The Revolution in News That Nobody Named

Abstract

In 2020, both popular and academic discussions of journalism in the United States - and elsewhere in the world where journalism has been significantly influenced by the US model - have assumed that “objectivity” is the journalist’s guiding ideal. That assumption is not well founded. Along with Katherine Fink (2014) I have argued that in the US there was a dramatic transformation in news practice and news ideals beginning in the late 1960s and taking on an enduring place in journalism in the 1970s. Where in the 1950s and 1960s the “objectivity” model describes some 90% of front-page news stories in leading US newspapers, by the late 1970s it described only 40-50% of stories, the others better labeled “contextual” or “analytical” journalism. Others have made similar points about US journalism and still others have found comparable changes in various European journalisms.
Why have journalists and historians of journalism not understood this? How can we better grasp this transformation of modern professionalism from Professionalism 1.0 to Professionalism 2.0 - a powerful revolution that preceded the digital revolution? This essay seeks to explore these questions.