How did you become involved with AJHA?

Ever since I edited my high school newspaper and read W. A. Swanberg's biographies of Pultizer and Hearst, I've had a keen amateur interest in the history of journalism. I planned a career as a journalist but changed direction and became an historian—that is, a journalist without deadlines. I was never formally trained in journalism history and did not even begin to teach the subject until fairly late in my academic career. My university, Drew University, created a new major in Media and Communications, so I decided to work up a new course on the History of American Journalism, which is the only American history course I teach (I'm a specialist in modern Britain and Europe). And so I joined AJHA to keep up (or rather, catch up) with the scholarly literature.

Around the same time, I began researching what was for me unknown historical territory: Playboy magazine's female readers. There were literally millions of them, about a third of Hefner's audience. And that was another good reason to join AJHA. In my journalism history course, I have my students read the May 1963 issue of Playboy and write a short paper analyzing it as a document of American popular culture in the age of MadMen. They can focus on the articles, the fiction, the interviews, the cartoons, the ads, the letters to the editor, or (yes) the ladies. But none of my students has ever chosen to write about the centerfolds. What's wrong with kids nowadays? 

How do you see your research on the history of the book, publishing, and reading in Britain contributing to the study of media history?

My research has always focused on readers. Frankly, I'm more interested in how a Victorian chambermaid responded to Middlemarch than I am in the novel itself. And that has important implications for journalism history. Why do we study newspapers and magazines and newscasts anyway? Obviously they're tremendously influential, but how exactly did they influence readers? We can only know that if we study readers directly, rather than focusing on the printed page and trying to guess how readers might have responded. To take the most basic question, which we should be asking at a time when media credibility is sinking to an all-time low: Did readers believe what they read in the papers? I tackled that and other problems of reader response in my book Readers' Liberation. 

The historiography of reading leads us again and again to counterintuitive conclusions. In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes I found that Victorian laborers did not limit themselves to penny dreadfuls, they were also enjoying Shakespeare and Shelley and Charles Darwin. I investigated a Black working-class public housing project in Louisville in 1943, where the most popular novel turned out to be (are you sitting down?) Gone with the Wind. And though feminists reviled Playboy, they were far outnumbered by the women who read it as a feminist magazine (which in many ways it was). 

What has your role as co-editor of Book History taught you about reviewing and publishing research?

While Book History wasn't the first journal in the field, it was pioneering on several fronts. Ezra Greenspan, my coeditor, and I had to decide what the history of the book was, what was included within its disciplinary limits. And from our first issue in 1998, we definitely included journalism history. Those early issues featured articles on press coverage of Jenny Lind's American tour, an eighteenth-century German women's magazine, and an English magazine that published sheet music. Later, we had studies of editor-reader dialogue in the Russian dissident journal Kolokol, "bohemian" reporters in the American Civil War, Canadian pulp magazines, Duke (a short-lived publication much like Playboy for a predominantly Black readership), government manipulation of Spanish Armada news in Elizabethan England, the Christian Science Monitor and the professionalization of journalism, how technological information systems transformed the Times of London in its first century, and digitally archiving nineteenth-century amateur newspapers. So we not only published journalism history, we expanded its methodological range.

Since practically everything we did was innovative, we had a large proportion of graduate students and junior faculty among our contributors. To attract younger scholars, we created an annual prize for the best article by a graduate student. Of course we also published distinguished senior scholars, but we especially wanted to showcase the work of young people who will be distinguished senior scholars thirty years hence.

How has your approach to teaching changed since you were part of the team that redesigned the graduate history program at Drew University? What lessons or advice can you offer to other graduate instructors looking to update their history media course or add media history into their syllabi?

We designed our graduate program to train students broadly in cultural and intellectual history, not just journalism history. I did teach a graduate course on journalism history, and there I had students read, analyze, and criticize books that cast light on the whole of American culture: for instance, Alan Brinkley on Henry Luce, William Hammond on covering the Vietnam War, Laurel Leff on the New York Times and the Holocaust, Neal Gabler on Walter Winchell, John McMillan on underground newspapers, and Jennifer Scanlon on Helen Gurley Brown. 

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

I'm so far behind the times, I still read paper-and-ink newspapers! In fact just about all my recreations are anachronistic. I enjoy visiting historic towns and museums, I watch old movies on TCM, I love live theater but almost never watch anything on a screen. I have no Twitter or Instagram or Facebook accounts, I don't even have a smartphone. For a media scholar I'm fairly allergic to new media.

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He specializes in British history, intellectual history, and the history of the book.