Cub Reporters

Investigates how depictions of young people in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America use artifice to destabilize pre-existing narratives of truth, news, and fact. Cub Reporters considers the intersections between children’s literature and journalism in the United States during the period between the Civil War and World War I. American children’s literature of this time, including works from such writers as L. Frank Baum, Horatio Alger Jr., and Richard Harding Davis, as well as unique journalistic examples including the children’s page of the Chicago Defender, subverts the idea of news. In these works, journalism is not a reporting of fact, but a reporting of artifice, or human-made apparatus—artistic, technological, psychological, cultural, or otherwise. Using a methodology that combines approaches from literary analysis, historicism, cultural studies, media studies, and childhood studies, Paige Gray shows how the cub reporters of children’s literature report the truth of artifice and relish it. They signal an embrace of artifice as a means to access individual agency, and in doing so, both child and adult readers are encouraged to deconstruct and create the world anew. “Cub Reporters adds an exciting new volume to the growing collection of scholarship about American periodical culture and children’s culture alike. Gray lays out her arguments neatly and convincingly, and supports them, throughout. The book is accessible, convincing, and engaging, and is poised to become a touchstone for future academic work.” — Karen Roggenkamp, author of Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth–Century American Newspapers and Fiction

Pippa and her friends Meg, Cici and Charlie are excited to join the school newspaper team – but will their friendship survive deciding what to write about when they have such different interests? A fashion photo shoot could be fun, if it weren’t for bad weather, a naughty puppy and other disasters! Just when things couldn’t get any worse, the four cub reporters get a news scoop that could bring the whole town together at Pepper’s mum’s beach shack café. Cupcakes for everyone!

Cub Reporters considers the intersections between children's literature and journalism in the United States during the period between the Civil War and World War I. American children's literature of this time, including works from such writers as L. Frank Baum, Horatio Alger Jr., and Richard Harding Davis, as well as unique journalistic examples including the children's page of the Chicago Defender, subverts the idea of news. In these works, journalism is not a reporting of fact, but a reporting of artifice, or human-made apparatus—artistic, technological, psychological, cultural, or otherwise. Using a methodology that combines approaches from literary analysis, historicism, cultural studies, media studies, and childhood studies, Paige Gray shows how the cub reporters of children's literature report the truth of artifice and relish it. They signal an embrace of artifice as a means to access individual agency, and in doing so, both child and adult readers are encouraged to deconstruct and create the world anew.

The story of the American newsroom is that of modern American journalism. In this holistic history, Will Mari tells that story from the 1920s through the 1960s, a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. During this time, the newsroom was more than a physical place—it symbolically represented all that was good and bad in journalism, from the shift from blue- to white-collar work to the flexing of journalism’s power as a watchdog on government and an advocate for social reform. Told from an empathetic, omnivorous, ground-up point of view, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920–1960 uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.

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Randall Sumpter questions the dominant notion that reporters entering the field in the late nineteenth century relied on an informal apprenticeship system to learn the rules of journalism. Drawing from the experiences of more than fifty reporters, he argues that cub reporters could and did access multiple sources of instruction, including autobiographies and memoirs of journalists, fiction, guidebooks, and trade magazines. Arguments for “professional journalism” did not resonate with the workaday journalists examined here. These news workers were more concerned with following a personal rather than a professional code of ethics, and implemented their own work rules. Some of those rules governed “delinquent” behavior. While scholars have traced some of the connections between beginning journalists and learning opportunities, Sumpter shows that much more can be discovered, with implications for understanding the development of journalistic professionalism and present-day instances of journalistic behavior.