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1970s newspaper wisdom
In 1971 Harvard Business School grad, Robert G. Marbut, approached the Harte family who owned a Texas newspaper group, to ask if they’d back his publishing venture. They turned him down. Instead, they asked him to run the family business, Harte-Hanks. Marbut took the company public and in a year had taken it out of…
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The first use of the word ‘Journalism’
The first use of the word journalism is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary like this: 1833 Westm. Rev. Jan. 195 (Reviewing a French work ‘Du Journalisme’) ‘Journalism’ is a good name for the thing meant..A word was sadly wanted. Ibid. 196 The power of journalism is acknowledged..to be enormous in France. But the OED…
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Journalism – serving your community
Having been raised in what journalistic cliche calls a “close knit community,” I’m deeply suspicious of the glorification of communities in the media. Some of the closest are also some of the nastiest. I take as my text an essay by the great Jessie Daniel Ames, called Editorial Treatment of Lynchings (1938).In a section The…
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Facts and opinion
The famous line of C.P.Scott, editor and the proprietor of the Guardian – “comment is free, but facts are sacred” – is immortalised not just in the Guardian‘s op-ed, but also in SacredFacts, Richard Sambrook‘s blog. Scott was in his seventies when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921.…