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Show CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In Discovering the News, Michael Schudson charted the "two journalisms" that emerged in the 1890s and persisted into the twentieth ccntury. 1 One was "journalism as entertainment," illustrated by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and the sensational "yellow" journals of the time. The second was "journalism as information," modeled by The New York Times' owner Adolph Ochs, who promised a nonpartisan, tasteful paper. llowevcr, Schudson's New York-centric look at American newspapers failed to account for journalism in the rest of the country. In the West, the frontier press - an individualistic, booster, partisan press - was giving way "to a more restrained, audience aware, commercial-based style of journalism's modem era."2 Boosterism is most often associated with the nineteenth-century frontier and efforts of struggling newspapers to attract settlers to settlements in the West. However, devoted editors carried boosterism into the twentieth century, extolling, and exaggerating, the virtues of their towns. The "pioneer newspaper of the upstart city ... had to call into 1 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social llistory ofAmeric:un Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978),88-120. David J. Vcrgobbi and Glen Fcighcry, "The Pioneer Press: 1800-1900," in Wm. David Sloan, ed., The Age of Mass Communication (Northport, AL : Vision Press, 2008), 194. 2 |
