Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, The

The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, by W. Joseph Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2006) 344 pages, $27.95 (paperback).

Reviewed by Ronald R. Rodgers

"To give the study breadth, it should cover a sufficient span of years to disclose trends, to allow for the lag between events and the comments which would follow...." So goes a work of history's typical rationalization for why a study looks at a particular chunk of time.

However, the other-and much rarer-approach is the "year study," a method that W. Joseph Campbell both successfully realizes and defends as a productive approach to revealing what he calls the "pivotal moments" in the history of journalism.

The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms is about a year the author describes as "exceptional." In that year, a "clash of paradigms" in the midst of a perfect storm of "experiment and transition" wrought changes and created journalistic traditions we still live and struggle with today-even as we must deal with new modes of communication that are driving another transition to new paradigms. The most exciting or worrisomedepending upon your point of view-of these experiments is blogging, which is challenging the notion of objective journalism even as bloggers gain more legitimacy.

That said, Campbell has written a history that is relevant to our own times. And, while it is about just one year, it is a multi-faceted study about many things.

For one, it is a deep look at both well-known and little-known events and debates of journalism that in their totality reveal the "clash of paradigms" at the center of Campbell's argument. A quite useful timeline-de rigueur for such a concentrated history-at the front of the book outlines many of the media events of 1897. These include The New York Tribune's publication of a halftone photo that showed the process was possible with a high-speed web; Richard Harding Davis' now classic tale of the execution of a Cuban rebel that is still taught today as an exemplar of the power of literary journalism; the rise of and battles about yellow journalism; such things as major sporting events, the Alaskan gold rush, infamous crimes and violent labor strife-all of which became fodder for a new kind of journalism that helped redefine news; some of the much-publicized examples of participatory-and often advocacy-journalism that drew readers to the papers of the day; and, contrarily, note of The New York Times' unheralded front-page slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print."

In addition, Campbell also surveys in detail several examples of "exceptional journalism" during the year 1897. These were The New York Sun's classic Christmas editorial, Richard Harding Davis' reporting from Cuba, and the works of the remarkable foreign correspondent Sylvester (Harry) Scovel.

Through exploring the media events and journalistic exemplars of 1897, Campbell reveals the different philosophies about news coverage to which newspapers adhered. And in it, he shows how each of these different paradigms were-in a sense-battling for the survival of their own journalistic models. It was a battle, Campbell tells us, that The New York Times' "detached, impartial, yet authoritative treatment of the news" would ultimately win and in the process set the course for journalism in America through the next century. The opposing paradigms were first, William Randolph Hearst's yellow "journalism of action," which was participatory in nature and acted as advocate and change agent, and second, Lincoln Steffens' literary approach, best represented by the writing that appeared in the New York Commercial Advertiser where he was city editor.

Campbell argues that Steffens' "eccentric model" was inspired by the growing commercialization of newspapers that had been going on for many years. At one point he briefly makes note of a particularly cogent and lengthy dissection by Steffens of the newspaper industry in Scribner's that gained much notice after it was published. The article, "The Business of Newspapers," showed how the transformation of the newspaper business into an enormous financial enterprise requiring large sums of capital to survive was "turning journalism upside down" and shifting the profession into "commercial hands," as Steffens put it. To answer the question, "What is the business man going to do with the newspaper?" he interviewed editors, proprietors and managers at nearly 100 newspapers in cities, towns and villages across the country.

As Campbell notes, Steffens described the growing sway of an impersonal "commercial journalism," and yet when be became city editor of the Commercial Advertiser he rejected that model for an "offbeat" kind of reporting that attempted to delve into the subjective aspects of its sources so the reader could see himself revealed. Ultimately, the Commercial Advertiser faded away as did its advocacy for a literary approach to journalism. But, as Campbell observes, while this model does not dominate mainstream journalism today, Steffens' dictum that stories be written "so humanly that the reader will see himself in the other fellow's place" remains a goal of many contemporary American journalists.