except in the glacial sense of evolutionary change, the natural science conception considers the news appetite
something beyond history. In this view, the news instinct may require neuropsychological rather than sociological study and cannot be ideological. The
measurements my colleagues and I have taken indicate otherwise. Whatever its relation to the organism, news is a product of social life which changes
through practice. If not, its core definition would have remained unchanged,
but my studies with colleagues have shown the opposite. Historical studies
have found similar long-term changes in what news has meant since thecolonial era in U.S. history (Schudson 1982; Barnhurst and Nerone 2001).
The direction of change that the studies summarized here reveal is away fromthe places and sources of current events. Instead of what dictionaries define
as journalistic – the “direct presentation of facts or description of events
without an attempt at interpretation”, to quote Merriam-Webster – news today has become primarily a location of interpretation, a place where journalists explain opinions about events. News is a product of human meaning
making, and journalists have taken the manufacture of social meaning as
their primary task.
But to be ideological – a set of shared ideas that organize group life – news
must also invoke, justify, and guide power. Journalists do not hold public officeand do not have executive power within political institutions. They do nothave behind them the force of state apparatuses over life and death, but they
do work through hegemonic means. They can highlight events and issues, bring-253

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ing them to the attention of legislators, courts, and executives as well as the
public. Stuart Hall and his colleagues found that the “media define for the
majority of the population what significant events are taking place” (Hall et al.
1978: 57). Journalists hold an advisory and adjunct power, but it is power
nonetheless. When news reports interpret war as a reasonable alternative, forexample, the impact of such ideas can contribute to state action that destroys
lives. Journalists and critics began documenting such cases after World War I(e.g., Lippmann and Merz 1920), and during the last three decades John Hartley(1996) and others in cultural studies have analysed how news constructs public priorities. Journalists also exert control within their own institutions, as editorsand managers, and within their profession and their industry.
To say journalists hold power and exert influence does not make theirproductive activities – the manufacture of news – ideological. The way they
live out the definition of news must also direct the operation of that power.
In the case of news during the twentieth century, the changes in their practices, as registered in the news texts they produced, have in most cases shifted
attention away from politicians and citizens and toward journalists. By redirecting attention, journalists exercise their advisory and highlighting influence to change the balance of power. Such shifts clearly move news into
the realm of ideological processes.
The next question, then, is which definition of ideology holds in the caseof journalism. A sociological description of news ideas would outline journalistic notions of power and show how the ideas guide news workers as asocial group, in their relations among themselves and with others such aspoliticians and audiences. One would expect that such a description would
map fairly faithfully onto the ground of common belief, if it had the neutral
qualities the broader definition of ideology requires. In this instance, news
work from day to day, as our studies measured in their output, reveals processes that contradict widespread beliefs. Those processes are not only ideological, but they fall within the narrow (and negative) definition of ideology. It is the presence of contradictions between the ideas surrounding power
and the ideas held in common belief that define the boundary between thetwo definitions of ideology. The task in light of those discrepancies is tocritique the hidden operations that sustain power.
The distortions are readily apparent. Widespread beliefs in shorter news,
in a greater focus on people, in more access to more events, and so forthsuggest a closer tie between audience members and the persons involvedin news events. That is not the direction news texts have taken. Furthermore,journalists, in the common picture, are at the mercy of events and serve as
mere go-betweens in a transaction connecting citizens with social and political actors. That is not where news texts have gone. In common belief, theprime movers driving news include impersonal market forces, such as thecompetition for news scoops and audience attention, and impersonal technological developments. These forces have not driven news in the expected
direction, toward briefer, person-centred, more-replete reports.

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Each of the contradictions relies on at least some factual basis. A series oftechnical changes has buffeted journalists: metal to photo to digital typesetting
and printing for newspaper journalists, film to video to digital image processes for television journalists, and tape to digital processes for radio journalists. Internet journalists surf a constant wave of technical innovations. In
the experience of news workers, pressures from competitors include macro– those new outlets, faster conveyances, and wider networks for journalism– and micro sources, such as the individual reporters who cover the same
beat. Competition is a process in which journalists construct a narrative. Each
competitor makes moves that the news institution or industry must counter,and journalists experience those moves as a series of feints, bobs, pot-shots,
and knock-outs. The actions may exist in fact, but they emerge as journalists
frame their work as a competition. The narratives of competition and technology not only guide but also explain and justify the craft of news work.
Markets and innovations that buffet journalists also supply a ready rationalization, because such stresses, journalists argue, inevitably prevent calculated
and self-interested activity. Concrete change in technology and market conditions thus absolves journalists of responsibility for making whatever transformation occurred in the text of news.
A continued belief in the picture has other consequences. First, it unifies
the audience with the journalist, both of whom confront similar changes inwork and everyday life. In the face of an information deluge, the journalist
proposes to overwhelmed viewers and readers a spurious identification. We
are just like you, the journalist implies. Our common enemy is impersonal:
markets and technological changes. These forces seem natural and universal, at least in the industrialized world. The assertion denigrates any outsiders who have no access to technology and the market, excluding them as
the Other while universalising the commercial subject. The belief then rationalizes whatever journalists do as the immediate, unintentional response
to indifferent, intractable forces. The product is nobody’s fault (except, perhaps, for the audience and its insatiable hunger for fast news served withplenty of spice). Finally, the common picture obscures the textual practices
that do just the opposite of what the picture holds to be the case. These
devices – unification and spurious identification, naturalization and universalization, denigration and exclusion, rationalization and mystification – areclassic ideological moves (Eagleton 1991).
On their face, the unwarranted beliefs about the world belong to theepistemic order (Eagleton 1991). All sorts of individuals participate, and evenscholars accept the picture of fast-paced, eventful, person-laden news, although that is not what U.S. journalism produces any more. The beliefs do
not involve genetic falsehood, because their origins in an earlier journalism
were not necessarily illegitimate. Event-centred news, in which journalists
sought to find occurrences happening to nearby persons and tell above alla lively story, did not exist independent of partisan news at the end of thenineteenth century, but it was an ideal that the Progressive Movement, among255

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others, proposed and that journalists followed, more or less, to judge fromthe numbers and contents of stories in fin de siècle newspapers.
The falsehood also belongs to the functional order, because it distributes
the benefits and consequences of those beliefs unjustly among groups. Scholars have amply demonstrated that politicians and political institutions havelost ground and attention in the press (Patterson 1993), and audience members have weaker connections to news (as circulation and audience ratings
figures show), while receiving the blame for getting the news they deserve.
As the changes in news happened, journalists themselves took control, talking or writing longer. Even as they closed down space for others to speak,
my studies show that they focused on their own judgments and opinions.
Interpretation replaced denotative news of people and events. The
commonsense beliefs, then, are an “interested fiction” that excuses journalists and presents an honourable account of their condition (Bourdieu 1977:196), while serving their specific interests. Although they form a “body of
specialized agents” (Ibid: 184), journalists do not themselves gain wealth in
the classic sense of ideological influences on the means of production. In
advancing their interests, they help constitute wealth for corporate owners
who control capital, the institutional equipment and mechanisms to function in their field and to appropriate profits. Through the action of journalists as agents, the system reinforces existing power as a matter of course. In
other words, although journalists promote their own interests through theirsymbolic activity, the falsehoods involved arise more from external conditions than from conscious dissimulation.
In the wider historical context, journalism has, actively exercised at times– and at other times recoiled from – its power. After World War I, critics began
to identify a tendency away from reporting events in newspapers. In 1920,
The Brass Check, Upton Sinclair’s best-selling attack in the press, called thenewspaper a mental “munitions factory” that was building the “bombs andgas-shells” used to impose ideas on and instil fear among the people (Sinclair
1936: 412). The progressive solution he proposed was a different kind of
newspaper, not “a journal of opinion, but a record of events pure and simple” (quoted in Goldstein 1989: 157, from a final section of Sinclair 1920,
that was omitted from subsequent editions). The following year, Walter
Lippmann, who would later become the dean of intellectual columnists, andCharles Merz, who eventually left the New York World to become editorial
page editor of the New York Times, published “A Test of News,” in The New
Republic. Their article examined three years of the Times – more than a thousand newspapers – for coverage of the Russian Revolution, documenting thehandling of copy and other text. The two young journalists called the paper’s coverage “nothing short of a disaster” (Lippmann and Merz, 1920: 3).
In its news columns, the Times had reported events that never happened.
And the stories and accompanying headlines and captions also emphasized
unsupported (and, as it turned out, unsupportable) interpretations. How, thejournalists asked, did such systematic misrepresentations occur in the Times?

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Driven by the wish for an outcome favourable to the Allies in World War I,
the Times published not news of actual occurrences but “semi-editorial news
dispatches” based on “what men wanted to see”, wrote Lippmann and Merz.
They concluded that “a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure
the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event” (Ibid:
2). In the decades following these critiques, the number of events coveredin the average report appearing in the New York Times and other newspapers increased slightly, but then fell after 1934.
During the downturn, fear of propaganda gave way to another urgent
concern: that giving bare-bones information about occurrences could itself
become misleading. This notion grew in reaction to the Great Depression
and World War II, pioneered oddly enough by the wire services, first United
Press and then the Associated Press (Mott 1952). The crisis that finally solidified thinking against event-centred news was the McCarthy hearings. When
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy mounted his virulent attacks in early 1950, accusing the Truman Administration of harbouring Communists in the State
Department, the press simply reported who said what. After the Republican
Party won the 1952 election and took control of the Senate, McCarthy became
committee chair and expanded his attacks, going after defence industries,
universities, and the broadcasters themselves. ABC Television came into
national prominence by airing the hearings about supposed Communist infiltration of the U.S. Army, riveting national attention with the live proceedings.
But the events could not really speak for themselves. Every name named
exacted a human cost, as McCarthy dragged innocent people into the publiceye, and his baseless accusations harmed their relationships and destroyed
their livelihoods. Under the existing definition of news, the front pages could
report a rebuttal to Senator McCarthy only when another usable occurrence
took place. It happened in front of the camera on June 9, 1954, when Special Counsel for the Army Joseph N. Welch, in his now-famous testimony
before the committee, challenged McCarthy’s needless defamation of a young
lawyer. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness”, he said, and then, after further exchanges, concluded, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough.
Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense ofdecency?” (Red Scare 1998: 149–50).
Prominent broadcasters took up a spirited critique of news in light of the
McCarthy hearings. Eric Sevareid, who had started at CBS News as one of
Edward R. Murrow’s so called boys covering World War II, observed that “thewarp and woof of what the papers print and the broadcasters voice – ourflat, one-dimensional handling of the news, have given the lie the sameprominence and impact that truth is given” (Casey 1963: 84). Elmer Davis,
who left reporting for the New York Times to become a commentator on CBS
Radio, in a speech to the Newspaper Guild criticized “this kind of dead-pan
reporting – So-and-so said it, and if he is lying in his teeth it is not my business to say so” (Ibid: 62). He proposed that journalists instead provide “a257

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mixture of news and interpretation” to “illuminate and explain the news forthe customer” (Ibid: 63).
The interpretative approach to news has held sway since then, so thatstories ran ever longer, included fewer persons but more officials and experts, and gave more of the journalist’s judgments about an event. Rick Kaplan,
who started out as a copy boy in Chicago and rose to become president of
CNN News, says journalists now offer knowledge, not just events. “Ted Koppel
is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met”, he says. “I want his knowledge.
This is a respected, trusted colleague, and he knows what he’s talking about”(Kaplan, Rick 2001: n.p.). Kaplan produced national programs with Koppel,
as well as with Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings, among others, but hefelt very uncomfortable with being interviewed for publication (although he
did grant permission). His comments typify the responses from other journalists I interviewed. News has become a body of interpretation about a small
number of events, which takes its authority more from the journalists themselves than from their sources or their access to occurrences.

Contradictory Conditions
The conditions of news production encourage Kaplan’s assessment of journalistic authority. Individual journalists experience contradictions within theirwork lives. On one hand, the work in corporations, many of them very large
conglomerates, reduces journalists to piece-workers, under pressure to manufacture a stream of product units or stories. Young journalists start out labouring long hours in unpleasant conditions, requiring constant travel andencounters with persons more powerful and sometimes less than cooperative. If they succeed in getting insider knowledge, their stories may endanger relationships with the sources they depend on. They work for unpredictable supervisors, move frequently (especially those in broadcasting) to
unfamiliar cities, and wash out of news work in large numbers, going on totake other employment. A notable quality even among the elite journalists I
interviewed was their skittishness about what their bosses, present and future, might think. They believe in the power of the published word. In short,working journalists face job insecurity and instability and do repetitive, highspeed, risky work on tight deadlines. These conditions encourage them tothink of their output as short and event-centred.
On the other hand, they are knowledge-workers, who create original
symbolic output. In his 1975 essay, “Writing News and Telling Stories”, historian Robert Darnton concluded that reporters “bring more to the events
they cover than they take away from them” (Darnton 1975: 192). Their output is in that sense literary. As knowledge workers, journalists aspire to or
have acquired elite status. Their educational levels have increased, so thatthe requirement for entry went from little or no education a century ago to258NEWS IDEOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURYa college (and sometimes a graduate) degree today. Sociologists have confirmed that, as a group, journalists occupy a higher economic and cultural
standing than any mere piece-worker (Gans 1979). Their claim to professional rank institutes a different set of material relations. Within corporations,journalists as knowledge-workers help accumulate symbolic capital. They
deal in the currency of public awareness, making their sources notable ornotorious, and each article they write gives a gift of exposure to others, atthe same time amassing symbolic credit, which is “a sort of advance” against“material and symbolic guarantees” of other institutions and powers – anarrangement between social actors and media institutions as holders of a
“symbolic patrimony” (Bourdieu 1977: 181).
These conditions encourage journalists to produce the kind of copy foundin our studies. They write longer stories because longer stories win immediate praise and garner prizes. They focus their attention on fewer people
because the very powerful among elites and the most unusual among nonelites win space on the front page in top stories. They concentrate on fewer
events, chasing the main story of the day to find a unique angle, because ascoop or exclusive about the big news event makes them stand out from thepack. They make assertions about the future because prescient statements
enhance their standing among peers. They avoid events at the level of thestreet address because authority flows to those who talk about larger domains. And they infuse their stories with their own opinions because individual judgments mark events as their own and lend events the quality ofbranding so valuable in a corporate setting. Given the material conditions ofknowledge-work, these outcomes seem predictable.
Journalists, however, face both sets of material conditions at once. Eachset is incompatible with the other, and the contradictions between the twocomplicate journalists’ lives. Piece-work is exhausting, knowledge-work exhilarating, and news workers experience both. Under stress, they show hypersensitivity to any slight (Bourdieu 1977). As a result of the contradictions,they identify with the person-on-the-street, and they share common but
counter-factual beliefs about news. Their commonsense assumptions aboutnews may sometimes approach a kind false consciousness. The contradictions also help explain why the oppressed (journalists as piece-workers) may
participate in their own subjugation. They simply don’t believe they are doing
what they do. When presented with the charts and data showing how thecontent of their texts has changed, the journalists I interviewed expressed
scepticism. It looked like statistical fakery to them.
On the positive side, journalists project a vision of Utopia. In it, they dopublic service when acting as go-between for government and citizens. This
Fourth Estate vision sees its mission as explanatory, in that is, giving a clear
and simple account of the complexity of government, economics, and society in the industrialized nation. Politicians benefit by having watch-dogs thatprevent incursions of falsehood onto public truth – even those caught andexposed provide an example of what to avoid. Citizens benefit as they re-259

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quire less of their busy lives not only to sort out the complexity of politicaland other aspects of life, but also to make rational choices in the voting boothand elsewhere. The positive vision of the new, long journalism builds social
solidarity among all parties to the social contract. The one check or balance
journalists see as necessary to their role is their own honesty and professional commitment. As befits knowledge work, journalists are idealistic about
their prospects and modest about their own power in this vision of news.
The conditions differ for a researcher studying news. Reporters have said
bluntly to me that I have no business writing about news because I’ve neverbeen a journalist. I explain to them that I’m a member of the audience, notthe press corps. I love newspapers and hope for their success, and I can’t go
a day without watching a newscast, if only to find out the weather forecast.
As an audience member, I have the unusual privilege of asking questions aboutnews and having the resources to pursue some answers. “Proper dialectic work”
begins with “self-criticism and its obverse, an act of historically sympathetic
imagination” (Mitchell 1986: 204). My own political agenda has become lesssure along the way. I started out confident that the new long journalism wasentirely harmful, but close work with the texts of news has moderated myview. The long news is different, but the results of such formal changes are
not entirely predictable. In newspapers, the longer stories driven by ideas rather
than events probably discourage reading, and they may have helped lose ageneration of young audience members. In television, the longer stories witha greater variety of visual images and faster pacing probably encourage viewing, although they may also discourage critical thinking (Graber 1990). On theradio, every aspect of NPR news seems preferable to what commercial stations – even the all-news variety – serve up, but I have found my patience
wearing thin as journalists talk more and more among themselves. Recent
innovations have amounted to alliances in which NPR reporters team up withanother medium and present their cross-talk as news (as in the new midday
program involving the on-line magazine Slate.com). The internet, so far, has
had little net effect on newspaper content but has damaged the presentationof television news, especially on cable, where clutter and confusion prevail.
The formal characteristics of news can serve almost any political agenda. Longer,
larger formats (for books, images, and other cultural productions) in Westernculture, despite their consistent association with authority since the early modern
era, need not retain that affiliation. Conditions of production reiterate thoseolder definitions, in a cycle that has proved difficult to break.

Consequences & OutcomesForms of news, however, do track with power (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001).
My project shows how journalists used news form to increase (whether consciously or not) their control over the selection, definition, discussion, andanalysis of issues in the public airwaves and in the press, the principal ven-

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ues for citizens to seek information. As the unannounced project of new long
journalism advanced, U.S. news became more uniform, offering a wider rangeof brand options but fewer substantial differences between outlets or venues. While attempting to remain honest, and, to the degree possible, neutral, my description of the changes cannot ignore the injustices they permit.
There is no risk of relativism here: politicians and citizens have lost space,time, and attention in the news. My analysis is also anchored in history andavoids using formal categories as markers with unchanging ideological alignments. The limits of measuring news text do not presume access to an external reality – as against the risks of immanence and hubris. Instead, ourstudies demonstrate the articulation of form with ideology, “which binds theinner discourse” of news “to the ideological universe of the society” (Hall
1981: 234).
Stuart Hall has called news, that is, its operational practices or news values, “one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern society” (Ibid.).
Journalists acquire a nose for news, but they cannot describe its smell. News
seems to happen to them, “as if events select themselves”, says Hall. “We
appear to be dealing, then, with a ‘deep structure’ whose function as a selective device is un-transparent even to those who professionally most know
how to operate it” (Ibid.). My project does, I hope, open the ideology ofnews to observation. Ideology advances the power of some groups (such as
journalists) in support of power elites (who may include journlists).
My project is also an intervention with a few expected outcomes. One
tool for disarming ideological processes is exposure. There are many examples of recent work that exposes the ideological workings of news. For
example, in a 1920s scandal, New York socialite Leonard Rinelander sued
to annul his marriage to Alice Beatrice Jones, a working-class girl from New
Rochelle (Ardizzone and Lewis 2001). The case turned on the question, Did
Leonard know Alice’s race? At the trial, reporters scrutinized Alice and called
her fair or slightly tanned or dusky or ebony, depending on who seemed
likely to win. At one point Alice had to disrobe partially before the court(baring her breasts, back, and legs) to prove that Leonard must have known
she was not white. Journalists along the way constructed race to fit their
expectation of what would happen. Scholars continue to examine race as acategory in news, to show that reporters are active agents in its construction. The same is true of other aspects of news.
Sometimes journalists observe the ideological dimension of news-work.
In New York during the mid-twentieth century, Nora Ephron, then a youngreporter for the New York Post, recalls standing outside, waiting and waiting.
And then, when the New York Times reporters arrived, the activity would
begin, and she would stand there wondering, “How do they always know
when an event will really start?” (Ephron 2001: n.p.). One unexpected resultof my research has been an epiphany for some of the journalists I interviewed,
who came to recognize the constructedness of news. A New York Times staffer
during the reign of the first George Bush recalls the Washington bureau re-261

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ceiving advance warning that the Gulf Conflict was about to begin. The tipster said, “Don’t leave for dinner yet”, and they stayed, scooping the competition and reconfirming the power of the Times.
Despite the limits to what scholars can do in an active struggle against
deception, one way to counterbalance the ideological drift of journalism might
be to measure it, document it, and make it public. Current measurements ofnews – circulation and ratings – are entirely in the service of advertising. No
ratings system exists for news content. If media executives had to face data
showing their own news operations were covering fewer events, fewer people, and fewer nearby places, the numbers might get them thinking. These
formal markers might assert wider authority for a news organization and its
staff. They might appeal more to upscale audiences that attract more advertisers and generate more revenue. Or they might distance the general public from events and from their hometown newspaper or news broadcaster,
resulting in shrinking audiences, business failures, and the silencing of avariety of voices, journalists among them. As it stands, few seem to recognize what is happening, least of all the public. The power of news will not
go away, but perhaps the common understanding might catch up with whatjournalists actually do in practice as they manufacture news.

Note
1.

262

Kevin G. Barnhurst, Professor and Interim Head of the Department of Communication,
University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of The Form of News, A History (New York:
Guilford Press) with John Nerone, and of Seeing the Newspaper (New York: St. Martin’s
Press). Earlier versions of this chapter were presented during the symposium,
Constru(ct)ing the Current: Theorizing Media in the New Millennium, May 14, 2004, at
the University of Chicago; at a colloquium of the Department of Communication, University of Michigan, October 14, 2004; and at the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University, February 28, 2005. The author thanks the organizers and participants of these events for their comments and suggestions and especially appreciates
the invaluable research assistance from Michael Vari of Lake Forest College, Chicago.

Epilogue

Perspectives on the Developmentof the News Paradigm
The Quest for Autonomy
Horst Pöttker*
In the introduction we defined the term news paradigm by naming the fiveelements it consists of: The event, news value factors, the news interview,
journalistic objectivity, and the inverted pyramid. Also, we characterized the
diffusion of the news paradigm as a process, where these factors as an ensemble – and thus the news paradigm itself – are not being deformed andtorn apart beyond recognition, but are exposed to influences of society, andbecause of that can appear in multifaceted variations.
We differentiated between three perspectives on the news paradigm andits diffusion, and with these we distinguished between three types of social
factors that can influence the news paradigm: technological, cultural, andpolitical-economic.
The strong influence, especially of the latter, can be seen in the fact thatthe conditions in dictatorial and authoritarian systems can hinder the diffusion of the news paradigm; Germany before 1945, and Eastern Europe before 1990 serve as impressive examples. However, explanation approaches
that are reduced to one of the three types of factors are affiliated with certain weaknesses, which we named in the introduction as well.
This constellation, as it has been described in the introduction, raises
questions whose answers emerge from the passage that this book makes
through various epochs in four regions and their contrasting cultures.
In the beginning there stands a methodological question, resulting fromthe insight in the shortcomings of solely technological, cultural, or politicaleconomic approaches:– Could an explanation approach with an all-embracing perspective befound that unites the technological as well as the cultural, and thepolitical-economic approach?
A meta-perspective like this gives hope for answers on two other categories
of questions. The first is theoretical:

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HORST PÖTTKER– Does the diffusion of the news paradigm, which is rooted in AngloSaxon journalism, result from a growing Anglo-Saxon superiority in theworld, culminating in the present Anglo-American hegemony? (At leastin Germany the news paradigm was grafted onto journalism by theWestern occupying powers after the demise of the National Socialist –NS – regime.) Or have discrete inner developments in the societies ofcontinental Europe been the crucial factor, and would the news paradigm have prevailed there without the military, economic and cultural
supremacy of the USA and Great Britain?
The second is of a material nature, concerning the future:– How will things develop? Did the diffusion of the news paradigm cometo a halt? Does the reduction of the prestige of the objectivity ideal in
American journalism that some observers (Gross 2004) have diagnosed,
herald the end of the news paradigm?

The News Paradigm and the Process of Modernization
None of the contributions to this book question the historic sequence, in which
its essays have been arranged. It seems to go without saying that the news
paradigm spread according to our sequencing. Having emerged in the AngloSaxon countries, USA and Great Britain, in the second half of the 19th century, it became accepted in Scandinavia in the first third of the 20th century;
only then did it spread to Germany after the military surrender in 1945 andin East Europe since the breakdown of the socialist systems around 1990.
Despite disavowals that are due to the political structures in these countries – especially in the NS regime in Germany and the Soviet dictatorship in
East Europe – this sequence seems like a schedule of the historic process ofmodernization. Three centuries ago, in England, those concepts that haveshaped the modern Western world ever since were minted: Parliamentarianism, human rights, free enterprise, regulation by the market principle, andthe freedom of the press. In this context, a profession has emerged that is
crucial for the coordination of the elements of modern societies: journalism.
The founders of the first political weekly magazines, Daniel Defoe, Richard
Steele, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison, proved their consciousness ofthe tasks and prerequisites of the profession by openly engaging against false
reporting and for freedom of the press (see Pöttker 1998).
The developing modernity of the mother country rubbed off on its colonies
in North America. The War of Independence, and the liberation of the UnitedStates of America from colonial power, subsequently added another component: the pride of being independent. Thus it is no wonder that the UnitedStates appears to be the most modern country in the 19th century, with ajournalism that developed faster and stronger than elsewhere, being based264

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on the freedom of the press as it had been granted in the “First Amendment”.
An important part of this progress lies in the development of the news paradigm that congruously fell on fruitful cultural ground in Britain in the first
instance.
Scandinavian countries were, if we ignore France, the next to follow theprocess of modernization. This shows for example in the political development of Norway in the 19th century. The Norwegian Constitution, which anchors the constitutional monarchy, originates from 1814, and thus it is almost as old as the Constitution of the United States. It wouldn’t have stood
the test of time, if it hadn’t brought modern political institutions into beingfrom the onset.
In 1821, the Storting confirmed the abolition of the aristocracy and in 1824
the King’s right to veto laws was restricted, for the first time. In 1884 civic
parliamentarism became part of constitutional law when the Norwegianparliament after a lengthy and bitter conflict with the Swedish King broke
his power to appoint his own Norwegian government, reducing his role toa political figurehead in domestic politics. It suits the relatively early political modernization that Scandinavian journalism adapted the news paradigm
in the first third of the 20th century, as described by Svennik Høyer, John
Nonseid, Søren Kolstrup and others in this volume.
Agreement exists that the modernization of Central Europe and especially of Germany, in contrast to the western and northern nations, wasdelayed and came not so much out of society itself, but was enforced in a
top-down manner (see Wehler 1987-2003). As a result it tended to be especially abrupt in the years that followed the foundation of the Reich in 1871,
which caused feelings of alienation, and regressive longing for pre-modern
guardedness, culminating in the national socialist ideology of the national
community , the so called “Volksgemeinschaft” (see Plessner 1974; Pöttker
1997, 271-283). Even though the NS regime, in contrast to its own ideology,
caused rationalizing advances in many material and structural fields, Germany reached modernity in cultural terms only after 1945, and then after
a long process of Westernization, which from the beginning was implantedby the victorious western powers. Part of this process was the adaptationof German journalism to the news paradigm, which was connected to misunderstandings (see Pöttker 2004b, 90f.). The more so in East Germany,
whose liberation from the Soviet dictatorship only dates back one and ahalf decades, for where westernization has not yet been completed.
This brings us to East Europe, especially to Russia, where modernization
is even more delayed. Until 1917 the nation was autocratic to the core, because bottom-up liberalization and rationalization efforts of the 19th and early
20th century failed even more thoroughly than in Germany (see Kappeler
2002). Seven decades of Soviet governance tended to consolidate archaic
authoritarian structures rather than overpowering them, abstaining from theenacted industrialization. Whether here the news paradigm is rooted deeply
enough to be able to develop healthily, remains to be seen.

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Modernization – we have not, until now, defined how this term has to beunderstood. Can the meaning of modernization be coined as a term that
contributes something to the understanding of the news paradigm as well?
Sociology makes an offer, characterizing modernization as a process of progressing division of labour, respectively “functional differentiation”. This interpretation approach was noticeable in the 18th century with Immanuel Kant
(see Kant 1994, 4), then found its professional specification with Emile
Durkheim (Durkheim 1893/1930) and Georg Simmel (Simmel 1983) in theemerging sociology, and is carried out in socio-scientific system theory (Parsons 1996) on a broad and differentiated level, but especially with regard tojournalism as a system of action on a not always convincing basis (seeLuhmann 2004).
So, what does it mean, when a society is “modern”, that is organizedaccording to the principle of division of labour or functional differentiation?
“Modern” or “not-modern” have to be seen not as absolute but as relative
attributes, and modernization as a process, which never leads from none toperfected, but always from a little to more modernity.
In the modern society, in contrast to earlier, less modern ones, most people are specialists. Indeed specialized institutions and professions exist for(almost) all needs: Physicians and hospitals are competent to cure diseases,
schools and teachers are concerned with the education of children and there
is social security and trained experts to help with old-age benefits.
The drive of the growing functional differentiation is an increase in efficiency. Someone, who concentrates on one task, can fulfil it faster and better than someone who’s doing everything. Efficiency includes a certain amountof bureaucracy within institutions. Efficiency includes that institutions andprofessions are often accompanied by sciences such as medical science,education science, or actuarial mathematics, thus founding practical experience on a rational and empirical basis. And efficiency includes a justifiableconfidence of the entire society that every profession really concentrates on
its task and does not give way to other interests and goals. Efficiency calls
for professional independency and autonomy. In more common terms, Niklas
Luhmann talks about “autopoiesis” of the sub-systems of society, which arecharacteristic for a high level of functional differentiation or modernity.
The journalistic profession is also the result of functional differentiation.
The level of its professionalism and its adherence to its own specific rules
and routines that are secured by a special education, indicate the level ofmodernity that a society has reached, and that the journalistic goods and services are for. But journalism is a special case and system theory confers this,because it is not only subject to the iron rule of functional differentiationand evolution of autonomy, but because the task is specialized upon, only
evolves from the problematic concomitants of the progressing division oflabour and modernization.
In a complex, very much differentiated and thus highly specialised society, immediate experiences of people are limited and isolated from one

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another, so that people have to catch up second-hand realities that lie beyond their own, in order to be able to shape their life, levelling off with thepossibilities their culture offers – and also, to enable society, whose members they are, to work on problems and finally solve them. In order to lift
narrow-mindedness in experience and knowledge of individuals, and compensate the regulation deficiency that thereby emerges, complex societies
need institutions and professions, which concentrate on the special task to
overcome geographical, temporal and social communication barriers, andthus create a sphere of unhindered social communication, which we call“public sphere”.
The relative autonomy of journalism, which emerged in the course ofmodernization, has no end in itself, but, just like any other profession, serves
the aim to fulfil the professional task as effectively and reliably as possible, which in this case is the specific task of the “public sphere”. In orderto create a public sphere, journalists have to report impartially, truly, allembracing, and comprehensively about everything that is important for the
public. With regard to any of the four named relations, the news paradigm
is an appropriate means to fulfil this task. To put only its most importantelements in this functional combination: The news interview and the strive
for objectivity, which because of the inescapable selectivity of thejournalistically perceived and reported can never be accomplished, areunmistakably focussed on an impartial, all-embracing and true coveragethat is designed according to the news paradigm, which guarantees credibility among the largest possible audience. Furthermore, an event-likestructure, as well as the pyramid design according to the principle of relevance, makes for reception-easing timeliness and comprehensibility, sothat the largest possible audience can actually be reached by this information.
But the news paradigm serves not only the journalistic task to create apublic sphere, it also serves professional autonomy by subordinating journalistic work to fixed rules whose non-compliance can be sanctioned, andwhich can be taught to prospective journalists. It is not by chance that it isin the USA, where the news paradigm originated, where the rational legitimacy of the profession by scientific journalism research and education atuniversities has its longest tradition, and belongs to societal normality. The
contrast is, for example, in Germany where people often stick to the traditional or even charismatic, in either case representing a pre-modern tradition of legitimacy as a profession for the gifted (“Begabungsberuf”). The news
paradigm, as well as the scientifically founded education of prospective journalists, show a high level of professional autonomy of journalism, which itself
can be taken as a sign for the level of complexity and modernity of a society. It is not by chance that the diffusion of the news paradigm appears likea schedule of modernization.

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Internal or External Driving Forces?
Interpreting the diffusion of the news paradigm as a component of the great
historic process of modernization, releases us from the pressure of having
to chose the technological, the cultural, or the political-economic approach,
all of which we know have specific deficits that have been explained in the
introduction. In the context of modernization theory all three – or even four
dimensions, if one does not want to force the political and the economic
into one – are well taken in consideration. At the same time the modernization-theoretical explanation releases us from the temptation to solely attributethe news paradigm and its diffusion to the conditions that effect journalism
from the outside. This temptation is especially true in the tradition of Marxist or non-Marxist analysis of media structures, where the hard material ororganizational frame is presumed to be crucial for communication processes
and forms. From this perspective, the news paradigm has to appear as astandardization that was forced upon them, and to which they can not help
but adapt. More suitable to journalism education is the modernization-theoretical perspective, in which the news paradigm turns out to be not least theresult of a consequent inner development of journalism and its strive forprofessional autonomy. At least this goes for its genesis in 19th century
American journalism.
Is this also valid for the other three culture groups and regions where itis credible that the news paradigm was only accepted as an export article
from the USA and Britain? Or had it developed and become accepted in
Scandinavia, Germany and East Europe without the Anglo-Saxon example
as well?
This question is hard to answer, at least empirically, because historicalobservations or experiments without the early existing Anglo-Saxon news
paradigm can not be made. And in front of the outlined background nocompelling theoretical answer can be expected either, since because of theasynchrony of modernization processes in different cultures one has to calculate the incline among developments of autonomy in journalism, whichlets an internally, as well as an externally, generated development appear
possible. Nevertheless it is worthwhile thinking about this question, whilelooking separately at the three different culture groups and regions.
Seeing Scandinavia, in contrast to Germany and East Europe, on an earlier path to modernization and towards democracy, points to a societal process
of modernization where later on the news paradigm emerges as an independent cultural achievement. At this point, one also has to include religion
and its impact on mentality and conduct. Max Weber is known to have explained the formation of capitalism, of whose expansion the modernization
impulse by way of rational enlightenment is a part, as deriving from the ethics
of ascetic Protestantism. In doing so, he assumed the religious powers that
asserted themselves in everyday experience of the early modern times, were
the deciding influence on the “character of the people” (Weber 1968, 357).

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The “English Puritanism that evolved from Calvinism” (Weber 1968, 357)
was of special importance to Weber because it ideally embodies the Protestant ethic. But he wanted to treat “the ascetic Protestantism as one” (Ibid.),for his discussion on the driving forces of capitalism and modernization. For
the explanatory power of Weber’s modernization theory, it may be regarded
as ephemeral, if Calvinistic and Puritan traditions do not play a dominantrole in Scandinavian Protestantism. Crucially the Scandinavian culture embraced and was deeply thrilled by the emergent Protestantism. Active protestant engagement, deriving from this culture, is symbolized in the Swedishking Gustav Adolf and his leading role in the Thirty Years’ War. The dominant Lutheran tradition in Scandinavia is especially apt as a medium for rationalization in the framework of progressing division of labour, because it
brings forward the priority of word and script at least as much as Calvinism
and Puritanism, who with their ascetic creation of capital brought forward
especially the economic modernization. Scandinavia, after Japan, is the region with the highest newspaper spreading today (about 600 copies per 1000
inhabitants, in contrast to 300 in Germany, 150 in France, and 50 and less inother catholic and orthodox Mediterranean countries). With regard to these
conditions, it can be assumed that the news paradigm as a means of rationalization of the profession in Scandinavia did not have to be engrafted fromthe outside, even if the Anglo-American example may have served as a stimulus.
This is different in Germany. It is true that, there also, protestant regionsin the north characteristically have been touched by industrialization earlier
than the catholic south. But as a whole, the German middle classes came
too late and were too weak, in order to realize successfully the rationalization program of enlightenment in politics and (journalistic) culture. Still being
democratically, and patriotically, minded at the same time in the first half ofthe 19th century, and self-consciously struggling for modern freedom rights
and national unity – it is not by chance that Heinrich Heine (see Pöttker 2000),
Karl Marx (Marx 2001) and other writers of the “Vormärz” made the first steps
towards professionalization of journalism in Germany if the many disasters
and humiliations after the political defeat of 1848/49, first with the ‘top-down’foundation of the Reich by Bismarck in 1871; then World War I and subsequent defeat; the plebeian revolution in 1918; the inflation in 1923; the NS
regime of 1933-1945 and even the communist dictatorship in East Germany
till 1990 took away its self-esteem and certainty about values. If there wereany attempts to independently establish an objectivity-oriented news paradigm, as one might discover in the writings of Karl Bücher during the WorldWar I (Bücher 2001) who seems to have been inspired by the austere, reserved reporting from the war of the British journalist William Howard Russell(see Hudson 1995), then these attempts were nipped in the bud with theempowering of Hitler in 1933. The NS orders for the press during the years
preceding World War II (Bohrmann & Toepser-Ziegert 1985ff.) clearly showthat the National Socialists took the German tradition of partisan journalism

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that was considered to be a part of the political power struggle, and pushed
it to the extreme of open propaganda, in doing so were able to build on thepractical experience and resulting from that gained the agreement of many
journalists.
The assumption that Otto Groth, building upon his experiences as an editorof the Frankfurter Zeitung, had already in the 1920s independently developed a concept of journalism as a mediating profession, which would comeclose to the Anglo-Saxon news paradigm (Groth 1928 ff.), was refuted byresearch of Michael Bodin at the University of Dortmund that has not yet
been published. Groth only developed this concept during the 1950s and1960s (Groth 1960ff.), after the occupying powers shaped the German media
landscape according to their ideas in the framework of denazification andre-education. This also indicates that the news paradigm in Germany canless be traced back to an inner cultural development that occurred in AngloSaxon and Scandinavian countries, and more to the influence of the victorious powers of the World War II, especially to the Anglo-Saxon occupiers.
This assumption does not exclude that the external progress was just an
impulse for an independent development, which finally deeply rooted thenews paradigm in the journalistic culture in Germany. But it also gives way
to insights on two possible problems: First, the old tradition of partisan journalism hasn’t fully disappeared, but subliminally is still at work. Distinct but
disparate clues in journalism research see this occurring to the present day(see Donsbach 1999; see Hachmeister 2002). Secondly, due to the lack of
tradition, the conditions for misunderstandings and ideologization of the news
paradigm are especially advantageous in Germany. Distinct clues exist thatprove this to have happened, especially in the 1970s (see Pöttker 2004b:90f.).
As far as East Europe is concerned, we do not think we are capable offormulating a decided thesis. On the one hand, chances for an independent
development of journalism in Russia were even smaller than in Germany.
On the other hand, no foreign occupying forces could have engrafted thenews paradigm after the end of the soviet power. It may be that the chances
for a merging of the news paradigm with the own tradition of a rather literary journalism, and with this for its creative development, in East Europe
are especially high.

Is the News Paradigm Drawing to an End?
Kevin Barnhurst’s findings that the news was “less densely populated, lessevent-packed, less up-to-date, less localized, and much less brief” (Barnhurst,
2005, p. 253) in the course of the 20th century, can be interpreted as the decay, even the downfall of the news paradigm. If it was true that the news
paradigm expresses the independent autonomy of journalism, then these find-270

PERSPECTIVES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEWS PARADIGM

ings would mean that it had been going downhill with journalistic independency and professionalism for quite some time, and will probably soon be at
a complete end. It is true that journalism scientists of several countries deplore that since the 1990s journalists orientate themselves less and less by
the ideal of objectivity (see Gross 2004), and that professional standards suchas the division of editorial and advertisements (see Branahl 1997), or thedivision of news and opinion (see Weischenberg 1995: 154-168) are being
increasingly put aside. The trend towards “Infotainment” that goes together
with the ongoing commercialization of the media, is being interpreted as
the beginning of the end of professional journalism.
Such apprehensions are a considerable challenge to our thesis that thenews paradigm spread as an expression of journalistic autonomy, becauseof and together with the ongoing professionalization of journalism that isembedded in functional differentiation. If this thesis is correct, then the process
of modernization has to have come to a halt, or decline, concerning journalism. This stands in contrast to the consensus, existing in social science sinceGeorg Simmel, that functional differentiation has to be seen as an iron ruleof societal progress. But if one holds on to this consensus and presumes thatin the case of journalism the process of functional differentiation can nothave declined – wouldn’t that mean, with regard to the undermining tendencies of the news paradigm, to give up on the thesis that it is an expression of journalistic autonomy?
A third interpretation seems possible here, going together with the developing principle of functional differentiation as well as with the news
paradigm as an indicator of journalistic independency. In the backgroundlies the insight, which is not being shared by system theory, that journalism
not only obeys the laws of functional differentiation, but that its special task
also stems from the necessity to compensate the narrow-mindedness of thehorizon of experience and knowledge of the members of society, which isdue to the differentiation of society, by overcoming communication barriers
via the creation of a public sphere. In the centre of this interpretation lies
the idea that the news paradigm might be misinterpreted, over-stretched anddogmatized to an extent that makes it become contra-productive as an orientation for journalists fulfilling the task to create a public sphere.
Over-stretching and dogmatization can make the objectivity ideal be acommunication barrier itself, which excludes certain subjects and modes of
mediation from the journalistically created public sphere. If the division of
information and advertisement develops towards a ban to talk about oneself, this contributes to the obscuration of media production; if the divisionof information and fiction means the exclusion of literary creativity from journalism, this means that everything that goes beyond the hard facts, remains
excluded from societal talk; and if the division of news and opinion is being
made the reason, why would journalists have to suppress expressions of theirown opinions, this does not only cut a human right, being valid for journalists as well, that was gained after hard struggle, but again it excludes events

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that are not easy to investigate on a factual basis as well as the driving forcesof journalistic action itself from the public sphere (see Pöttker 2004b).
Not only the news paradigm, but its over-stretching and dogmatization as
well, came into being during a phase of development of modern society, inwhich the bourgeoisie, who had been revolutionary themselves during the18th century, tried to reject emancipatory claims of workers, women and theyouth. Not only did the rules of a professional news journalism with its strive
for objectivity, and the division of advertisement, literature, and – at least in
Anglo-Saxon countries – political propaganda from serious information, develop in the course of the 19th century, but also the division of the serious,
rational, male sphere, from the playful, emotional, female part in the social
division of labour, and the division of serious, informing elite culture fromentertaining popular culture. Seen like this, the news paradigm in its ideologised shape appears as a cultural instrument, being used in journalism by
the bourgeois elite of democratic societies to defend their privileges.
Might it be that at the turn of the 21st century, this hierarchization of culture weakens, because the economic perspective of capitalism, which isforced to extend its markets (globalization) as well as to intensify them, has
to overcome sales barriers that have a cultural background? This would haveconsequences especially for the media, which not only wants to sell its own
products but also works for the marketing of products from other trades.
There is little hope for success, if the science that accompanies journalism understands itself as a stronghold against this development. A merely
defensive strategy, which tries to keep the news paradigm in its original shape,
would not be necessary, if the described development of the media corrects
its publicness-opposing deformation. It might be that due to the present development, the news paradigm will be traced back to what it might be without over-stretching and dogmatization: an expression of respect for the audience and its ability to differentiate, which accordingly can handle a greater
amount of authentic, possibly subjective information than the guardians ofobjectivity may think. Nowadays this does not only mean an elite, but theentire audience, including women, workers, unemployed, the youth, andethnic minorities.
This would be a development that does not lead the news paradigm toits end but modifies it. Scientists can not conscientiously predict this to occur but they can work in this direction by creatively aiming for an understanding of the news paradigm that frees it from dogmatization.

* The author wishes to thank Anne Fölting for language help with English.

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292

Author index

Abbot, W.J. 26
Adam, J-M. 113
Adorno, T. 243
Akhmetzyanov, I. 204
Allern, S. 80, 85, 89
Althusser, L. 241
Altschull, H. 171
Anderson, B. 106
April, J. 56
Ardizzone, H. 261
Asch, A. 56
Bagdikian, B. 231, 235
Bajka, Z. 217, 218, 221, 224
Baldasty, G. 57
Ballinger, J. 251
Barnett, S. 241
Barney, R. 40
Barnhurst, K.G. 107, 199, 227, 240, 245, 246,
247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 260
Bastiansen, H. 82, 83
Bauer, Z. 220
Becker, K. 97, 98, 104
Belin, L. 203
Bell, A. 1112, 113
Bent, S. 35
Berelson, B. 125
Bingen, D. 223
Birkhead, D. 38
Bittman, L. 178
Bjørklund, T. 85
Black, J. 40
Blankenburg, W. 40, 44
Bleyer, W. 58
Blöbaum, B. 158, 159
Blondheim, M. 231
Bochenski, J. 217
Bogucka, T. 220
Bohrmann, H. 269
Bordwell, D. 114
Bortonowski, S. 220
Boston, R. 66
Bourdieu, P. 242, 256, 259
Boyce, G. 275
Boyd-Barrett, O. 233

Bradley, D. 40
Brake, L. 275
Branahl, U. 271
Branigan, E. 113, 114
Braudel, F. 106
Briggs, A. 95
Brink Lund, A. 88
Brooks, J. 199
Brown, L. 67, 70
Brunöhler, K. 154
Bruhn J.K. 106, 121
Bücher, K. 142, 269
Brügger, N. 275, 282
Budd, R. 125
Budianto, A. 246, 252
Buel, R. 23, 35
Burke, P. 95
Busbey, L. White 32
Cannon, J. 32
Carey, J. 26, 40, 42, 45, 94, 95,
Carr, D. 244
Casey, R. 257
Chalaby, J. 34, 68, 70, 72, 208, 214
Chatman, S. 112
Christians, C.G. 40
Christopher, S. 131
Clark, C. 23
Clark, C.E. 72
Clarke, B. 66, 68, 69
Clarke, J. 254
Cockerell, M. 81
Commission on Freedom of the Press 253
Committee of Concerned Journalists 249
Conboy, M. 66, 68
Conell, I. 219, 220
Cooter, R. 20
Crawford, N. 39, 49
Critcher, C. 254
Curran, J. 275
Curry, J.L. 213, 214, 215, 216, 224
Dahl, H.F. 82, 83
Danielsen, R. 77, 79
Danielson, W. 249

293

AUTHOR INDEX

Darnton, R. 258
Davis, E. 25
Davis, H. 202
Davis, L. 234
DeFleur, M. 132
Dewey, J. 30
Dicken-Garcia, H. 13, 58, 90, 229, 231
Djerf-Pierre, M. 84, 85
Donohew, L. 125
Donovan, S. 97
Donsbach, W. 19, 34, 142, 143, 164, 270
Drotner, K. 106, 123
Dunn, J. 204
Durkheim, E. 266
Dzirkals, L. 171, 173
Eagleton, T. 241, 243, 255
Eisenstein, E. 148
Ekecrantz, J. 96, 97, 98, 100, 104, 131,
Emery, E. 20, 28, 35, 38, 40, 45, 55, 59, 233
Emery, M. 20, 28, 35, 38, 40, 45, 55, 59, 233
Engblom, L-Å. 77, 84
Engel, M. 67, 69
Engelsing, R. 153
Ephron, N. 261
Errico, M. 56, 57, 59
Escott, T. 233
Esser, F. 158, 161
Ettema, J. 14, 237
Fjæstad, B. 82
Foerster, N. 48
Foucault, M. 241
Fox, R. 46, 47, 48
Frankiewicz, A. 217
Franklin, B. 22
Frid, E. 98, 104
Furhoff, L. 86
Gajlewicz, M. 213, 223
Galasinksi, D. 219, 220
Galnoor, I. 81
Gans, H. 231, 259
Geertz, C. 241, 242
Geisslinger, E. 203
Gerbner, G. 232
Gielzynski, W. 215
Gieseke, M. 149
Giverholdt, H. 126
Glass, A. 244
Glasser, T. 14, 37, 40, 237
Gleick, J. 244
Golding, P. 233
Goldstein, T. 256

294

Graber, D. 260
Gramling, O. 29, 232
Gramsci, A. 241, 243
Grand, 221
Gregorovich, A. 178
Greiling, W. 154
Gross, P. 203, 204, 219, 264, 271
Groth, O. 142, 155, 270
Gruening, E. 35
Grzella, S. 140, 141
Gunther, R. 173
Gustafsson K.E. 134
Habermas, J. 76, 140
Hachmeister, L. 270
Hadamik, K. 217
Hadenius, S. 77, 86, 87
Hager, M. 37, 40
Hall, S. 241, 243, 254, 261
Haller, M. 141
Hallin, D. 31, 244, 246, 250
Halse, K. 82
Hammond, P. 202
Hanna, P. 35
Hardt, H. 228, 237
Harms Larsen, P. 115
Harro, H. 188
Hartley, J. 94, 95, 254
Hawkes, D. 242, 243
Hennessy, P. 81
Heyck, E. 153
Hiebert, R. 221
Hochman, J. 177
Holm, L. 246
Holmlöv, P. 82
Holzer, J. 223
Horkheimer, M. 243
Høyer, S. 14, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 90, 91,
104, 124, 126, 129, 176, 181, 187
Hudon, F. 234
Huntzicker, W. 16
Hutt, A. 67, 70, 71
Hynds, E. 58
Ickes, H. 39
Ihlen, Ø. 79
Informatsionnye zhanry… 200
Inkeles, A. 200
Innis, H. 94
International Labour Office 233
Irwin, W. 30, 251
Iyengar, S. 251
Jakubowicz, K. 170, 175, 183, 204,

AUTHOR INDEXJameson, F. 242, 243
Jamet, C. 107
Jannet, A-M. 107
Janowitz, M. 42, 44, 45
Jefferson, T. 254
Johansson, F. 84
Johnson, O. 213, 215
Jones R. 55, 58
Jones S. 246
Journalists and Journalism of Russian Province
203
Kagarlitsky, B. 201
Kant, I. 266
Kaplan, R. 90, 123, 258
Kappeler, A. 265
Karlsen, G. 127
Katz, C. 64
Kaul, A.J. 40, 42, 43
Käyhkö, S. 203
Kellner, D. 97, 101
Kelly, E. 35
Kempers, F. 81
Kepplinger, M. et al 100
Khalfani, L. 56
King, E. 28
Klett, B. 34
Klossowicz, J. 215, 216, 218
Kobre, S. 58
Kolstrup, S. 275, 282
Konstitutsioon 173
Kopper, G. 224
Korn, F. 40
Koss, S. 67, 69
Koszyk, K. 161
Krekola, T. 96
Kriminaalkoodeks 173
Kroichik, L. 203
Kronvall, K. 80, 81
Kuhn, T. 10
Kunelius, R. 206
Kurzweg, M. 154
Kwiatowski, P. 21, 218
Labov, W. 113
Larrain, J. 241
Lashchuk, O. 202, 206
Lasorsa, D. 249
Lauk, E. 96, 104, 129, 174, 176, 180, 181, 183,
188
Lauristin, M. 172, 223
Lears, T. 46, 47, 48
Lee, A. 65, 67, 71
Lehrmann, U. 106

Lendvai, P. 171, 172
Lenoe, M. 199
Leupp, F. 228
Lewis, E. 261
Lewis, J. 108, 119
Lie, J. 127
Lindstedt, I. 13, 111, 113, 116, 135
Lipari, L. 104
Lippmann, W. 254, 256
Lis, T. 218, 221
Lojek, J. 213
Lorentzen, P. 80 Table 1
Luhmann, N. 158, 266
Lundström, G. 126, 127, 135
Maaland, O. 89
Machlup, F. 227,
Magowska, A. 222
Maier, P. 23
Main, T. Jackson 23
Majcharek, J. 220
Mancini, P. 224
Mändmets, J. 189
Mannheim, K. 243
Marcuse, H. 242
Margueritte, B. 217, 221
Marples, D. 178, 182
Marx, K. 269
Marzolf, M. 106, 120
McAdams, R. 35
McGerr, M.l 29, 35
McKerns, J. 40, 42, 45
McLellan, D. 243
McNair, B. 83, 177, 178
McReynolds, L. 199
Meier, G. 162, 163
Meilby, M. 107, 115
Merz, C. 254, 256
Michael, G. 35
Michnik, A. 204,
Mickiewicz, E. 177, 181, 201
Mielczarek, T. 215
Mills, R. 37,
Mindich, D. 13, 56, 60, 129
Mitchell, W. 242, 260
Moe, S. 127
Mott, F. 13, 38, 55, 59, 75, 228, 237, 257,
Mughan, A. 173,
Murdock, G. 233
Murray, J. 200, 201,
Mutz, D. 107, 245, 248, 249, 251
Myslinski, J. 213,
Najwieksi 221

295

AUTHOR INDEX

Nalecz, D. 212, 213, 223,
Napoli, J. 208
Nerone, J. 199, 227, 245, 253, 260, 262,
Niczyperowicz, A. 285
Nilsson, N. 12
Nizamova, L. 202
Noelle-Neumann, E. 54
Nord, L. 88
NOS 86
NOU 79, 85, 86
Nurmoja, J. 196
O’Connor, P. 70
Odegard, P. 30
Øhrstrøm, P. 112
Oledzki, J. 217, 222
Olejnik, M. 218
Olsson, T. 97, 98, 100, 104, 131
Orwell, G. 169, 170, 180Østbye, H. 87
Ottosen, R. 78, 136
Owsiany, E. 219
Paczkowski, A. 213, 214, 223
Palmer, M. 95, 104, 202
Palonen, K. 203
Pankin, A. 201
Paradowska, J. 218, 220
Parsons, T. 266
Pasley, J. 75
Patterson, T. 256
Peckham, M. 94
Perlmutter, D. 93
Perry, J. 58
Peterson, T. 215, 231
Pew Research Centre 251
Pfingsten, S. 140, 141
Pietiläinen, J. 199, 201, 204, 208, 209
Pisarek, W. 215, 220, 221, 222, 223
Planeta, P. 224
Plessner, H. 144, 265
Pollack, E. 104
Postman, N. 234
Pöttker, H. 139, 264, 265, 269, 270, 272,
Poulsen, I. 106, 121, 283, 287
Pratte, P. 29
Pulitzer, J. 30,
Purcell, E. 29, 35
Pynt Andersen, L. 107
Rahv, P. 234
Rantanen, T. 202,
Read, D. 129
Reading, R. 76

296

Red S. 257
Reese, S. 251
Reichstein, R. 64
Remsu, K. 203
Requate, J. 153, 154, 160
Retallack, J. 160
Riffe, D. 246, 252,
Ritchie, D. 24
Robert, R. 254
Roberts, N. 28,
Rogers, E. 15
Roksvold, T. 124, 125, 127, 129, 135, 136
Rosenberg, N. 35
Rosenblum, M. 251,
Rosengren, K.E. 79,
Ross, C. 39, 49
Ross, E. 230
Rüga, M. 188
Rühl, M. 158,
Sahlstrand, A. 104
Salcetti, M. 231
Salokangas, R. 76, 79, 84, 85, 90, 136
Schaeffer, F. 46
Schiller, D. 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 231
Schramm, W. 215, 231
Schroder, K. 106, 121
Schudson, M. 31, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 55, 58, 94,
116, 135, 136, 188, 253
Schulz, W. 54
Schwarzlose, R. 231
Seitz, D.
Sektion Journalistik 54
Semetko, H. 71
Seveborg, J-O. 77
Seymour-Ure, C. 81
Shaw, D. 26, 27, 40, 42, 55, 58, 123, 135
Shilen, R. 37, 40,
Shoemaker, P. 253
Shuman, E. 13, 60, 113, 116
Siebert, F. 215, 231
Siering, F. 270
Silverman, M. 241
Simmel, G. 266, 271
Sinclair, U. 38, 256,
Skalski, E. 218
Skre, A. 76, 81,
Slater, M. 68
Smith, A. 37, 40, 42, 43,
Smith, M. 56
Soley, L. 250
Søllinge, J. 107,
Søndergaard, H. 283, 287
Sosnovskaya, A. 201, 209

AUTHOR INDEXSOU 79, 82
Sparks, C. 76, 224,
Sporakowski, G. 220
Startt, J. 70
Stead, W. 68
Steele, C. 246, 253,
Stensaas, H. 13, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 124, 125,
134
Stephens, M. 55, 58, 232
Stöber, R. 149, 152, 153, 154
Streckfuss, R. 13, 27
Sükösd, M. 174
Szczygiel, M. 220
Taylor, S. 69
Tepljuk, V. 180, 181, 182
Terdiman, R. 94, 95,
Tertychnyi, A. 203
The History of The Times 72
Thompson, J. 242
Thompson, K. 114
Thomsen, N. 77, 78, 90, 105, 106, 107, 134, 136
Thorp, R. 125
Thulstrup, J. 82
Toepser-Ziegert, G. 269
Tommila, P. 78, 90, 136
Tuchman, G. 19, 34, 37, 40, 95, 230, 231, 232

Wagner, H. 144
Waisbord, S. 96
Walden, R. 40, 44
Walker, D. 81
Walker, M. 66
Warren, C. 58
Weber, J. 140, 149
Weber, M. 143
Wehler, H-U. 157, 265
Weibull, L. 77, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88
Weidermann, J. 217, 221
Weischenberg, S. 271
Westerståhl, J. 84
Wetherell, C. 23
Widestedt, K. 98, 99
Wiener, J. 71
Wieten, J. 81
Wilke, J. 54, 142, 143, 150, 164
Will, G. 47
Williams, R. 243
Wilmer, L. 38
Windahl, S. 79
Wingate, P. 275
Winsvold, M. 127
Wladyka, W. 214
Wuthnow, R. 97
Ybarra, X. 56

Ulstein, K. 127
Unger, L. 220
van Dijk, T. 107, 111, 115, 117, 120, 129, 188,
191, 192, 242
Vartanova, E. 96
Vihalemm, P. 168, 176, 181, 183
Voltmer, K. 201, 203, 204

Zakowski, J. 217, 218
Zassoursky, I. 203
Zhanry sovetskoi gazety 200
Ziomiecki, M. 224

297

298

Subject index

Media Products in Italics
Subjects in bold have sub-categories
ABC TV 246, 252, 257
Adamowski, Janusz 212, 219, 223-224
Adams, Samuel 23
Addison Joseph 264
Adresseavisen 136
Advertising revenue 25
Aftenbladet 114, 115, 119
Aftenposten 127, 130, 132, 136
Agitation and Propaganda Department (Soviet)
174
Agnew, Vice President Spiro 38
Aitzinger, Michael 149
Alberti, the Minister of Justice 118-119
All Things Considered 247, 252
Allgemeine Zeitung (AZ) 148, 153
Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein 155
Allied: Forces 157, 161-164; Occupying Powers 157, 161
All-Union: 172; broadcasting 172; media 180;
news 176; press 172, 178
Ambiguity 152, 222;
Ambiguous: 21, 147, 152, 181; role 180
American Civil War 13, 40, 54-56, 58-60, 63,
94, 116; post-Civil War 41, 55, 230
American Newspaper Publishers Association
30, 45 American Revolution 47
American Society of Newspaper Editors 13, 29,39
Anglo-American: background 17-62; concept
in Germany 164; discursive revolution 33,
34; hegemony 264; perspective 156; tradition 164, 165; press policy 162; model 163,
186, 214, 218, 269; news paradigm 169; style222; text-books 190
Anglo-Saxon: countries 139, 142, 143, 264,
270, 272; journalistic culture 140, 144; social science 143; news paradigm 142, 143,
268, 270
Annales School of History (French) 106, 122
Anonymity 196
Anti-federalists (US) 23

Arbeiderbladet 127, 130, 136
Armory Show 49
Associated Press 29, 58, 231-233, 235, 257
Atlanta Constitution 41
Augsburg 148, 153
Australian ballot 28-29
Authored news programmes 204
Authoritarian regimes 15, 72, 96-97, 185-186,
196-197, 265
Autonomous profession 76, 90, 185, 213
Autonomy: bureaucratic 33; journalistic 7, 8,
16, 33, 80, 99, 129, 135, 144, 164, 268, 270271; media 8, 186, 187; professional 266-268
B.T. 119
BBC 83
Begabungsberuf 267
Bennett press empire (US) 59
Bennett, Jnr James Gordon 63
Bennett, Snr James Gordon 59
Berlin 58, 140-142, 148, 165, 195
Bias: news 26-27, 29, 37, 42, 53, 55, 84, 156,
196, 204, 217; political 75, 82, 123, 135, 155;
unbiased 38, 42, 55, 201, 231
Big Brother 218
Bismarck 269
Black Death 148
Blaine, James G. 27
Bly, Nelly 228
Boston Herald 27
British Control Commission for Germany 162
Bush, George 261
By-lines 101
Canonised texts 173
Canons of journalism 29, 39;
Capitalism 15, 94, 223, 227, 268-269, 272;
corporate 230; dynamics 58; media 16
Catholic Centre Party (Germany) 154
Carolus, Johann 149, 152
Cavling Henrik (1858-1933) 106, 120
Cavling Ole 116
CBS 246, 252, 257
Censor 173, 175

299

SUBJECT INDEX

Censorship 15, 65, 96, 143-144, 169-171, 173,
174-175, 183, 186-187, 191, 195, 211, 215,
217, 224; self-censorship 182
Central Committee of the Communist Party
196, 200
Central Committee of the Estonian Communist
Party 175
Central Committee Secretariat 174
Central press 174
Chernobyl 177-180, 182-183
Chicago Tribune 41, 245, 248, 251
Chronicle, San Francisco 245, 251
Chronology: timeline 89, 231; news paradigm
39, 63, 187; of narrative 13, 131, 190; organising principle 188
Circulation spiral 86
Civil Service 66
CNN 93, 235, 258
Code of Ethics 29, 45
Cold War 211-212, 215
Cologne 148
Commercialisation 57, 76, 86, 202, 214, 227,
233
Commission on Freedom of the Press 253
Committee for the Defense of Workers 223
Communication monopoly 171
Communicators 158-159, 181, 203,
Communist Era 211-212, 214, 221
Communist Party (CP) 169-171, 173-175,
180-183, 186, 195-196, 200, 223; Russian
language CP press 172
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
170-174, 182, 200
Composite: character 133; story 130; week
124-125, 136
Concept of news: 104, 147, 185, 203, 236,
237; content 88, 106, 107, 127, 235, 240, 250,
262; form and appearance 236; headline
news 236; infotainment 96, 165, 236, 271;
soft news 236
Conduits of information 38
Confederal Press Law 148
Congress (US) 32, 170
Congress of the Communist Party 195-196
Congressional committees 24
Congressmen 24
Conservative government (Danish) 105, 115
Conservatives: (Denmark) 105; (Germany)
155; (Norway) 77
Constitution, (Estonia): 1920 186; 1936 186
Contemporary Review 66
Contoocook Transcript 245
Conventions of presentation 70
Cooper, Kent 29

300

Copenhagen 77,105, 106, 108, 112, 114, 120121
Corbett, William 232
Cosmopolitan 218
Cox 244
Cracow 214, 222
Criteria, news 10, 12, 84, 88, 101, 107, 203,
205; five Ws 101, 103, 104, 240, 253; selection 10, 82, 84, 159, 160, 191, 195, 204, 217,
260
Cronkite, Walter 258
Cultural: contexts 45, 93; press 218
Customer oriented 218
Cycle of reporting 239
Dagbladet 127, 136
Dagens Nyheter 85, 98, 101, 120
Daily Mail 69-71
Dark Ages of Partisan Journalism 13
Darwin, Charles 48
Deadline 14, 258
Defoe, Daniel 139, 264
Deixis 115
Democratic: candidates 24; citizens 161
Democratic Republic of Germany 147
Derrida, Jacques 242
Deutsche Zeitung 154
Dickens, Charles 68
Differentiation 8, 148; functional 144, 266,
271; journalistic profession 153, 158, 213,
214; modernising trend 8; political press 78;
social press 78
Dovifat, Emil 155
Dramatic news 130
Editor: political 79-81, 86, 88-91, 99-101, 163,
174, 175, 178, 228; prestige 139;
professionalization 154, 213, 231; sub-editor 86
Editorial 39, 59, 61, 81, 99, 101, 127, 152, 161,
163, 174, 178, 192, 234, 271; democracy 86;
development 152; idea 11; judgement/decisions 22, 61, 124; objective 67; organization/staff 62, 67, 68, 70, 80, 100, 125-126,
145, 152, 153, 158, 164, 213, 217, 230; programs 163; slant 201
Eesti Päevaleht 187, 197
Eesti Raadio 196
Electronic media 173, 236
Elite orientation 76
Engels, Frederick 243
English Protestant perspective 22
Enlightenment, the 54, 143, 243
Esmaspäev 186

SUBJECT INDEX

Estonian Telegraph Agency (ETA) 178, 186
Estrup, Prime Minister 114
Ethnographers’ observations 19
Euronews tv 209
Evaluations independent 196
Evening News 69
Evening Transcript 237
Event-determined 218
Exactitude 222
Exclusivity 165
Fact and fiction 233
Fact-oriented 14, 134, 142, 163-165, 187, 223
Factual 120, 230; basis 255, 272; information
163, 202, 209, 235; news 97, 164; orientation 135, 165; style 26, 53
Falu Kuriren 131
Family Circle Group 249
Federal Republic of Germany 142
Federalists (US) 23
Feuilleton 108
Filtering of information 170
First Amendment to the Constitution 15, 143
Fiske, John 48
Focused: condensed technique 187
Focusing: technique 185, 191, 193, 197
Folketing 88
Folkets Avis 118, 119
Foreign media aid 212
Forposten 109, 118
Fourth Estate 66, 71, 75-76, 84, 259
Franco, General 96
Frankfurt 54, 148
Frankfurter Zeitung 274
Freedom of Information Act (US) 81
Freedom of Press Act 1695 (UK) 143
French Revolution 95-96, 112
Gannett 235
Gazeta Wyborcza 212, 217, 219-221, 223
Genres in print journalism 135; announcements 188, 189; commentary 23, 26, 33, 34,
51, 140, 163, 192, 207, 208; comments 65,
70, 71, 88, 110, 118, 126, 135, 150, 159, 186,
220, 222; feature articles 220; interview (seeInterview); introductory editorial 213; local
news 24, 192, 213, 239; news agency reports
213; notices 67, 110, 125, 135, 189; otchet
204; publicist writing 220, 224; reportage 51,
70, 88, 106, 110, 119, 126, 135, 140, 204, 206,
220; reviews 126, 135, 213; social 68; sport
128; war 139; wrap comments: 250; zametka
200, 203

Genre-strategy 188
German Peasants’ War 148
German Press Council 164
German press law 148
German Revolution 143
Germania 155
Glasnost 177, 180, 182, 187, 201, 203
Glavlit 174-175
Goebbels, Joseph 156
Gold Democratic ticket 25
Gordon, General 68
Government control of the press 15, 186;
(to) direct the formation of opinion 173;
Grady, Henry 25
Great Awakening 47
Great Depression 257
Greely, Horace 68
Gudbrandsdølen 136
Gulf Conflict 262
Gustav Adolf 269
Gutenberg, John 148-149, 151
Hamburg 148
Handbooks of Classified Data 174-175
Hard opening 219; soft opening 219
Hard Copy (traditional): broadsheet 85-87,
109, 149; family magazine 150; gazettes 160,
164; halfpenny paper 69, 71; hand written
newsletters 149-150; intelligence papers
149-150; journals 65, 149, 151, 212, 214, 220;
meeting chronicles 196; penny magazine
150; penny paper 24, 57-59, 66, 141, 230,
237; scientific journals 148; tabloid 12, 69,
71, 85-86, 96, 99, 101, 104, 108, 109, 112113, 134, 186, 187
Headline: deck / decked 71, 130, 192; major
206; stacked 71, 192-193; strapline (secondhead) 206; sub-headline 192-194
Hearst International News Service 232
Hearst 28
Hegel, Friedrich 46
Helsinki 130
Helvetius, Claude Adrien 243
Hemberg, Oscar 120
Henry, Benjamin Day 12
Hierarchy of: ascribed importance 101; centralised media 180: Communist Party (CP)174; Communist press 172, 180; editorial 80;
professional 214, 221; sources 180; topics
172, 176
Higher Journalism School, Warsaw (Poland)
223
Hitler 269

301

SUBJECT INDEX

Hitler’s Germany 31
Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
139, 147
Homo sovieticus 170
Honesty 48, 222, 260
Hugenberg, Alfred 156
Human interest stories 32, 70, 141, 249

269, 270; passive 126; Polish 211-222; popular 12, 70, post Cold War 211; Soviet 169,
171, 176, 177, 182-183, 199-200; top-down
134; unconventional 12
Journalistic: filters 196; manuals 158; organizations 158; roles 158; structural elements
159

Ideological articles 201
Ideology in Context 253
Illiteracy 57, 214
Impartiality 29, 40, 65, 72, 222, 232
Imperial Germany 155
Individual decision making 169
Industrialization of News 227, 229, 235, 237
Information: journalism 159, 163-164; retrieval 185; centred 220
Integrity 23, 28, 30, 32, 48, 80, 222
Interfax 202
International Conference on Population andDevelopment 219
Interpenetration 7, 15, 76, 79, 87-89
Interview 9, 10, 12, 14, 25-26, 70, 83, 120, 126,
129, 131-132, 140-142, 164, 206-208, 213,
263; celebrity interview 68; first published140; role reversal 239
Inverted pyramid 51-64; development 187192; format 41, 42; invented 13; structure 37,
60, 202, 205-208; v diamond structure 131,
133, 135, 188; quadrangle structure 131133, 134, 188; unstructured quadrangle 135
Iron Curtain 215
Irving 47
Isted, battle of 112
ITAR-TASS 202, 205
ITV 83Izvestija 174, 178, 182,

Kaiserreich 154
Kaja 189
Kapuscinski, Ryszard 221, 224
Karjalan Sanomat 199, 202, 209
Kent, Frank 32
KGB – the Committee of State Security 173175
KGB: Fifth Department 174
Kierkegaard 46
King, the Nowegian 77, 265
Kolding Folkeblad 117
Kommersant 201,
Komsomol 172, 186
Koppel, Ted 258
Krall, Hanna 221, 224
Krokodil 173
Kultura tv 209
Kurier Karelii 199, 205, 206, 209
Kuron, Jacek 223

Jefferson, Thomas 23
Jennings, Peter 258
Johnson, President Andrew 25
Jones, Alice Beatrice 261
Journal Courier 244
Journalism: active 70, 126, 127, 134; advocacy 219, 222, 233; announcement 160;
campaign 67, 68, 99; contemporary Western 199; continental European 19; conventional 220; critical 163; detached 124, 187;
elite 204; Estonian 185, 190, 196; fact-oriented 14, 134, 142, 163-165, 187, 223;
golden rule of modern 221; interventionist
222; investigative 66, 68, 83-85, 88-89; literary 199, 270; new American 9; new Russian
202; partisan 13, 19, 75, 142-145, 154-156,

302

Lawrence, David 32
Layout 64, 71, 86, 108-109, 121, 163, 171, 186,
234
Le journal 90
Le quotidian 90
Lead sentence 52, 54, 56-59, 62-63, 71, 111,
117, 192, 193-194, 197; summary lead 232
Leipzig 148
Leninskaya pravda 199, 209
Liberal Party (Norway) 77-78, 136
Liberals: (Denmark) 105, 115; (German) 136,
153-155
Licensing Act 1644 (UK) 65, 143
Licensing models 161
Lincoln: President 25; murder 13, 55-56
Linear: constructions 111; development 132;
principles 107; non-linear principles 108,
112
Literacy 148
Literary: aspirations 26, 34; devices 113, 115;
form 9; ideal 33; style of writing 27, 33, 216;
traditions 48
Literati 151, 152, 213-214
Literaturnaja Gazeta 173
London press 22, 33, 65-72
Lord Northcliffe 69

SUBJECT INDEX

Lord Thomson 233
Lukács, George 242
Luther’s New Testimony 149

Multi-contextual approaches 93
Munich 148
Murrow, Edward R. 257

Magazine: first 149; first political 150; news
magazine (television) 249; on-line 260;
penny 150; satirical 173
Mainz 139, 149
Manifesto of Independence (Estonia) 186
Martial law December 1981 (Poland) 215-216
Marx, Karl 241, 269
Marxian terms 242
Marxism in social sciences 84
Mass audiences 38, 227
Mass media technology: Internet 229, 240,
247-248, 250-252, 255, 260; Photography 60,
98, 229; Printing 42, 77, 89, 95, 148-149, 151,
255; Radio 233, 240; Television 233, 240
Maziarski, Wojchiech 212, 223
McCarthy Hearings 257
Measurements: column inches 125, 240;
packages 240; sound bites 240, 244, 246247; stories 240
Media: charter 218; content 158; hierarchies
171; history 7, 75, 106, 147, 154; industry
237; landscapes 96, 157, 249, 270
Media expectations 160; education 150, 158,
160, 173, 176; entertainment 150, 158, 160;
mobilization 97, 160
Media focus 236
Media research: 16; communication science
158, 159, 215; content analysis19, 40-41, 82,
84, 125, 127, 196, 239, 242-243; diachronic
content analysis 56, 59; empirical 55, 142,
157, 243; historical-empirical 140; Marxist or
non-Marxist analysis 268
Melville, Herman 48
Members of Parliament (UK) 72, 81, 88, 155;
members of parliament (Karelia) 206
Merriam-Webster 253
Metaphorical language 176
Metropolitan newspapers 188, 230
Middagsposten 109
Middle Ages 147-148
Minority parties (Germany) 155
mise en intrigue 113
Modernization 93-104, 144, 159, 162, 164, 186,
214, 222, 264-271
Molodjozh Estonii 183
Morning 71
Morning Edition (NPR) 247, 252
Morrill Acts 49
Moscow 130, 173-174, 177-178, 199, 203
Muckrakers 38, 251; muckraking 38, 67

Napoleonic: era 146; wars 62
Narrative: personal 232; Labov model 113;
writing 220
National Public Radio (NPR) 239, 247, 250,
National Socialism (Germany) 157, 159-160,
162
National Union of Journalists (Norway) 78, 91
Nazi dictatorship 147, 157, 269
NBC tv 246, 252,
Népszabadsag 172
Neue Preußische Zeitung 155
Neuvosto-Karjala 199
New Deal 1930s 39
New Haven 244
New Orleans Times-Picayune 41
New Rochelle 261
New York 261,
New York Evening Post 27
New York Herald 12, 41, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 6163, 134, 140, 141, 237
New York Herald-Tribune 41
New York Journal 28
New York Post 261
New York Sun 12, 59, 237, 251
New York Times 24, 30, 41, 51, 59, 62, 235, 244,
245, 246, 248, 251, 256, 257, 261,
New York Tribune 41, 68
New York World 28, 228, 256
News: as a commodity 94, 227, 231-232, 235;
concept of 104, 185, 203, 236, 237; culture
233; discourse 188, 234; format 185, 192;
gathering 231, 232, 251; presentation 58,
64, 176, 185, 188, 190, 197, 231
News categories: 24, 106, 107; accidents 107,
118, 119, 121, 128, 129, 194-196, 197, 245,
251; commentary 26, 33, 34, 51, 140, 163,
209; crime 24, 106, 118, 194, 195, 197, 251;
culture 106; diverse events 106; economics
106; entertainment 106; high society 24;
politics 24, 106; public affairs 128, 187; sensation 106; sport 128, 154, 205; war 125, 128130
News Paradigm – characteristics: comprehensibility 141, 144-145, 163, 267; comprehensiveness 44, 163; detachment 31, 163164; openness 81, 182, 202; styles and subgenres 94
News Paradigm - determinants: roots 16,
89, 212, 214, 220, 227; Anglo-Saxon origins
142

303

SUBJECT INDEXNews Paradigm - elements: facts 234, 236,
271; details 14, 39, 52, 70, 109, 125, 182, 196;
inverted pyramid 51-64; news event 129,
187, 203, 259; news interview 12, 263, 267;
news value factors 12, 263
News Paradigm functions 119
News Paradigm preconditions 94; aggressive commercialism 24
News print technology 42, 71, 229
Newspaper Guild (US) 31, 257
Newspaper market 77, 87, 186
Newspapers: party oriented 79, 81, 87, 120,
160, 186, 228; provincial 105; quality 160,
203, 219; regional 160, 230
News-rhetoric, Soviet 196
Newsroom technology: cell phones, electronic mail, text messaging, faxes 244; telegraph 11, 20, 26-27, 40, 42-43, 52, 54-55,
58-60, 63, 67, 72, 94, 188, 229, 250; telephones 229; typewriters 229
Nomenclatura 170, 181
Non-wired stories 132, 133,
Noorte Hääl 176, 177, 178, 180, 183, 187, 195
Nordlys 136
Norm: objectivity 19, 22, 26, 30-32, 34;
Durkheimian conditions 21-22, 29, 32, 34;
Weberian conditions 21-22, 29, 31, 33-34
Norwegian Broadcasting Company 83
Norwegian Telegram Bureau (NTB) 125
Novyi Mir 169
Nuremberg 148, 150
Objective reporting 19, 31, 34, 39-41, 43-44,
1356, 142, 163-165, 221
Official Secrets Act (UK) 81
On-the-job training 162
Oregonian 245, 248, 251
Oslo press 76, 81, 123-125, 127, 134-136
Oslo Journalist Association 85
Osrodek Badan Prasoznawczych 222
Pall Mall Gazette 66, 68-69, 71
Paradigm shifts 240
Partiinost 182
Partisan: American 23, 24-25, 28-29, 43, 230;
communist 204; Germany 144, 154, 156;
London 65; non-partisan 19, 32; readers’ 20;
subjectivity 144
Party press: 75; American 32; Denmark 105;
Estonia (inter war period) 184; Germany
154, 155, 160; multi-party press 7, 75-76, 79,
86, 123; Norway 136; Scandinavia 7, 75-77,
81-90, 99
Party-affiliated newspapers 161, 163

304

Patriots 23
People Weekly 249
People’s Home, the 99, 102-103
Peoria Star 251
Perestroika 177, 182, 201
Personal point of view 201; impersonal 37
Perspectives: 26, 67, 103, 263; long-term andshort-term 93
Peterborough Transcript 245
Petrozavodsk 199, 208, 209
Philadelphia 23, 251
Pirate radio stations 217
Plebeian revolution 1918 (Germany) 269
Pluralistic Anglo-American tradition 161
Polish Press Agency 217
Politbureau 174
Political: commitments 13, 65, 70, 71, 76-77,
85, 88-89, 124development 15 (Europe), 90 (USA), 265 (Norway); engagement 219, 224
Politicisation of news 99
Politievennen 108
Politiken 106-107, 117, 120-121
Positive evaluation of articles 196
Postimees 188, 190
Poznan 214
Prague Spring 187
Pravda 172, 174, 178, 182,
Pre-journalists 152
Presentation: 59, 124, 130, 185, 231, 239;
Internet influence on Television 260; journalistic 253; chronological 55, 112, 129, 131; communist 172, 218; conventions 70; development 197; economics 228; Element of news
paradigm 124; form of 24, 123-124, 135, 140141, 157, 159-160, 162, 187, 209; Polish journalist 223; Polish publicist 223; post-WWII
Germany 162; pyramid standard 59, 63, 188;
Soviet 176, 190, 201; strategies 10; style 124
press 218, 221, 224
Press Act in 1938 (Estonia) 186
Press News 190
Press: as political watch dogs 259; commercial 42, 43-44, 46; free 180; freedom of the143, 160, 186, 264-265; landscape 215; laws
148, 152; national 230; penny 40, 44, 57,
141, 230, 232; policy 162; regulations 65,
186, 199
Prince of Wales 68
Printed matter 173, 175
Printers: colonial 22, 39; neutrality 23; tyranny
76; political relationships 17, 90
Prioritisation of facts: 187; priority 130, 160,
269

SUBJECT INDEX

Professionalism 45, 58-59, 63-64, 83, 86, 103,
135,144, 169, 180, 197, 202, 218, 266, 271
Professionalization of Journalism: 42, 4445, 47, 104, 160, 213-214, 269, 271; gatekeeper model 44-45; honoraria 213
Progressive Era 56-57, 63
Progressive reforms 28
Propaganda: age 30; agitation 160 (Germany), 173 (Soviet); American 23, 30, 38;
Anglo-Saxon 272; Communist 257; Germany 270, 142, 144, 160, 163; news management 40, 42-43; Polish 211, 215; Soviet
171, 173, 176, 180, 182-183, 187; wartime
43, 142
Propagandist 29, 181, 200
Public Service broadcasting: 76, 83, 85;
Finnish 83; Sweden 83-84
Public sphere 75, 96, 105, 267, 271-272,
Publicists: Norwegian 135; Polish 213-214,
221, 223
Publishers: American 61, 64; controlled 174;
economic interest 13, 20, 40, 51, 57, 58, 63,
149, 161, 228; journalism association / tradeunion 30, 31, 45, 86, 152, 156; politics 29,
140; principles 152, 228; strategies 77, 86,245, 246
Publishing houses 174
Pulitzer School of Journalism 30
Pullerits, Priit 190
Putin,Vladimir 204, 209
Quality daily 187
Quality journalism 153
Quality of information 38
Queen’s Speech 66
Radio Free Europe 221
Radio programming 186
Rahva Hääl 180, 183
Reading between the lines 181
Reformation, The 149
Reich 1848 148
Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse (Reich
Federation of the German Press) 152-153,
155
Relevance order 107, 111
Relevance principle: 62, 116, 118-120, 188,
189; diffusion 56
Relevance structure 110, 111, 117-118, 129
Republican Party 257
Research: journalistic-editorial 159, 165; scientific 267
Reuter, Julius 129
Rewriting 125, 214

RIA Novosti 202
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact 1939
Riget 121
Rinelander, Leonard 261
Rivera’s dictatorship 96
Rivington, James 40
Role as catalyst 78, 154, 155
Rorschach, Lake Constance 149
Rote Fahne 155
Round Table negotiations 216, 223
Royal Commission on the Press 233
Russell, William Howard 54, 269
Russian Revolution (1905) 95
Russian Revolution (1916) 99, 256
Russian-language CP press
Samizdat 172,San Francisco Examiner 41
Satirical magazine 173
Scandinavian Protestantism 269
School for Political Sciences, Warsaw 214
School of Journalism (Warsaw) 214
School of Journalism at Columbia 30
Secularisation 42, 46-49
Sedition Act of 1798 23
Self-monitoring 164
Serial or semi-serial products 149
Sevareid, Eric 257
Severnyi Kurier 199, 202, 205, 208-209
Sienkiewicz, Henryk 213
Sigma Delta Chi 45
Slate.com on-line magazine 260
Social change: bottom-up, Tsarist Russia 265;
top-down, German 265, 273
Social Democrat Party (Germany) 155
Social Democrats: Denmark 105; Germany
155; Norway 88; Sweden 99
Social-Democrat 155
Social-Demokraten 106, 112-113, 136
Societal development: German 144
Society of Professional Journalists (US) 14, 37
Solidarity: movement 215-217, 223; press 181
Sõnumileht Estonian 187, 197
Sorø Amtstidende 114
Sovetskaja Estonija 183
Soviet doctrine 200
Soviet Estonian press 195
Soviet media: brainwashing the populace
176; concept 171, 183; coverage of Chernobyl 177-180, 182; glorifying the Communist
Party 176; goals 175; main principle 182;
policy 177;
Soviet news paradigm: ‘authorised’ correspondents 182; news without information

305

SUBJECT INDEX

183; omission of relevant information 176;
propaganda 171, 173, 176, 180, 182, 183,
187, 211, 215
Soviet occupation (of Estonia) 186
Soviet rule 1940-1941(of Estonia) 183
Soviet rule 1944-1991 (of Estonia): 183; 1)
Stalinist tyranny 187; Thaw; Stagnation; New
Awakening 187
Soviet-Finnish Winter War 129, 133
Spanish Civil War 96
Springfield Republican 27
St. Petersburg 96
Standards (journalistic): ideological 180;
journalism training 224; of objectivity 129,
231; of performance 44; Polish 211; professional 52, 58, 64, 162, 170, 203, 218, 236,
271; professional ethics 211; Western 169,
211
Stanton, Edwin M. 55-56
State Department (US) 257
State Journal-Register 245
State Propaganda Department (Estonian) 186
State Publishing, Printing and Book-Trade
Committee 174
State radio 217
State secrets 177
State Television and Broadcasting Committee
174
Steele, Richard 264
Stockholm 88, 120, 127, 178
Storting 126, 265
Strasbourg 139, 149
Stuarts (Royal House of) 233
Sullivan, Mark 32
Sunnhordland 136
Supervision and control 170-171, 173
Swift, Jonathan 264
Systematic differences 240
Systematically structured: fact-oriented 14,134, 142, 163-165, 187, 223; transfer-oriented news 165
Systemic transformation 216, 223
Systems theory: 266, 271; socio-scientific 266
Tagesschriftsteller (daily writers) 152
TASS 172, 176-178, 180, 182, 186, 208
Teaching between the lines 181
Technical journalists 214
Tel Aviv 239
Telegraph news
Telegraphen Union 156
Teleological perspective 211, 223
Texts and discourse 72
Textual structures 196

306

Textual: condition 61; non-graphic advertising 201; operations 10-11; practices 255;
products 248; strategies 104
The Guardian 219
The Hague 130
The New Republic 256
The Star 69
The Telegraph 67
The Times 31, 54, 66-68, 71-72
Third Reich 182
Thirty Years War 147-148, 150, 154, 269
Thoughts between the lines 218
Tidens Tegn 131, 136
Time, Inc. 249
Titanic 72
Tory (party) 38, 42, 65
Totalitarian regimes: 130, 185; totalitarianism 7, 204
Trade Union (Journalists): Norway 136;
Germany 152
Transmitting between and behind the lines 181
Truman Administration 257
Tryckfrihetsföordningen {Freedom of Speech
Act 1766; Sweden} 81
Twain, Mark 48
Tygodnik Powszechny 215
U.S. Army 257
United Press 232, 257
Us (magazine) 249
USA Today 31, 244
Utopia 243, 259
Uus Eesti 187
Value-free reporting 26
Victorian Age 75
Vienna 140
Viet Nam War 84
Vocabulary: of middle class interests 236;
Soviet journalism 169
Voice: authorities 180; foreign / outside 206,
208-209; independent 207; journalism 103;journalists 10, 262; narrative 114, 208; of thestory 206-207; power holders 173; variety
of 206
Vormärz 269
Vremya tv 172
Waba Maa 189-190
Wankiewicz, Melchior 219, 224
Washington D.C. 239
Washington Post 235
Webpage of Kommersant 201

SUBJECT INDEX

Weimar 96, 161; Democracy 156; era 152-156,
163; Republic 142, 157, 159-162
Wekhrlin, Ludwig Wilhelm (1739-92) 143
Welch, Joseph N. 257
Weltanschauung 229
Weltanschauungen (German world view) 142143
West Germany 157, 164
Westminster 70
Whig (party) 65
Whitehall 70
Whitman, Walt 46
Wiinblad 117
Wilson, President Woodrow 30
Wired stories 133
Wolfe, Tom 233
Wolfenbüttel 135

Workers’ Publishing Cooperative 217
World News Tonight 252
World War I: as a timeline 27, 45, 101, 104,
123, 148, 257, 274; before 12, 30, 43, 96, 124,
155, 192, 229, 232; during 25, 30, 152, 257;
after 27, 38, 40, 43, 44, 155, 254, 256;
number of journalists 152; reporting method
124, 129; time cut event 129
World War II: as event 257, 177-178, 257; astimeline 40, 157, 170; before 40, 128, 135,
273; after 41, 135, 170, 235; reporting
method 261
XXII Congress (Soviet) 170
Yakovenko, Igor 209
Yleisradio 82, 83

307

About the Authors

Kevin G. Barnhurst, Professor and Interim Head of the Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of The Form ofNews, A History (New York: Guilford Press) with John Nerone, and of Seeing
the Newspaper (New York: St. Martin’s Press). E-mail: kgbcomm@uic.edu
Bernd Blöbaum, Professor and Director of the Institute for Communication
Science at the University of Münster. He has lectured at several universities
including Bamberg and Hamburg. His books include Journalisimus als
soziales System, Zwischen Redaktion und Reflexion, and Literatur und
Journalisimus (Ed. with Stefan Neuhaus). Blöbaum’s research comprises journalism theory, audience research, sports and science journalism, and theEuropean public sphere. E-mail: bernd.bloebaum@uni-muenster.deMarcus Denton has lived in Tartu, Estonia since 2004 from where he provides
an Internet based English Language consultancy with an emphasis in the fieldsof Journalism and Media Communication. Email: marcus@derettens.pri.ee
Jan Ekecrantz is Professor and Chair in Media studies, Department of Journalism, Media & Communication at Stockholm University. Current researchinterests include cultural globalisation as it relates to political economy, in
Russia, Latin America and China. E-mail: ekejan@jmk.su.se
Katharina Hadamik, Ph.D. is Lecturer at the University of Bochum and the
University of Gent. Her research and teaching address the transformation ofmedia and journalism in Central and Eastern Europe, media and journalism
cultures, and print journalism. E-mail: katharina@hadamik.nl
Halliki Harro-Loit is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of
Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu, Estonia. She has a Ph.D.
from University of Oslo 2001. Her publications include Changing Journalistic Conventions in the Press. Empirical studies on daily newspapers under
different conditions in 20th century Estonia. E-mail: halliki.harro@ut.ee
Hanno Hardt, Professor emeritus, currently at the University of Ljubljana,
Croatia. He was for many years John Murray Professor of Journalism and
Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He is interested in the intellectual history of communication studies and the uses of history in media
research. Among his books are Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History and Theory in America. E-mail: hanno.hardt@uni-lj.si, hannohardt@uiowa.edu

309

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Svennik Høyer is Professor emeritus at the Department for Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He has written extensively on the Norwegian and international press, on the professionalisation of journalists and on
the newspaper industry. Current research interest includes comparative studiesof journalism and the press. Latest publications are: “Newspapers without
Journalists”. Journalism Studies Vol 4, no. 4 /2003 and “The Paradoxes of
the Journalistic Profession. An Historical Perspective” (with Epp Lauk)
Nordicom Review Vol. 24, no. 2 /2003. E-mail: svennik.hoyer@media.uio.no
Søren Kolstrup is Senior Lecturer emeritus at the Department of Information
Science and Media Studies at the University of Aarhus. He has written on
discourse analysis, media history and the role of visual expression in communication. His current research interest includes the history of newspaper
genres in the 19th and the 20th century and the analysis of visual communication. E-mail: skolstr@imv.au.dk
Epp Lauk, Professor in journalism at the Department of Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu, Estonia. She specialises in media history andthe study of journalism and the professionalisation of journalists. She has
written extensively on Estonian media in international journals and publications. She was visiting professor at the University of Oslo in 2004. Her books
include Towards a Civic Society. The Baltic Media’s Long Road to Freedom(ed. with Svennik Høyer and Peeter Vihalemm), and Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Development of Estonian Journalism. E-mail:epp.lauk@ut.ee.
John Nonseid is Senior consultant in Statskonsult, Oslo. MA in Communication, University of Oslo 1997. Nonseid has been engaged in developing
projects and has served as consultant, advisor and evaluator for several communication plans and plans for avoiding and handling crisis for Government
agencies and Departments. E-mail: john.nonseid@statskonsult.no.
Jukka Pietiläinen, Ph.D. is a Researcher at University of Tampere Centre forAdvanced Study (UTACAS) 2004-2005 and at the Department of Journalism
and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, Finland. His research is
focused on Russian mass media and journalism – especially on the regional
level – and on comparative media research, news flows and foreign news.
E-mail: jukka.pietilainen@uta.fi
Horst Pöttker (Dr. phil. habil.) is Professor of theory and practice at the Institute for Journalism at the University of Dortmund. He has studied sociology, philosophy and philology at the universities of Hamburg, Zürich, Kiel
and Basel. Pöttker served as a journalist for many years and as a visiting
professor at the universities of Leipzig, Iowa and Rostow o.D. He initiated adebate on the National Socialist past of the German communication sciencein 2001, which can be found at ww.dgpuk.de, the homepage for Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. E-mail:horst.poettker@udo.edu
310

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael Schudson is Professor in the Department of Communication andSociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of several
well-known books including: Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, Watergate in American Memory, The Power of News andseveral scholarly articles. E-mail: mschudson@ucsd.edu
Harlan S. Stensaas has a Ph.D. from University of Southern Mississippi 1987.
He has served on journalism and communication faculties in South Dakota
State, Washington State, Eastern Illinois, Oral Roberts, University of Southern Mississippi, Mankato State, Tarkio, and Southeastern Oklahoma between
1960 and 1994. His journalistic experience includes service as reporter, photographer, copyeditor, and news editor. Stensaas has also published in the
popular press, in professional/trade publications, and scholarly journals. He
and his wife are currently serving as English language experts in the Anhuiand Guangdong provinces of China.
Rudolf Stöber (Dr.phil.habil.) Professor for communication studies at theuniversity of Bamberg; he has been guest professor in Dresden 1996-2001,
in Leipzig and in Zürich; and served as lecturer in Berlin and Lüneburg 19851996. He is author of: Verbandsinteresse und Pressefreiheit 1992; Dieerfolgverführte Nation 1998; Deutsche Pressegeschichte 2002; Mediengeschichte 2003. He has also contributed to the European Journal of Communication most recently with “What media evolution is. A theoretical
approach to the history of new media”: 2004/no. 4, pp. 483-505. E-mail:rudolf.stoeber@split.uni-bamberg.de311

Svennik Høyer and Horst Pöttker (eds.)

owards the turn of the 19th century, newspapers in the US wereexpanding more rapidly than elsewhere. Was it this burgeoning market,
which inspired journalism to reinvent itself into a ‘new’ and different
kind of texts: clearer, fact oriented and without any obvious ideologicalbias? Or were also broader cultural currents at work?

This anthology is one of a few, which compares the developments ofnews journalism cross-nationally. The creation of a ‘news paradigm’ in
US is traced from its beginnings up to the present; its varying impacts
on European journalism is discussed and documented for England
during the 1880s and 1890s, in Scandinavia between the 1870s andthe present, in Germany before and after 1945, and in Central/EasternEurope before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

NORDICOM

Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research
Göteborg University
Box 713, SE 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden
Telephone +46 31 773 10 00 (op.)
Fax +46 31 773 46 55
E-mail: nordicom@nordicom.gu.se
www.nordicom.gu.se
ISBN 91-89471-30-X

GÖTEBORG
UNIVERSITY

Diffusion of the News Paradigm 1850-2000 Svennik Høyer & Horst Pöttker (eds.)T

NORDICOM

Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik
Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp LaukJohn Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan
S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan
Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik
Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst
Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G.
Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno
Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John
Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harland S.
Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz- Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker
Michael Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst- Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki
Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka
Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf- Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan
S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan
Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik
Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst
Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G.
Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno
Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John
Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S.
Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz- Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker
Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst- Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki
Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup - Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka
Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael Schudson - Harlan S. Stensaas - Rudolf
Stöber - Kevin G. Barnhurst - Bernd Blöbaum - Jan Ekecrantz - Katharina
Hadamik - Hanno Hardt - Halliki Harro-Loit - Svennik Høyer - Søren Kolstrup- Epp Lauk - John Nonseid - Jukka Pietiläinen - Horst Pöttker - Michael
Schudson - Harland S. Stensaas - Rudolf Stöber -Diffusion of theNews Paradigm
1850-2000

NORDICOM