This dissertation examines the development of journalism as a writing profession in late nineteenth-century America, paying particular attention to the reporters and correspondents who composed the bulk of the newspaper's news content. Journalism was becoming a viable profession in this period and writing, the journalist’s primary occupational duty, became an important and contested component in articulations of journalists’ professional identities. Such articulations form a discourse of professionalism that shaped both the identity of the journalist as well as the value of his writing. I examine this discourse through nonfiction and literary texts including journalism textbooks, speeches by prominent editors and publishers, trade journals published by and for journalists, and fiction by former journalists.
In this corpus, I identify three representations of journalistic professionalism circulating in this period: representations of the journalist as a literary apprentice, as an entrepreneur, and as a knowledge worker. Each manifests a different way of conceptualizing authorship, the nature of writing, and the writer’s relation to the text. For example, dual conceptions of writing as both a learnable craft and an expressive art shape the representation of journalism as a form of literary apprenticeship. Aspiring literary writers were encouraged to apprentice in journalism in order to develop their technical skills, yet cautioned against staying too long lest their expressive faculties become too blunted to create art. The entrepreneurial model conceptualized the journalist as a businessperson profiting from his highly marketable writing skills. While the representation of journalism as a form of knowledge work also positioned journalists as purveyors of a valuable commodity, writing in this model was viewed as a transparent vehicle for the transmission of information, separating form and content and subordinating writing skill to information gathering ability.
Representations of journalistic professionalism are shaped by multiple, sometimes competing, conceptions of writing, which, in turn, are subject to the shaping influence of social and cultural forces like emerging technologies and educational regimes. All of the representations I identify existed simultaneously; collectively, they represent the raw materials from which journalists forged their professional identities in this period and which continue to influence conceptions of journalistic professionalism today.