Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review
When we teach classes that deal with the First Amendment—Perlmutter in political communication, Dowling in media history—we often ask our students: “When the founders guaranteed unique ‘freedom’ to the press, what did they mean by ‘press’?”
The point is to explain that the definitions of “journalism” and “press” have changed over time. They once meant purely partisan screeds closely tied to political parties, factions, or passionate individuals, supported by loyal audiences, not advertisers, and often small in scale, with only a few employees. Think Ben Franklin and his brother. Fairness; objectivity; mass, heterogeneous audiences; advertiser support and influence—those ideals and business models didn’t emerge until the following century. The “press” of 1776 looked more like the independent political blogs of today than like the media giants of the 20th century.
That perspective is important because the giants are bleeding. Industrial journalism has received many blows in the past decade, all largely self-inflicted: not adapting fast enough to changes in technology and interactive platforms of reading and viewing; not developing a pay model (like iTunes) early in the days of the Internet; and perhaps most of all, accumulating huge debt. Now the great search continues for revenue from the digital dimes, as industry analysts put it, that were once print dollars.
Some journalism venues still do well with audiences and advertisers. Small local papers and specialty publications, like hobby and professional trade magazines or business papers, offer the heralded premium content that some people want and are willing to purchase, and that advertisers favor because of the targeted audience. But ask a room full of journalism students—even those already working at a “paper"—and you will find almost no one paying for, or even conceptually willing to pay for, general content like breaking news. An iTunes download of the Lumineers’ debut album, an app for learning the Klingon language, or the latest version of Angry Birds, yes; likely as well The Wall Street Journal, the West Branch (Iowa) Times, or Guitar magazine. But general news is struggling to find a successful revenue model.
We think help may be around the paywall. As the Web site paidContent.org recently reported, “Many newspapers have tried e-books as a new revenue stream, but the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s In the Footsteps of Little Crow stands out. Curt Brown’s extensively researched narrative of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War is No. 13 on The New York Times e-book best-seller list this week.” The Minnesota history e-book—serialized in the paper and sold online—is a milestone, one that is worthy of attention not only among journalists, media owners, and journalism faculty but also among practitioners and scholars in the similarly beleaguered humanities and arts—which we will conjoin for ease hereafter as the humanities. In the Footsteps of Little Crow may suggest one of several models whereby journalism and the humanities can save each other, not just creatively but also in the service of enticing audiences and surviving with new sources of revenue.
Such a future can be inspired by the past. Once, the magisteria of journalism and the humanities overlapped, nourished, and financed each other. For much of America’s first century and beyond, the newspaper was a site for the multiflorous offering of ideas, observations, opinions, and, yes, reporting via many forms of expression, not just news stories or editorials. Newspapers and magazines regularly carried a cornucopia of items, including poetry, artwork, guest columns by statesmen, and serial fiction.
The demand for in-depth stories can promote a return to the humanitarian origins of journalism.
Some famous cases: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling novel of the 19th century, began as serial fiction published in the periodical press before it was bound into two volumes. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and many of the cultural and political essays in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book originally appeared in the newspapers of their day. Walt Whitman and Margaret Fuller nurtured their careers through journalism and in some cases, like Fuller’s, created their greatest works for the press.
Journalism of the 19th century was influential precisely because it provided a platform that openly embraced the humanities. Rebecca Harding Davis, among the first female journalists of the century (and mother of Richard Harding Davis, of Pulitzer and Hearst fame) combined the two in making the larger point: “Increase of population will compel more of my sex to earn their living, and literature (or journalism) will always be ... an easy, respectable way of doing it.”
Poets also thrived in the world of journalism. The Springfield (Mass.) Republican printed some of the handful of poems that Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime. Just as Dickinson herself courted the periodical press, so did William Cullen Bryant, who was steeped in the world of fine arts, particularly the revered Hudson River School of landscape painters. The most visually illustrative of the antebellum marriages between the press and the arts is the depiction of Bryant, who would dedicate a half-century to editing the New York Evening Post, next to the painter Thomas Cole amid the verdure of the Catskills in Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” perhaps the most recognizable of American paintings of the era.
The e-book In the Footsteps of Little Crow appears to have discovered a 21st-century variation of what Stowe pioneered. The periodical press lends itself well to influential and profitable literature. Stowe would become world-famous, and her serial story would rally other abolitionist papers of the North before the Civil War. Never before was a novel more relevant in our nation’s history, and journalism was the first to deliver it to readers. The social progress the work achieved was matched only by its unprecedented profits. Stowe earned $400 from the newspaper The National Era in 1851 for the serialized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By three months after its publication in book form, the novel had earned her $10,000. One reporter noted, “Such success was never known in the annals of Literature,” a point that underscores the viability of the partnership between journalism and long-form literary works, and points to the fluidity between journalism and Literature with an uppercase “L"—a whole new world of content.
Such a mutually beneficial relationship, at once intellectually edifying, politically challenging, and financially rewarding, is also possible in today’s digital world. New forms of expression flourish in the digital humanities. The force of an audience base demanding longer in-depth stories (as at longreads.com) can promote a change in the industry, a return to journalism’s distinctly humanitarian original principle that, in the words of This American Life’s Ira Glass: “Every story is an answer to the question of how should I lead my life.”
The time has never been better for the humanities and journalism to answer Malcolm Gladwell’s sentiment that “we live in a suddenly serious time where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics.” Quite a few antebellum newspaper readers shared that seriousness and thus demanded that journalists function like authors—a concept worthy of resurrecting for a hyperpersonal media age. Journalism programs such as ours take pride in preparing students to be high-end visual, textual, and oral storytellers across all media and for any venue. As one of us (Perlmutter) tells prospective majors, “There are a billion people on Facebook giving content away for free; if you want to make a living from your content, it has to be much, much better than most of the rest.”
At the same time, the disaffection with hyperlinked short articles and blaring headlines characterizing the majority of free (or rather freely passed on without recompense) news on the Web is countered by a trend that is as heartening as it is delightfully anachronistic. Distracted reading characterized by scanning and skimming has not erased the desire for immersion in richer, deeper works of words and images.
There are no easy answers or game plans for what a remarriage of the humanities and journalism would look like. We are not asking the Gray Lady of New York to serialize Fifty Shades of Grey as a means to pay for its Iraq desk. Rather, in a time of flux and uncertainty, bold experimentation is welcome and necessary. Unleash the reporters to serialize that novel they always wanted to write about a local unsolved murder. Train high schoolers to make a documentary about how the steep costs of college are affecting their plans for the future. Create a poetry contest on the topic of a regional drought. Invite a historian from the local college to excerpt her biography of a civil-rights leader. Recruit a graphic artist to explain a complex corruption scandal at city hall.
The possibilities are endless, and audiences are yearning for the best of them. We believe that anyone interested in a brighter creative and more secure financial future for the humanities and journalism should look to past examples of their successful interweaving.
