1st Edition
Journalists and Knowledge Practices Histories of Observing the Everyday in the Newspaper Age
This multi-disciplinary anthology provides new perspectives on the journalist’s role in knowledge generation in the newspaper age—covering diverse topics from fake news to new technologies.
Fake news, journalistic authority, and the introduction of cutting-edge technologies are often viewed as new topics in journalism. However, these issues were prevalent long before the twenty-first century. Connecting for the first time two burgeoning strands of research—a newly perceived history of knowledge and the study of journalism—Journalists and Knowledge Practices provides insights into the journalist’s role in the world of knowledge in the newspaper age (ca. 1860s to 1970s). This multi-disciplinary anthology asks how journalists conducted their work and reconstructs histories of journalistic practices in specific regional constellations in Europe and North America. From fake news writing to inventing psychological concepts, integrating electric telegrams to fabricating photographs, explaining pandemics to creating communities, these case studies written by distinguished scholars from various disciplines in the humanities show how notions of fact and truth were shaped, new technologies integrated, and knowledge transfers arranged. This book is crucial reading for scholars and students interested in the historically changing relationships between journalistic practices and the generation and dissemination of knowledge.
This volume is crucial reading for scholars and students interested in the history of journalistic practice.
Part I
1. "I Was There Today": Fake Eyewitnessing and Journalistic Authority, from Fontane to Relotius
Petra McGillen
2. "Have We La Grippe?": A Washington Case Study of Reporting the "Russian Influenza" (1889–1890)
E. Thomas Ewing
3. Why Marmaduke Mizzle and the Good Ship Wabble Fooled No One: Fake News and Metajournalistic Discourse in the Era of Journalistic Professionalization
Andie Tucher
Part II
4. What it Means to Be a Journalist: Constructing the Journalistic Persona at the End of the Weimar Republic
Hansjakob Ziemer
5. Secret Press Agents: When Journalists, Propagandists, and Spies Seemed Indistinguishable
Heidi Tworek
Part III Technologies
6. Shortness and Speed in Journalism: The Electric Telegram and the Circulation of Knowledge in Germany and France in 1860
Lisa Bolz
7. Fabricating Authentic Pictures: Press Photography as a Transnational Mode of Observation at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Malte Zierenberg
8. Inattentive Subjects: The Emergence of a Photojournalistic Norm
Annie Rudd
Part IV Knowledge Transfers
9. "Like a Modern Harun al Raschid": Herman Heijermans’s 1910 Reports on the Herzberge Mental Asylum in Berlin
Eric J. Engstrom
10. A Peasant among Peasants: Maurice Hindus’s Transnational Revolutionary Journalism
Elena Matveeva
11. Pop or Popularization? The Boundaries between Social Science and Journalism
Susanne Schmidt
Biography
Hansjakob Ziemer received his PhD in Modern History from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2007, having also studied at Stanford and Oxford. He is senior research scholar and head of cooperation and communication at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
