Editor’s Note: University of Maine professor Josh Roiland presented his paper, “Hidden in Plain Style: The Anti-Bomb Politics of John Hersey’s Hiroshima,” at the recent International Association of Literary Journalism Studies conference held in Canada. The Intelligencer asked Dr. Roiland to tell us more about how and why he started researching this topic, and why this research is important and interesting for himself and our field.

By Josh Roiland, University of Maine

The lasting image from my first reading of John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima is his description of the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto reaching down to help a blast victim. Tanimoto grabs the woman “by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces.” The verb slipped. The adjective glovelike. Together they created an aqueous revulsion that still attends each reading.  

Hiroshima was part of Tom Connery’s “Literary Journalism in America” graduate course at the University of Saint Thomas. It was my first semester in the English master’s program, and I remember being repulsed, if not exactly moved, by the story. I was more interested in the fact that Hersey traveled back to Japan 40 years after the piece first ran in The New Yorker, to report on the fates of the six survivors he profiled in 1946.  

When I read the story again, several years later, it was in preparation for teaching my own version of “Literary Journalism in America.” This time I was struck by the story’s clinical and antiseptic feel. Yes, the gory details still stood out, but the text was, in many ways, boring. Hersey overwhelmed readers with precise measurements, exact times, and arcane details. Trapped within this barrage of facts, the characters seemed not so much heroic as fated. I wondered and worried how I was going to teach this landmark work or journalism. As far as pedagogy goes, standing in front of students pleading Isn’t this horrific? wasn’t much of a plan. 

That question, however, was canny. It led to two more questions that subsequently animated my teaching and, eventually, my research on the text.

Why is it terrible? 

How does it work? 

I’ve taught Hiroshima eight times. The first five as part of the SAGES writing program at Case Western Reserve University, then twice more as a visiting professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and finally once as an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maine. In each class, we spent the first of our four days cataloging reactions to the text and the passages that produced them. Students are always shocked, disgusted, and riveted. They’re awed by the enormity of the catastrophe. They’re sickened by the graphic descriptions. They’re captivated by the stories of resilience. Each time I would ask them why they were so moved, and each time they exclaimed: “The story!” 

The unanimity and repetition of that answer increasingly left me unsatisfied. I understood being stirred by the ghastly content of Hersey’s text, but what about Hiroshima’s form? The story, they would often say, speaks for itself. This answer both made sense and was completely unsatisfying. Hersey’s narrative is so plainly drawn and utterly compelling that it feels as though it always existed just that way. But, of course, it didn’t. No story ever speaks for itself. In class I would push back: all stories—including Hiroshima—are constructions, and our job is to figure out how it is constructed, then determine the effect of that particular composition. In time, that became my job outside of the classroom as well. 

On the second day of class discussion, I start to push back. I ask: Does the text express a point of view? Does Hersey offer his thoughts, either explicitly or implicitly, on the usage of the bomb? I introduce secondary articles for historical and theoretical context. We discuss Hugh Kenner’s “The Politics of Plain Style” and an excerpt from Phyllis Frus’s The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative. Students are moved by Kenner’s refutation that “a man who doesn’t make his language ornate cannot be deceiving us.” Maybe there’s something more going on here, they think. They are less persuaded (and, in fact, often annoyed) by Frus’s theoryspeak when she adduces that due to a nonfiction writer’s lack of reflexivity, a reader’s “response is reduced to a narrow emotional range, and we do not experience the subjectivity of another, for the text (with its repetition of universal truths and reified, historical facts) confirms the naturalized view we already hold, the world we recognize as ‘actual.’” What?, they ask. The first couple times I taught that text I joined the students in their puzzlement, but every semester when I explained Frus’s argument I found myself more and more persuaded. 

In addition to those two works of literary theory, we read three works of historiography: an 11-page excerpt from Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made that offers both a brief biography and a behind-the-scenes exploration of Hersey’s reporting and writing process; the corresponding chapter from Norman Sims’s seminal True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism; and Kathy Roberts Forde’s award-winning article, “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima.’” Forde, a friend and mentor, chronicles in meticulous and captivating detail how “[n]o other publication in the American twentieth century was so widely circulated, republished, discussed, and venerated.” 

After a while, all these passages and the articles that contained them, looked like puzzle pieces.  

Forde’s article, however, was the kicker. It spurred me to put the puzzle together: “Hiroshima”’s recognition was immediate and its reach, vast. Aided by a press release announcing its publication and advanced reviews, when The New Yorker hit newsstands on August 29, 1946, the magazine sold its entire 300,000 non-subscription run in an hour. ABC radio staged a somber four-night reading of the text for a national audience. Alfred A. Knopf almost instantaneously published the article in book form. The Book-of-the-Month club selected Hersey’s story and sent a free copy to its more than half-a-million subscribers. 

The question that frustrated me over and over was: Why? 

As I later wrote:

“Hiroshima” was released less than five years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed 2,386 Americans. Upon entering World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans living along the Pacific Coast. The last internment camp, at Tule Lake, California did not close until March 21, 1946. A virulent anti-Japanese sentiment still coursed through American culture after the war ended. So then, how did a story rooted in empathy for the Japanese cause publishers to, as Forde put it, “largely disregard commercial imperatives to provide as many Americans as possible with vital information and a forum for debate about the unsettling moral, political, and social realities of atomic warfare and the new atomic age.”

The more I taught the text, the more I thought I figured out that very basic question.

The answer, I believed, was that Hersey’s lack of reporting transparency, absence of rhetorical reflexivity, and plain compositional style made his rendering of such a distasteful moral act palatable for large numbers of American readers. 

I was writing my dissertation while I taught most these classes. Moved by the work of James Carey, Barbie Zelizer, and Michael Schudson, I wanted to figure out the democratic significance of literary journalism in America. Hiroshima was not part of my study, but my scholarship informed my teaching, which, in turn, informed later scholarship. When I floated my ideas in the classroom, however, students were not swayed. In fact, some were offended. Hersey’s story was so meaningful to them that to suggest an alternative understanding was to impugn on their critical sensibilities. 

At the end of every semester, I ask students to rate all our primary texts on a scale of 0-10 based on how much they “liked” each piece. It’s a fun exercise that also offers me some unscientific data about what and how I’m teaching. In each of the eight semesters that I’ve taught “Literary Journalism in America,” Hiroshima’s average rating came in above 8.5, which always made it one of the three highest-rated stories out of the more than 35 that we read in class. The text’s popularity mirrored the honor bestowed by esteemed journalists and NYU professors who, in 1999, named the story the most important work of journalism of the twentieth century. 

The push back from the students proved to be good practice for when I eventually presented the paper at a conference. 

After a half-dozen courses, I felt I had my argument pretty-well mapped out. I had a hypothesis, some convincing examples, and an explanatory theoretical framework. These elements were enough to run several successful classes and prod students to consider Hiroshima in new and uncomfortable ways. But they were not enough for an article. So I spent last summer researching and re-reading. I went through the text page-by-page and created thematic taxonomies, then populated those categories with extensive examples. The puzzle grew larger and larger. And then I assembled it.

If research papers have nut grafs, this would be mine:

Hersey establishes his authority through an unrelenting presentation of precise times and measurements. He employs an unadorned style of writing that garners readers’ trust by abandoning rhetorical flourishes. He pulls readers along through a looping, nonlinear narrative with constant temporal transitions that seemingly link the stories together. Hersey further enhances the narrative by hiding his reporting via conventional attribution. A result of taking the marks off his reporting is a presentation of characters that appear representative of Hiroshima’s victims, when, in fact, they display religious and occupational characteristics familiar to most western audiences. Hersey uses a limited-omniscient point of view for much of the story, which removes direct agency from the events and replaces it with a more dramatic emphasis on fate. He plays down the political and militaristic context rendering the events in a cultural vacuum. Finally, there are several key moments in “Hiroshima” where Hersey betrays his plain style by deploying figurative language that directly editorializes his disdain for the bomb. 

I presented the paper at the twelfth annual meeting of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS) in Halifax, Nova Scotia in May 2017. Relative to AJHA, this association and its attendant conferences are small. Approximately 75 presented at IALJS-12. It felt like half of them came to our panel, “Content, Form, and Time: Style as Argument,” which also featured Christopher Wilson (Boston College) discussing Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker murder stories and David Dowling (University of Iowa) presenting his award-winning paper on Marilynne Robinson’s radical environmental journalism. 

I expected there to be some opposition in the audience. I was taking on a canonical writer, after all, as well as some canonical takes. If my students were bothered by my reading of Hiroshima, surely scholars who had vested interests in the text would also disagree with me. 

They did. 

(Readers can watch the panel and the feisty question and answer session here.) 

Some believed I was unfairly critical of Hersey and his journalistic decision-making process. I explained that I was not—in the paper, anyway—offering a value judgment on Hersey’s reporting and writing choices, but rather noting that all choices have an effect; therefore, it was important to understand how Hersey’s choices positioned readers, then and now, to encounter the text in particular ways. (That said, I didn’t help my case by adding that I personally felt Hersey’s lack of transparency and reflexivity was compositionally manipulative.)

Other scholars questioned my use of the term “political,” wondering if I was suggesting that Hersey was either partisan or agenda-driven. I explained that I was using John J. Pauly’s conception of “politics” as “the realm of symbolic confrontation in which groups of citizens organize, enact, and negotiate their relationships with one another.” Moreover, I was not making any claims, nor am I interested in Hersey’s intention or agenda. Rather, I wanted to explore the effects of the choices that he made in his text. 

An ancillary question attended these points: So what? Several scholars pointed out that Hersey’s text had been effective because the world had not experienced any atomic warfare after the publication of this influential account. I believe it is reductive to make such a correlation. Global politics are a volatile and complicated crucible, and to suggest that any one text—no matter how profound—ever has such direct influence is, I believe, simplistic. Moreover, the fact that civilization has thus far staved off nuclear annihilation really has nothing to do with my argument. 

As the Q+A concluded I tried to emphasize this point: all styles are political—even (or, especially) a plain style. Such a statement, however, is not analogous to saying that Hersey had a political agenda or intended to smuggle a message into his text. Intention has nothing to do with it. Rather, saying the style is political acknowledges that all reporting and writing decisions have consequences for readers; our job as scholars is remove our value judgment about those decisions and instead highlight and understand those consequences.

I titled my essay “Hidden in Plain Style” to draw attention to the style’s subtlety. Although the approach is unadorned, direct, and simple, Hugh Kenner called it “the most disorienting form of discourse yet invented by man.” And once one notices it, the style is impossible to unsee. Yet for more than 70 years, most of the popular and scholarly criticism of Hiroshima has focused not on the story’s form, but rather on its content. There is good reason for this attention: the subject matter is literally (and thankfully) unparalleled. But that focus has also prevented us from understanding precisely how the story works. It’s not enough to note that Hersey travelled to Japan and bore witness to the effects of the first ever detonation of an atomic bomb on civilization. Scholars must account for the fact that he constructed a story based on what he saw and whom he talked to, and then chose to tell that story in a very particular way. The hope is that my article creates a space to start that discussion.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Josh Roiland is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maine. His article, “Hidden in Plain Style: The Anti-Bomb Politics of John Hersey’s Hiroshima,” has been accepted by Journalism History pending minor revisions. His essays and criticism are available at www.joshroiland.com

This year’s call for nominations yielded a diverse pool for leadership positions in our organization. Two AJHA members have been nominated to fill the slot of 2017-2018 2nd VP, and three members were nominated to fill three three-year terms on the Board of Directors.

Here’s a little bit of information about each nominee (listed in alphabetical order, by position).

Donna Lampkin Stephens (University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Ark.) has been nominated for the position of 2^nd VP. Stephens joined AJHA as a graduate student in 2008, where she won the Robert Lance Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper for one of her assignments in Dave Davies’ Historical Methods class at the University of Southern Mississippi (“The Conscience of the Arkansas Gazette: J.N. Heiskell Faces the Storm of Little Rock.”). Since then, she has attended conferences in Raleigh, New Orleans, St. Paul, Oklahoma City, St. Petersburg and Little Rock. In New Orleans, she presented her dissertation, “’If It Ain’t Broke, Break It’: How Corporate Journalism Killed the Arkansas Gazette,” which earned honorable mention for the Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Prize. It was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2015. She has participated in panel discussions and served on the Public Relations and History in the Curriculum committees and has been a reviewer for American Journalism. Stephens is transitioning off the AJHA board after a three-year term and is one of the local hosts for the Little Rock conference. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in Journalism and English from the University of Arkansas, an M.Ed. in special education (Teaching Visually Impaired Children) from UA-Little Rock, and a Ph.D. in Mass Communication (History and Law) from the University of Southern Mississippi. 

Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has been nominated for the position of 2^nd VP. Roessner joined AJHA as a graduate student in 2006. In her time with the organization, she has served in numerous roles—as the member and chair of the AJHA Graduate Committee (2007-2011), as the chair of the Elections and Nominations Committee (2011-present), as a conference reviewer (2010-present), as a member of the Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation award committee (2013-2016) and the AJHA Book Award Committee (2011-2014). She also served on the Board of Directors 2013-2016. Roessner has published one book and 12 refereed articles, including three that appeared in American Journalism, where she has served as a manuscript reviewer on numerous occasions. Much of this research was presented at AJHA, where she has been honored with AJHA’s William Snorgrass Memorial Award and honorable mention for the David Sloan Outstanding Faculty Paper Award and the Robert E. Lance Award. Roessner recently was honored with the 2017 AJHA Award for Excellence in Teaching, with American Journalism’s 2014 Rising Scholar Award, and with AJHA’s 2011 Joseph McKerns Research Grant Award. Roessner is an associate professor of journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; she received her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2010. Her research interests include twentieth century U.S. political communications and race and gender politics in American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

David O. Dowling (University of Iowa, Iowa City) has been nominated to serve on the board of directors. Dowling has been a member of AJHA since 2014. Dowling has served as a referee for Research Paper Submissions for the 2016 and 2017 Annual Conferences and on the American Journalism Editorial Board since 2016. Two of his articles, one on the ideological convergence of Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville in the periodical press, and the other on multimedia approaches to teaching journalism history, have been published (the latter in press) in American Journalism. His presentations on radical nineteenth-century intellectual culture in mainstream press was presented at the 2014 and 2015 AJHA Annual Conferences prior to inclusion in “Emerson’s Newspaperman: Horace Greeley and Radical Intellectual Culture, 1836-1872,” J&C Monographs spring 2017. In 2016, he presented his research on Indian journalist T.G. Narayanan, the figure responsible for publicizing the revolutionary vision of Mahatma Ghandi. This research is currently under review at Modern Asian Studies.  

Dowling, an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, is the author of six books and numerous articles on digital media and journalism history. His research on publishing industries and cultural production has appeared in Literary Journalism Studies, Genre, Convergence, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journalism & Communication Monographs, and elsewhere. His current book project is titled, Immersed: Narrative Journalism in the Digital Age.

Keith Greenwood (Missouri, Columbia) has been nominated to serve on the board of directors. He has been a member of the American Journalism Historians Association since 2005. He has served AJHA as a member of the Nominations and Elections Committee and as a current member of the Board of Directors.  He also manages the website of the AEJMC history division. 

He is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism where he is part of the photojournalism and journalism studies faculty groups. He teaches History of Photojournalism as well as graduate seminars on photography in society and research methods. His research on the history of photojournalism has included the study of individual photographers. His research also includes visual framing analysis of news photographs and adoption of technology in photojournalism. 

Sonny Rhodes (University of Arkansas, Little Rock) has been nominated to serve on the board of directors. He has been a member of the American Journalism Historians Association since 2005. He has attended a number of AJHA national conferences since then, given that AJHA is, by far, his favorite organization. Having a strong commitment to service, he has served AJHA by reading numerous papers submitted for presentation at annual conferences. He also has served the organization by reviewing papers submitted for publication in American Journalism and by writing book reviews for the journal. Since early 2016 he has aided in planning for the 2017 national conference in Little Rock.

Additional nominations can be made from the floor during the election that will be held during the annual convention in October. Please remember that any nominee must have been a member of AJHA for at least one calendar year immediately preceding the date of the election. No more than one person from an institution can serve on the Board of Directors at one time; individuals from the same institution may serve on the Board of Directors and in the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, concurrently. Dues paying AJHA members unable to attend the conference are eligible to vote. They should send their name, email address, and intent to vote online to AJHA Nominations and Election Committee Chair Amber Roessner (aroessner@utk.edu) no later than midnight Sept. 31. After elections are held on Saturday, October 14, at the 35th annual AJHA convention in Little Rock, current 2^nd VP Ross Collins (North Dakota State University) will become 1^st VP, and current 1^st VP Dianne Bragg (University of Alabama) will become president for 2017-2018.

A reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette whose work has exposed judicial and higher education corruption will soon be honored by the American Journalism Historians Association. Debra Hale-Shelton, who joined the Democrat-Gazette in 2004, will receive AJHA’s 2017 Local Journalist Award at the organization’s annual convention, which will be held Oct. 12-14 in Little Rock.

“Every year AJHA honors a journalist in our convention city who has repeatedly ensured that the public interest is served by governmental, societal and corporate institutions,” Dave Vergobbi, AJHA President and a University of Utah professor. “We are indeed pleased to so honor Debra Hale-Shelton this year in Little Rock, because her career exemplifies the vital role of journalism in a democracy.”

Hale-Shelton has reported stories that led to the resignations of two University of Central Arkansas presidents, and she reported extensively on a judicial corruption probe. Hale-Shelton previously worked more than 20 years for The Associated Press. She has interviewed former Presidents Carter and Clinton, the late advice columnist Ann Landers, a young Donald Trump, death-row inmates and the suspected Tylenol killer. 

"Debra Hale-Shelton is, perhaps, the best reporter in Arkansas,” said Donna Lampkin Stephens, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Central Arkansas. “The epitome of journalism's watchdog role, she is a dogged, determined journalist who has uncovered a number of cases of wrongdoing and been the catalyst for correcting them. I hope my students grow up to be just like her."

Editor’s Note: University of Bamberg doctoral candidate Hendrik Michael presented his paper, “The World’s ‘True Stories of the News’ and the Commodification of Literary Journalism Before 1900,” at the recent International Association of Literary Journalism Studies conference held in Canada. The Intelligencer asked Mr. Michael to tell us more about how and why he started researching this topic, and why this research is important and interesting for himself and our field.

By Hendrik Michael

University of Bamberg

The mission statement of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies broadly defines literary journalism to be “journalism as literature.” It is a genre of nonfiction writing that combines discursive strategies and research practices of traditional journalism with storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction. 

Interrelations of literature and journalism are historically varied and complex. The historical roots of literary journalism have been traced back to the advent of mass media in the 16^th century. Since then the genre has been adopted in different journalism cultures across the globe and has gone by various names. Its best known practitioners arguably are the so-called New Journalists of the 1960s and 1970s. But this period, which many regard as the genres most prominent phase, marks just one heyday in the genre’s checkered history. Thomas Connery, among others, argued that Pulitzer’s New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s marked the first most prominent phase of the genre in mainstream journalism. Only recently, Robert Alexander called literary journalism “a genre whose time, once again, has come.”

The continuous re-emergence of literary journalism makes the genre an interesting subject to study changes of media, journalism and culture. My field of research focuses on the formation phase of modern journalism in the late 19^th century and explores the role of literary journalism within this process. 

One of the most active fields of research in the genre has been author studies. By pointing out commendable examples of literary journalism, researchers attempt to build a canon. However, with respect to the 19^th century, this canon aims mainly at the upper echelons of journalism. It includes better-known journalistic and literary writers. Notably, Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, to name a few, are all male. Only recently research on women journalists attracted wider interest. 

Through Karen Roggenkamp’s research on women journalists of the period I came across Elizabeth Jordan’s journalistic work for Pulitzer’s The World: “The True Stories of the News,” a popular reportage series that was a stepping stone for Jordan’s later career in journalism and as a novelist.

Although less recognized as part of the canon, I realized that the “True Stories of the News” could reveal important aspects of journalistic story-telling in urban mass periodicals and the significance of literary journalism in this context. Roggenkamp kindly sent me a handful of facsimiles and during a research trip to Minneapolis, I was able to get hold of the full series through the University of Minnesota Library in 2015. 

Here, I want to briefly outline why I believe that The World’s “True Stories of the News” is an example for the initial commodification of literary journalism in mass periodicals. By the term commodification I mean the implementation of literary journalism as a marketable good in mass journalism. My analysis followed a heuristic approach that differentiates three dimensions: media messages, media agents and media organizations. 

As regards media organizations, I considered the newspaper’s hierarchies, its resources such as money, staff, information technology, and informal competencies, and furthermore its production routines of news-gathering and processing. With respect to media agents it proved helpful to look at journalists’ working methods and job conditions, as well as personal experience and biographies. I believe these intervening factors shaped the message level, meaning the narrative form and content of a journalistic genre. With respect to narrative form I differentiated between the components voice, character, time and space.

Let me start on the message level by outlining the form and content of the series. The “True Stories of the News” appeared regularly in The World for about half a year between November 1890 and May 1891. More than 90 articles were published in this period of time. Often the series was printed in the section “Metropolis Day by Day” on page 9. The articles ran over about a third of a newspaper page. Their layout was characteristic for the New Journalism of Pulitzer’ World with screaming headlines, bold leads and sub-headings. 

Stories dealt with curious events like a freak-show, intrigues in upper-class circles, or curious events from other parts of the country. But by and large the topics focused on the life of the lower classes and immigrants. None of the articles had a byline. Only through autobiographical claims do we know that Elizabeth Jordan authored all of the articles.

Recurring topics from the lower strata of New York social life were court cases, tragic events in the life of immigrants and workers, visits to the city’s institutions, and accounts of the day-to-day chasm between cultures. Thereby “True Stories of the News” fit into the routine local reporting of the New York press. Evident is a tendency for personalization and tapping into social issues as regards housing, health-care and immigration in a rapidly changing urban environment. Interesting is the fact that the series selected events and situations that had been previously reported as small news items. The marginal thereby became relevant and received public attention.

With regard to narrative form an analysis of journalistic voice yield interesting results. My findings show that voice is quite ambiguous in the series. Less than a fifth of sampled articles feature a homodiegetic narrator (someone who is part of the story). Most articles feature a heterodiegetic narrator (someone who is not directly linked to the story). Events are often told from a limited epistemic and emotional perspective. This figural perspective is sometimes identified as a “World reporter” or a “World man,” only in three instances “a female reporter.” Another dominant feature of voice is the presence of an omniscient narrator, someone who seems to tell and comment the story from an elevated position.

In contrast, only 15 or so stories feature a homodiegetic narrator. Direct evidence for a homodiegetic narrator appears in the reportage, “Only a Case of Mumps” and “The Happiest Woman in New York.” In both texts, personal and spatial deixis can be detected, which establishes a direct reference between narrator and story. In “Only a Case of Mumps,” the narrator, although covert in most of the story, speaks up to demand better health-care: “[This] hospital is a necessity. I have advocated it for years. So has Dr. Jacobi.“ 

Overall, the analysis of narrative voice shows that even though most articles have a male figural focalizer or an omniscient narrator, the narratorial perspective, referring to attitudes and ideology, is still identical between a heterodiegetic and a homodiegetic narrator. 

This means, Jordan, then unknown to be the author of all texts, deliberately manipulated the narrative situation. Obviously this created variation from story to story and possibly contributed to their relative longevity. On the other hand, Jordan indirectly manipulated her readers, too. By creating a narrative ambivalence she strengthened the collective public voice of The World, while also creating an overlap between this collective voice and the individual voice of the seldom present women reporter.

Overall, results of my textual analysis suggest that characteristics of literary journalism were successfully adapted to a feature series in the context of New York’s mass print market. To understand how a Elizabeth Jordan was able to establish the genre in form and practice, I want to point out some aspects about the media organization and its journalistic agents.

It must be acknowledged that publishing became less profitable at the end of the 1880s. Market competition forced papers to invest more in new technologies and expand their correspondent networks while advertising revenues stalled. This resulted in soaring news-gathering costs while the market grew more and more saturated.

To balance spending, labor costs for the city staff was cut drastically. Even the biggest papers like The World, while still expanding their staff, cut employment costs. Their local reporting still kept up in quality because editorial resources and news-gathering routines were bound to relatively flat hierarchies. The moderating influence of managing editor John A. Cockerill in the newsroom was already recognized by contemporaries. His regime still allowed for innovative practices to be realized. The innovation of stunt reporting can be considered an example of this. 

While providing chances for women to make a career in journalism that wasn’t confined to the “Women’s Pages,” editors certainly exploited new women reporters, sending them on sometimes dangerous assignments to get a “fresh” reaction about deplorable conditions in the big city. 

Informal feedback was established to keep staff motivated and channel the production process towards editorial goals. Such feedback consisted of an internal credit system, displaying specific journalists’ ‘model stories’ for a week in the newsroom. 

On the agent level this fired up job competition. Bear in mind that, around 1890, about 100,000 people wanted to make a career in journalism, meaning if you underperformed you were given the boot pretty quickly. In addition the role of women journalists was constantly under attack by male colleagues. In her autobiography, Elizabeth Banks pointed out the growing competition among newspaper women as well.

To establish her position in the journalistic field, Jordan had to take a risk and escape the woman’s page duties, quitting her job at Peck’s Sun in Milwaukee and moving to New York.

She benefited from The World’s internal credit system. Her reportage “The Death of Number 9,” left a footprint and became The World’s “model story.” This emboldened Jordan to solidify her role by asking the managing editor to give her an extensive assignment just as Bly had three years earlier with her undercover reporting from Bellevue Asylum. Therefore Jordan’s “True Stories of the News” was surely a “task with entrepreneurial nature” as Alice Fahs pointed out. It competed with stunt-reporting and investigative reporting done by other women reporters.

Jordan’s job writing the series was most challenging. In order to crank out two to three pieces a week, researching, meeting sources and writing meant working up to 18 hours a day. Her task was slavishly “done on time and space specifications” as Jordan recalled in her autobiography. In addition to gathering information and writing up stories, Jordan also was responsible for editing and laying out the Sunday edition of the paper. But this meant Jordan had achieved a solid standing within the newspaper’s institutional hierarchy.

Therefore, the presence of the male reporter in many stories may indicate that she also had the authority to coordinate research. Jordan may have made use of her better editorial position and relied on organizational routines of information gathering to delegate rookie reporters to visit a scene and provide their impressions in short-hand. For Jordan, this meant filtering the information and channeling it into stories, based on the facts gathered on the scene by somebody else.

On the other hand, this freed Jordan to investigate other cases in depth and write stories about the fate of individuals such as Annie Meyer, who had been secluded to her bedroom for 18 years due to illness. Karen Roggenkamp referred to this case in particular to illustrate how Jordan later on transformed these factual stories into very popular fictional stories about the world of journalism.

In this respect, one can definitely conclude that Jordan differed from other newspaper women with her work on “True Stories of the News.” Her status was indicated by earning higher wages than some male colleagues − $30 per week. Lincoln Steffens, in contrast, paid his reporters a meager $15 a week at the Commercial Advertiser. Most female journalists earned only a “delightfully erratic income,” as a contemporary essay about women journalists made clear.

Thus Jordan also helped to create what Alice Fahs called “an important new social space within the pages of the newspaper.” On the one hand, this was meant to be an interactive, participatory space: in “True Stories of the News” readers were invited to interact with the newspaper by tipping stories, seeking advice, and using the paper as their public forum. On the other hand, the series also created a new representational space that included women as emancipated subjects of the social world, not only as women reporters but also as heroines of news stories. 

Working with the resources provided by The World Jordan achieved to make “True Stories of the News” highly compatible with the general wave of human-interest that swept urban mass periodicals in reviews, urban sketches, advice columns, interviews, profiles and other features − a phenomenon that Thomas Connery coined as a “paradigm of actuality.” The “True Stories of the News” became a successful product because it complied with a double-principle of journalistic production. The stories helped reduce complexity of the urban life world and engage readers, but also save resources and make profit in a time of increased market competition and saturation. 

Thereby the feature series is an interesting case for historical genre studies:

First, it shows that while media systems and societies change overtime, the content and form of literary journalism has remained relatively stable. A research focus on the first prominent phase of literary journalism in American journalism, the triumph of the popular press in the 1880s and 1890s, reveals how the genre offered journalists very effective strategies to process information efficiently. 

Second, the “True Stories of the News” prove that literary journalism cannot be merely evaluated from an aesthetic perspective but research should take into account the institutional conditions that allowed fostering a “humanistic approach” to news-writing, as Norman Sims has called it repeatedly. 

Third, with respect to contemporary developments and challenges in journalism, an in-depth look at the commodification of literary journalism during the 1880s and 1890s may help us understand how specific genres offer the necessary stability to information processing in a time of New Obscurity, to borrow a phrase by Jürgen Habermas. Rudolf Stöber explains this necessity through biological analogy. He wrote just as “without stability in the reproduction process of genetics, the genes would go astray, without stability in communication, the same will happen to societies.”

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Hendrik Michael is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Bamberg (Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg), Germany.

Call for Conference Papers

"Media Representations of Race and Sex in the Long Civil Rights Movement"

Southern Historical Association 84^th Annual Meeting

Birmingham AL; November 8-11, 2018

This panel is seeking to bring together scholars who are working on topics that explore media representations of race and sex in the Long Civil Rights Movement using social, cultural, and legal history perspectives. My paper for the panel examines newspaper coverage of a 1963 rape case involving a black teenager, a white woman, and a Japanese woman in Lynchburg, Virginia. The case garnered local and regional attention from Movement supporters who understood Lynchburg papers' coverage of the case as the reworking of the "black beast rapist" narrative, especially in the midst of local tensions between black and white city residents over civil rights campaigns.

This panel encourages paper proposals that consider how southerners – particularly black southerners – conceived of and contested raced and sexualized images, rhetoric, and ideas of difference in the Jim Crow South through the lens of media coverage. New work on cases such as the Scottsboro Nine, Martinsville Seven, and Emmett Till cases are also welcome as well as scholarship that uncovers new histories and voices relating to the panel theme.

Interested individuals should submit a brief paper description (up to 150 words) and a brief author biography to Samantha Bryant at sbryant21@huskers.unl.edu by September 1, 2017.

Contact Info: Samantha Bryant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Contact Email: sbryant21@huskers.unl.edu

The American Journalism Historians Association’s Education Committee has named Dr. Amber Roessner of the University of Tennessee as the winner of its 2017 National Award for Excellence in Teaching.

"I am truly humbled and honored to receive the American Journalism Historians Association's National Award for Excellence in Teaching," Roessner said. "To be mentioned in the same breath as Betty Winfield, David Sloan, Leonard Teel, Janice Hume, Earnest Perry and the other past recipients, whom I hold in high esteem and count as my pedagogical mentors, is a great privilege and a mark of distinction that I will always treasure. In many respects, I have developed my teaching style based upon the models of these wise pedagogues, who seek to passionately impart to every student that they encounter the influence of the histories of media, journalism, and mass communication on our ways of life." 

Roessner, who joined the University of Tennessee School of Journalism & Electronic Media faculty in 2010, teaches a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate classes in the areas of mass communication history, writing and journalism. She’s even taught a seminar on hiking and the history of the Great Smoky Mountains.

"We received excellent nominations for this award, so the selection was not easy," Dr. Kaylene Armstrong, chair of the education committee, said. "However, we were pleased to select Amber Roessner for this honor. The judges noted the solid support in the letters of recommendation written on her behalf, her integration of experiential learning and her commitment to interdisciplinary work as just a few of the strengths she has as an educator that make her so deserving of this award."

Digital Journalism

Special Issue Call for Papers: Journalism History through Digital Archives

Deadline: 15 September 2017

http://explore.tandfonline.com/pages/cfp/rdij-special-issue-journalism-history

While analytical methods have been steadily developing in relation to research on journalism in its various live digital forms (e.g. news websites, twitter, and Facebook) there has been less focus on developing research on and related methodologies for journalistic productions accumulating in digital archives. While such inventories hold great potential for researchers of journalism history they also pose a set of challenges.

The amount of material raises questions of selection, data clean-up, meta-data availability and the ensuing possibilities of search and analysis. Linked to this, the possible malleability of access, retrieval and analytical procedures is challenging, as this requires new digital skills, products and collaborations. Yet, the amount of material and avenues of access and analysis simultaneously open a range of possibilities for investigating vast amounts of data across former barriers (e.g. media platforms or archives) and this allows for re-visiting of old questions as well as developing new ones.

Against the background of such wider issues this special issue elicits papers that do journalism history through digital archives in various geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. While such ventures necessarily raise theoretical and methodological questions the call is for contextual reflections rather than generic discussions of the potential and problems of digital archives. Following this, submissions can — but do not have to — engage with journalism history projects

• across media platforms and/or (former) technologies
• across long time periods, geographies, cultures and/or archives
• that draw on layout and textual forms (in a wide sense of that term)
• that correlates with other types of (public) digital data (e.g. migration, BNP etc.)

In relation to the journalism history projects papers may in various degrees reflect on

• methodological and theoretical issues
• the politics of archiving
• computational analysis in relation to contextual and qualitative studies.
• issues arising from collaborative research across disciplinary and institutional boundaries
• research infrastructures for the utilization of digital archives
• the constitution of archived digital objects and its relations to the historical artifacts and what this means for the writing of journalism history

Submissions

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to guest editor Henrik Bødker (hb@cc.au.dk) no later than September 15, 2017. Selected authors will be invited to contribute by January 15 (2018). A maximum 8,000-word paper (including references, tables, etc.) will be considered for publication, subject to double blind peer-review.

Timeline:

Abstracts to guest editor: September 15, 2017

Authors notified: October 1, 2017

Full papers for peer review: January 15, 2018

Reviews to authors: March 15, 2018

Revised full papers: April 15, 2018

Editorial information

Guest Editor: Henrik Bødker, Aarhus University (hb@cc.au.dk)

http://explore.tandfonline.com/pages/cfp/rdij-special-issue-journalism-history

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society and the American Printing History Association are hosting a joint conference on October 6-7, 2017 at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Registration is now open for "Good, Fast, Cheap: Printed Words & Images in America Before 1900."

This conference will explore the production, distribution, reception, and survival of printed words and images in America to 1900. In an era in which the process of design had not been separated from production, the purpose of the conference is to explore the inter-relation between composition, design, and printing processes. In the face of the familiar constraints of deadline and budget, early American printers used the materials and equipment at their disposal to design and produce necessary items in the service of democracy, education, science, commerce, entertainment, and the arts.

Their inventiveness and problem solving often resulted in work ranging from the pedestrian to the sublime, and that might, when considered carefully, offer lessons for today's communications environment. How can the past inform the present and the future? How can the study of continuity and change through printing history inform contemporary design?

Contact Info: 

Laura Wasowicz

Curator of Children's Literature

American Antiquarian Society

185 Salisbury St.

Worcester, MA  01609

Contact Email: 

lwasowicz@mwa.org

URL: 

http://www.americanantiquarian.org/apha-and-chavic-conference

The American Journalism Historians Association is seeking nominations for three board positions and the office of second vice president. 

Board members serve for three years and are expected to attend board meetings at the annual convention.

The 2nd VP, under normal circumstances, rises to the presidency in two years, then serves on the board for an additional two years. A nominee to the Board of Directors or to any of the other Officer positions must have been a member of the AJHA for at least one calendar year immediately preceding the date of the election. No more than one person from an institution can serve on the board at one time. 

To make nominations and to vote in an election, an individual must be a member of AJHA. Those who wish to nominate candidates may do so by sending an email with the nominee's name, contact information and affiliation to election and nominations committee chair Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee, ataroessne@utk.edu. 

Please confirm the candidate's willingness to serve before sending the nomination to Amber, and if possible, you should send a brief bio of the candidate.

Deadline for nominations is 5 p.m. Sept. 1. Nominations may also be made from the floor during the 2017 conference in Little Rock, Ark.

The American Journalism Historians Association has selected Thomas J. Hrach as the winner of its 2017 Book of the Year Award for his 2016 work, “The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America.”

Hrach will receive his award and discuss his research during a special session at the 36th annual AJHA Convention, to be held Oct. 12-14 in Little Rock, Ark.

“I am honored and grateful that my colleagues who study journalism history have chosen to recognize my work,” Hrach said. “I have enjoyed being a member of the AJHA and the support I have received from the members is appreciated.” Hrach is associate professor and graduate coordinator in the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis.

In researching this book, Hrach relied upon original documents from the 1968 Kerner Commission at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, documents about Otto Kerner from the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill., and interviews with people willing to share their memories of the commission’s work. Citing his concerns about “the future of journalism as a profession in our current economic and political climate,” Hrach said he hoped his book will show the importance of professional journalism.

 “Journalism is as important as ever,” Hrach said, adding he hoped his book would show “the power of good, quality journalism to improve the lives of people in a democratic nation.”