Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

In fact, concerns about the maladaptions of media ownership have long been clear to U.S. newsrooms. The Quill noted in 1939 that most publishers used their newspapers’ business offices to exert too much influence on news content. Editors were too weak about asserting control over their news space; it said, “and it would take a man deaf, dumb and blind to deny the fact!”¹⁰ In a nationally broadcast radio debate among journalists about the press, Louisville Courier-Journal editor Herbert Agar maintained that newspapers were becoming dull and unimaginative. The problem was mostly attributable to the publishers, he said,

Obviously, since Agar’s comments, tomes have been written about the imperatives of the news marketplace on the newsroom. Although that is an important line of analysis, this book moves beyond that well-worn path. And, as for digital media pressures on newsrooms, such stressors, as of this writing, are so new that they are too fluid and ill-defined. We have yet to see the arrival of a clearly established and pervasive digital vehicle for credible news. Online news sites mostly mimic (or even carry) what is on traditional news media. Emerging forms, like blogs, have not yet achieved a credible format for both news gathering and dissemination. Instead, news through digital media platforms is mostly about potential. From a news-making perspective, one promise of these new digital technologies is that they can eventually help traditional journalism reinvent its professional imperatives. That is, with the new conversational paradigm that increasingly pervades news renditions on