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After Reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South that lasted for generations. Black journalists fought these regimes as they were being built. The stakes could not have been higher: The future of liberal democracy in the newly restored United States was on the line. Journalism & Jim Crow is the first extended work to examine the foundational role of the press at this critical turning point in U.S. history. It documents the struggle between two different journalisms—a white journalism dedicated to building an anti-Black, anti-democratic America and a Black journalism dedicated to building a multiracial, fully democratic America. The southern white press and its political and business allies carried the day, effectively killing democracy in the South for nearly a century and crafting a racial hierarchy that inflected modern America and endures today. This study of journalism, democracy, and race during a tragic, consequential moment in our nation’s past, as the ideology of the New South spread throughout the country, will help readers think in new ways about two important concerns: the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy and the systems and structures of white supremacy in American life. The unpleasant truth is that journalism in America has often not been devoted to democratic values.

In A Case for Community-Centered Journalism: Solutions, Engagement, Trust, Andrea Wenzel maps out a process model for building trust—not just in journalism, but between different sectors of communities. She details how, in many communities, residents gauge trust in news not only based on factors like accuracy and credibility, but also based on how these are intertwined with the perceived motives of news media, and whether outlets are seen to represent communities respectfully. For this reason, Wenzel contends that more local journalism alone is not enough. Rather, she argues that a different kind of local journalism is needed—a community-centered journalism that is solutions-oriented and that engages and shares power with community stakeholders. Through a series of case studies across the U.S., in urban, suburban, and rural communities, Wenzel uses a communication infrastructure theory framework to explore how local journalism interventions attempt to strengthen relationships between residents, community organizations, and local media. She examines the boundary challenges to dominant journalistic practices and norms that arise from place-based interventions to build relationships of trust. Mindful of dynamics of race, class, place, and power, Wenzel recommends a process that is portable – rather than scalable -- that centers on community stakeholders, and is shaped as much by local assets as by needs. She argues that if they shift away from a model that puts journalists at the center and marginalized communities on the periphery, engaged journalism and solutions journalism have the potential to strengthen not just journalism, but the communication health of communities.

This book explores sensationalism as it took hold of U.S. media between 1870 and 1900. During this period, print news publishers became adept at translating stories about sex, crime, and violence into emotion-based pictures. Analysis of significant episodes in media history shows how a range of news media producers engaged with the sensational style. As they pioneered the art of visual journalism, news publishers conveyed racial, class, and gender anxieties in a complex dialogue with audiences that established precedents for modern media. Prominent cases – obscenity litigation, anti-Chinese violence, the Ghost Dance, Jim Crow-era lynching, and domestic violence – demonstrate how efforts to maximize the dramatic power of the news transformed everyday reporting and established standards for visual journalism. Commercial newspaper editors exploited sensationalism’ economic benefits, while marginalized groups and social activists experimented with its power to challenge negative stereotyping and mobilize their own constituencies. By the 1890s, a wide range of publications had come to embrace, adapt, and expand the sensational style through news illustration – albeit in different ways for different audiences. The patterns prevalent in entertainment publications infiltrated the commercial dailies, and even low-budget political news sheets: few publications could afford to resist borrowing from the sensational toolkit. As sensationalism increasingly pervaded visual journalism, the very nature of the news changed.

This book addresses the role of media, particularly periodicals, in the American women’s suffrage movement, and in public understandings of the campaign for a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Chapters deal with the rhetoric of pro- and antisuffrage activists as covered in the mainstream regional and national press; several chapters deal with suffragists’ own periodicals, as well as with other non-mainstream periodicals, including the black press and socialist and radical periodicals. These new studies offer fresh perspectives on relatively familiar suffrage narratives while exploring lesser-known aspects of the roles of journalism, publicity, visual communication, and external alliances with organizations and individuals. Taken collectively, the chapters clarify intersections of suffrage ideas with other social and political movements as well as differences by geography and culture. The essays are marked by attention to the movement’s long-term implications; to contemporary concepts such as social movement and countermovement strategies, status conflict, and the public sphere; and by sensitivity to race, class, and regional politics. As the historiography offered here makes clear, these issues were largely ignored in the first wave of suffrage research.

The Enforcers describes the problems with business journalism and its possible future by focusing on the little-studied genre of the trade press. A historical and normative analysis of business journalism frames a case study about a small but extraordinary trade newspaper, the National Thrift News, whose aggressive reporting on the savings-and-loan crisis contributed to the downfall of a corrupt banker, Charles Keating Jr., chairman of American Continental Corporation and owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan. The National Thrift News offers broader lessons for mainstream business journalism in that its newsroom envisioned investigative reporting as a commercial and market opportunity; the editor’s part-ownership of the newspaper allowed the staff to take risks. The National Thrift News defied a long-standing narrative that trade publications are captive to the industries they cover; the case study provides new evidence of accountability and investigative journalism in the trade press. It explores the complex relationships and interactions between businesspeople and the press, how their fortunes can rise and fall as a result of similar economic forces, and how their roles in the capitalist system create tension and put them at odds with one another. This book makes the case that business journalism must evolve from its origins as market servant and become a market watchdog.

What is a trend? What role do trends play in consumer culture? How do trends come into being? And how do trends shape the future? This book explores these and other questions through a focus on the business of trend forecasting, an industry that emerged in the 1970s to anticipate, manage, and influence the future of culture. Galvanized by the rise of futurism and by social scientific research on popular culture and taste, pioneers in trend forecasting turned unease about the future into a business opportunity, using trends to marketize cultural change. Since then, the business of trends has grown into a highly influential (if sometimes overlooked) facet of the wider consulting industry. Trend forecasters advise some of the world’s most prominent companies on how to innovate, disrupt, strategize, and otherwise manage the future. In addition to the early history of trend forecasting, the book examines how current trend professionals do what they do, taking stock of contemporary practices and exposing their built-in assumptions. In sum, On Trend argues that trends have become an important way to sell cultural change, and as such they deeply shape and profoundly limit our ideas about what the future can be.

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

This study examines the role of the black and white press in the cultural and political struggle over civil rights in South Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s, when black newspapers in the Deep South were mostly cautious and conservative, John McCray and his allies at South Carolina’s Lighthouse and Informer challenged their readers to “rebel and fight” for their rights – to reject the “slavery of thought and action” that created “uncle Toms and aunt Jemimas” and become “progressive fighters for the emancipation of the race.” As black activism spread, journalists at the state’s daily newspapers assumed leadership roles in the white resistance movement. They crafted new narratives designed to undermine black activism, but they also engaged directly in the political process to help implement the policy of massive resistance. When that strategy began to fail, the same journalists ignored their profession’s new norms of impartiality and joined the fight to create a new political home for white segregationists in a conservative Republican Party in the South. By moving the press from the periphery to the center of the political action, Newspaper Wars asks readers to reconsider the role of journalists during times of social, cultural, and political change in their communities.

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.

Local media is at a turning point. Legacy outlets – television and newspapers – are declining while emerging platforms are failing to take their place. When it comes to the policies and regulations governing local television, regulators are struggling to address audience gravitation and fragmentation, the declining commercial viability of broadcasting, and the ongoing crisis of journalism. In an era of digital platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, regulators are also grappling with a question they had never anticipated: What does it mean to be local in the digital age? The lack of an answer has left them unsure of how to define a locality, what counts as local news, if the information needs of communities are being met, and the larger role of local media in a democracy. Through comparative analysis, Media Localism explains, assesses, and critiques these issues and asks how communication regulators in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom defined, mobilized and regulated “the local” in broadcasting from 2000 to 2012. Using critical theories of space and place, critical regionalism and critical political economy, and based on document analysis and interviews, Ali offers a fresh approach to localism in media policy. Through policy critique and intervention Ali argues that it is only through redefining the scope of localism that regulators can properly understand and encourage local media in the 21^st century.