journalism

At its most basic, journalism is the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and information to the public. Embedded in the idea of journalism is the notion that it exists to inform the public and hold the powerful to account—whether in print, videos, or on the Internet. The role of journalism in society was so profound that James Madison enshrined its protection in the U.S. Constitution, making journalism the only constitutionally protected profession.

Over time journalism’s track record of being worthy of that honor has been mixed. Consider these high and low points in journalism history:

• Era of Yellow Journalism: In the late 1800s competing publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer tried to outdo each other with sensational coverage, particularly around the Spanish-American War.
• The Muckrakers: U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt used the term muckrakers in a 1906 speech and intended it as an insult to some of the earliest American investigative journalists—including Lincoln Steffens, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Ida Tarbell—for exposing political and corporate corruption and its impact on the masses at the start of the 20th century.
• Watergate: The investigative work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led to the 1974 resignation of U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon.
• News of the World phone hacking: In 2011 Rupert Murdoch’s publication, with its reputation for reporting salacious scoops about celebrities and crimes, was shut down just days after it was revealed that its reporters had hacked phones, bribed police, and used their influence to coerce revelations about the famous, victims of terrorist attacks, and the British royals.

And yet Thomas Jefferson, aware of the limitations of a free press as well as the limitations of a government, wrote this in 1787:

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history of publishing: Newspaper publishing

…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

What is the state of press freedom in the 21st century?

Early history

The earliest known journalistic product was a news sheet circulated in ancient Rome: the Acta Diurna, said to date from before 59 bce. The Acta Diurna recorded important daily events such as public speeches. It was published daily and hung in prominent places. In China during the Tang dynasty, a court circular called a bao, or “report,” was issued to government officials. This gazette appeared in various forms and under various names more or less continually to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The first regularly published newspapers appeared in German cities and in Antwerp about 1609. The first English newspaper, the Weekly Newes, was published in 1622. One of the first daily newspapers, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1702.

At first hindered by government-imposed censorship, taxes, and other restrictions, newspapers in the 18th century ultimately came to possess the reportorial freedom and indispensable function that they retain. As the literacy of the public grew, so did the demand for newspapers. The introduction of steam- and then electric-driven presses allowed for the daily circulation of newspapers to rise from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands and eventually to the millions.

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Magazines, which had started in the 17th century as learned journals, began to feature opinion-forming articles on current affairs, such as those in the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12). Appearing in the 1830s were cheap mass-circulation magazines aimed at a wider and less well-educated public, as well as illustrated and women’s magazines. The Atlantic, first published in 1857, is one of the oldest, most successful, and most respected examples of magazine journalism.

The cost of large-scale news gathering led to the formation of news agencies, organizations that sold their international journalistic reporting to many different individual newspapers and magazines. The invention of the telegraph and then radio and television brought about a great increase in the speed and timeliness of journalistic activity and, at the same time, provided massive new outlets and audiences for their electronically distributed products. In the late 20th century, satellites and the Internet were used for the long-distance transmission of journalistic information. The 21st century saw the use of technologies including drones, open-source records, and sophisticated data analysis to aid in reporting.

The emergence of journalism

Some of the fundamentals of journalism that are still in place today came to be in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ranging from crusading investigative reporting to a focus on things like color images and softer feature articles.

Newspapering became an increasingly profitable business as publishers produced stories that readers would pay for. There was no better example of this than the intense rivalry between two New York City papers, Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal. The competition reached a fever pitch when each paper tried to outdo the other with sensational headlines about the mysterious 1898 explosion of the USS Maine in Cuba’s Havana Harbor. The coverage played at least some role in stoking public support for the Spanish-American War later that year. This era would come to be known as “yellow journalism.” (Read more about this colorful time, including the origin story for its colorful name.)

The yellow journalists were followed by the muckrakers, journalists who were largely progressive in their thinking and sought to tell stories about the impact of cozy relationships between business leaders and politicians, which often came at the expense of the people whom the politicians were supposed to protect and represent. Muckrakers often wrote long, deeply reported investigative pieces intended to open the eyes of the public to social injustice and move them to act. As Lincoln Steffens, one of the most prominent muckrakers of his day, put it: “The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.”

Some of the groundbreaking reporting done by the muckrakers included:

• Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company: First published as a series of articles in McClure’s Magazine starting in 1902, Tarbell exposed the rise of the monopoly in American business. Her reporting led to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, as she had demonstrated the ways in which it was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
• Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: A ferociously courageous journalist, Wells responded to the 1892 lynchings of her friends by reporting about rampant racism in pamphlets and at the New York Age. In 1892 she wrote: “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”
• Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities: Steffens’s series of investigations into political corruption in big American cities, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, started as a series of articles in McClure’s and was published as a book in 1904.

Before the latter part of the 19th century, most journalists learned their craft as apprentices, beginning as copyboys or cub reporters. The first university course in journalism was given at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1879–84. In 1912 Columbia University in New York City established the first graduate program in journalism, endowed by a grant from the New York City editor and publisher Joseph Pulitzer. In 1921 Northwestern University founded the Medill School of Journalism, named after Chicago Tribune publisher and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill.

It was during the early years of the 20th century that the growing complexity of news reporting and newspaper operation was recognized and, along with it, the need for specialized training. Editors also found that to cover complex topics including politics, economics, and the sciences, they needed reporters with expertise and education in those areas. While the word journalism has its origins in print news, the rise of radio and television provided reporting opportunities beyond newspapers. By the 1950s, courses in journalism or communications were commonly offered in colleges.

By the middle of the 20th century an expanded definition of what constituted “news” was entrenched, proving Pulitzer prescient in his investments in such revolutionary concepts as comics and coverage of sports and fashion. In part to compete with the now-established presence of radio and television news in people’s homes, newspapers expanded coverage to include news analysis, personality profiles, and commentary. The mission-driven role of a free press envisioned by the Founding Fathers still drove many journalists, however, and the late 1960s and early 1970s proved to be a heyday for journalism that helped shape history and change Americans’ perception of their government. This period saw the publication of stories including:

• Walter Cronkite in Vietnam: When CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite (known as “the most trusted man in America”) went to Vietnam to report in February 1968, he brought a chilling assessment into American living rooms, saying: “For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”
• The Pentagon Papers: First published by The New York Times and then The Washington Post in 1971, the stunning classified history of the U.S. government’s role in Vietnam and the surrounding region from World War II through 1968 was so damning that the Department of Justice sought to halt publication of the documents.
• Watergate: The relentless coverage over the course of more than two years of the “third-rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex and the Nixon administration’s attempts to cover up its involvement led to the resignation of a president, inspired an Academy Award-winning film, and motivated a generation to enter the field of journalism.

Watergate’s legacy: How the scandal changed politics and journalism.

While the U.S. government ultimately failed in its bid to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, other governments around the world saw success in clamping down on a free press. In countries with communist governments, the press was owned by the state, and journalists and editors were government employees. Under such a system, the prime function of the press to report the news was combined with the duty to uphold and support the national ideology and the declared goals of the state. This led to a situation in which the positive achievements of communist states were stressed by the media, while their failings were underreported or ignored.

In noncommunist developing countries, the press enjoyed varying degrees of freedom, ranging from the discreet and occasional use of self-censorship on matters embarrassing to the home government to a strict and omnipresent censorship akin to that of communist countries. The press enjoyed the maximum amount of freedom in most English-speaking countries and in the countries of western Europe.

21st century challenges

Starting in the 1990s, but coming to full, disruptive, and energizing fruition in the early years of the 21st century, the Internet transformed the sharing of information as nothing had since Gutenberg’s printing press. In doing so it changed just about every aspect of journalism, from how news is reported and verified to how journalism functions as a business.

The transformation was a double-edged sword and one that the industry continues to struggle with, adapt to, and take advantage of well into the 21st century. Consider these factors to understand the ways in which digital publishing expanded the power of journalism while presenting existential issues.

• Before the Internet, The Washington Post, despite its national reputation for its involvement in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate stories, was only sold in the Washington, D.C., area. If you wanted to read a Post story but didn’t live in the area, you were largely out of luck. Digital publishing allowed The Post (and other publications) to reach more people than at any time in history. For those who believed in the importance of getting news to the masses, it was game-changing.
• Digital publishing, however, quickly meant that people wanted and expected their news in real time. That meant that reporters weren’t working toward a deadline of the first edition of a newspaper or an evening news broadcast. They were expected to report almost instantaneously, which sometimes led to the publication of errors that could have been avoided with more fact-checking time.
• Readers who were getting their news from the Internet saw less need to buy newspapers, which relied on advertising and subscriptions to finance their journalism. Similarly, viewership of TV news programs declined, as people no longer needed to tune in at a set time to catch up on the day’s events.

The rise of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube provided a new way of reaching even larger audiences. Journalists found they could contact sources more quickly via social media, but also that public officials, who used to rely on reporters to get their message out, could go directly to social media and bypass a journalist and their (sometimes pesky) questions. People had access to unprecedented amounts of information; but without the gatekeeper role of fact-checking traditionally played by journalists, it became increasingly difficult to know what was actually true.

A new era of misinformation and disinformation rose as social media algorithms tended to amplify sensational or misleading content alongside verified journalism. Misinformation, incorrect information shared without intent to deceive, had always been an issue in journalism; sometimes wrong things unintentionally get published. But the digital publishing world also increased disinformation, which is incorrect information knowingly published to deceive for political, ideological, or financial purposes. Coordinated disinformation campaigns, manipulated images and videos, and, increasingly, synthetic media produced with artificial intelligence have complicated efforts to verify information during elections, armed conflicts, natural disasters, and other rapidly developing events. The rise of mis- and disinformation has also led to a decline in public trust in the media.

None of which is to say that journalism doesn’t continue to have a profound impact on society and that digital publishing hasn’t helped further its mission. Some of the most memorable journalism of the 21st century has taken advantage of technology—whether in the form of cell phones, drones, or the increasing collaboration of news organizations and the use of open-source records—even as traditional reporting methods continue to evolve.

Consider:

• Me Too reporting: The 2017 investigative work by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at The New York Times and Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker produced, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize Board, “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators.”
• Citizen journalism: On Memorial Day in 2020 Darnella Frazier was a high school junior running an errand in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when she saw police officers murdering George Floyd. She took out her phone and for more than 10 minutes recorded the assault that resulted in Floyd’s death. The proliferation of such recordings brought attention to the kind of brutality that Ida B. Wells had written about more than a century earlier.
• Jeffrey Epstein: Julie K. Brown’s work for the Miami Herald in 2018 exposed the extent of Epstein’s sexual predation for the first time and led to one of the most enduring and shocking scandals of the 2020s.
• Panama Papers: Published in 2016 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Panama Papers represented one of the largest troves of leaked documents in history. They showed how Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca had assisted companies and individuals from more than 200 countries in hiding billions of dollars in offshore accounts, as well as detailing how the world’s superrich conceal their wealth to avoid taxes.

The ways in which journalists can present their work has changed and expanded greatly in the digital age, with podcasts and newsletters being key innovations. Even amid exemplary work, the profitability of journalism has suffered in the digital age. As audiences increasingly consumed news online, many news organizations faced declining circulation, newsroom layoffs, consolidation under larger media companies, or closure. The effects have been especially pronounced in local journalism. Since 2005 the United States has lost almost 40 percent of its local newspapers, leaving many communities without a locally-based news organization or served only by outlets with limited reporting capacity. These have become known as “news deserts,” where residents have little or no access to independent local news covering municipal government, schools, courts, public health, and other civic institutions.

Many outlets that still exist have experimented with a variety of business models, ranging from digital subscriptions to nonprofit ownership. The continuing challenges of the long-term economic sustainability of public-interest journalism have rendered the choice Jefferson proposed far from hypothetical. And yet the continuing importance of accurate, fair, independent journalism is no less relevant today than at any time in history. Speaking almost 200 years after Jefferson, Pres. Ronald Reagan said:

 There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our ‘noble experiment’ in self-government.

Learn more

Why Media Literacy Matters

A Look at the History of Mass Media

How Did “Yellow Journalism” Get Its Name?

Inside 60 Minutes

“All The News That’s Fit to Print”

Julie K. Brown: The Reporter Who Gave Victims a Voice