By Ross F. Collins, AJHA president 2018-19
One of my goals as this year’s AJHA president has been to strengthen our connections with journalism history groups internationally. While it appears AJHA is the world’s oldest organization focused on the discipline of media history, newer groups in France and Britain have certainly demonstrated a high level of enthusiasm and scholarship. Previous columns have considered France. This column considers Britain. But this time I had an opportunity to do more than correspond by email. As I was going to England to present at another conference, I arranged to meet with the directors of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History, housed at the University of Sheffield.
The center is barely a decade old—launched in 2009—but scholars there have already established an impressive body of research. Most recently co-directors Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy published a history of the British popular press, Tabloid Century (Peter Lang, 2015). I had the opportunity to chat with them over coffee on a sunny afternoon outside the university cafeteria.
Considering journalism history as part of the larger discipline of history, Adrian emphasized a need to rethink the scholarship to a more general level. “Historians of journalism need to be more ambitious in engaging with the big questions of the discipline, political, social, and cultural” he said, and they need to be less defensive about the field. “I consider myself to be a social and cultural historian of modern Britain, first and foremost.”
Martin agreed, noting journalism historian conferences should become more inclusive, reaching out to allied disciplines. “Try to incorporate journalism history into the larger area of history by considering it as social and cultural history.”
In his article “The Paradoxes of Journalism History,” (Australian Journalism Review 32), Martin wrote that journalism history needs to establish common research approaches. “In order to best create methodological links between journalism history and other areas of interest,” he wrote, “we need the sort of textual analysis which book history has developed and which, within journalism history, might well be served by some sort of historically grounded discourse analysis.”
The co-directors warn against journalism historians falling too strongly toward the traditional focus on biography of famous journalists and newspapers. Not that this work has no value, Adrian noted, but “if they are to avoid being pigeonholed as players in a relatively minor field, then journalism historians, I think, need to be more ambitious.” Conboy in his article acknowledged that American scholars such as David Paul Nord and James Carey also have addressed this, but added that scholars in other disciplines could benefit from greater understanding in how journalism historians analyze texts. “Journalism history,” he said, “ is a reference for social and cultural change in society.”
Adrian said as well that today’s journalism historians can be more ambitious in exploiting sources in new and more sophisticated ways, based on material now available online. The center offers an online archives for journalism historians accessible at the university, and encourages international scholars to research and study there in the discipline. “We currently have a student here interested in Chinese journalism history,” Adrian noted. The center actively seeks postgraduate students, and schedules conferences “from time to time,” most recently 2017. When they launch the next one, Adrian added, we in AJHA will hear about it. Check out the center at sheffield.ac.uk/journalismhistory.
