Journalism in the Quarterly : A Century of Change in the Industry and the Academy

Abstract

The very first article published in the new Journalism Quarterly, in January 1924, was titled “The Professional Spirit.” It was a fitting start for the journal, which over the next 100 years tracked the maturation of journalism as a profession and journalism studies as a field of scholarly inquiry. This article explores how “journalism” evolved in the pages of the journal through a turbulent century. By analyzing the changing debates and tracking the incremental but steady expansion of knowledge, we seek to provide insights into where journalism scholarship started, the path we traveled, and how we arrived at today.

Journalism studies, Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch (2020) suggest, have a “prehistory”: It lies in the ideas of German social theorists in the 19th century, when men such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Ferdinand Tönnies set out the normative preoccupations that came to shape the field. But they were well ahead of both the industry and the academy in thinking about journalism as worthy of formal training or study. The idea that journalism could and should be taught in a university setting caught on only around the turn of the 20th century (Weinberg, 2008). The idea that it is a topic worthy of scholarly attention came later still and then proceeded in fits and starts, spreading slowly and unevenly around the world over the decades that followed (Josephi, 2020; Wahl-Jorgensen & Franklin, 2008).

The foundation of the Journalism Bulletin—relaunched as Journalism Quarterly in the 1920s, and renamed Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly in the 1990s—aligned with the development of university-based journalism training and marked a seminal moment in journalism scholarship. This was the journal that paved the way for serious formal inquiry into journalism as both a practical endeavor and an object of study, inquiry that spans a century of ongoing change in the industry and the world.

Our article explores how journalism has been discussed in the journal and what this discourse tells us about the history of what has evolved into “journalism studies” as a field. We argue that the changing debates around journalism in the Quarterly encapsulate this century-long evolution. We focus on three historical periods, which although uneven in length, reflect distinct phases of journalism studies as reflected in the journal:

• * In the earliest period, under the guidance of the first four Quarterly editors from 1924 through 1964, we see the emergence of journalism research. In these decades, Journalism Quarterly developed from a bulletin containing a motley assortment of relatively brief commentaries, along with other items of likely interest to the growing community of journalism teachers, to a bona fide academic journal. Beginning with a smattering of historical analyses and occasional contemporary explorations, empirical studies gradually swelled in volume, a transition given added impetus by the emergence of communication studies as a recognized field of scholarship in this period.

• * In the second period, beginning with a new editor in 1965 and ending with the last issue of “Journalism Quarterly” in 1994, journalism studies found its footing through increasingly rigorous scholarship, characterized by a search for useful theoretical approaches and a growing commitment to more systematic, rigorous empiricism. This evolution, overseen by another four editors, paralleled the consolidation of journalism teaching programmes into recognized academic disciplines at American universities, where the large majority of scholarship published in the journal during this period originated.

• * In the final period—from 1995, when the journal’s title changed to explicitly encompass “mass communication,” through 2022—we discern the maturation of journalism studies. Work on journalism during this period reflects increased internationalization of journalism scholarship, coinciding with the rise of digital media that has come to dominate both industry and academy.

Method

We took an inclusive approach to collecting our data. Rather than relying on the selectivity necessitated by the algorithmic process used for most other articles in this special issue, we sought a method that would yield a fuller and richer portrait of “journalism” as it was understood over 100 years of a journal that was groundbreaking—and for much of that time, unique—in its attention to the topic. We therefore manually logged articles from all 396 issues in Volumes 1 through 99; our results included the items captured by the algorithm but significantly expanded the data set available for analysis. Our aim is to complement the more topically focused approaches taken by our colleagues, demonstrating the wonderfully wide scope of what scholars have explored in seeking to advance understanding of journalism in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

We did, however, omit book reviews, editorial notes, and such other early materials as bibliographic lists and convention notes. We also omitted articles unrelated to journalism, even broadly defined; as discussed further below, the proportion of Quarterly articles devoted specifically to journalism declined in later years, following the emergence of specialized journals such as Journalism and Journalism Studies around the turn of the millennium.

Drawing on the online Sage archive of journal articles, supplemented with reference to a database of Journal Archives (https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/) accessible through the lead author’s university library, an initial data set of 4,586 articles was logged in an Excel file. The authors then made a second pass through this data set to eliminate articles only peripherally about journalism, resulting in a final set of 4,427 items. To enable closer analysis of contents and trends across this lifespan of the journal, a sample was then drawn by selecting every 10th article, including the first item—published on page 3 of Volume l, Issue 1 in January 1924—and ending with the last article in Volume 99, Issue 4, published in December 2022. This process resulted in a total of 444 articles for purposes of a more focused analysis, approached by dividing the journal’s contents into the three chronological clusters outlined above.

This sample was subjected to a textual analysis that categorized each article, assessed by one or more of the authors. Our categories, which emerged from the data based on a close reading of abstracts and, as necessary, the texts themselves, are described in the appendix. Many sampled articles reflected more than one thematic topic, and although we provide some numbers and percentages below to convey the relative prevalence of various types of content, we have resisted a “counting” approach in favor of a more holistic look at this representative snapshot of 100 years of publication. The findings sections that follow draw principally on the sampled data. References to Quarterly articles cited in the text are provided in a separate Bibliography.

The Emergence and Early Growth of Journalism Scholarship: 1924 Through 1964

The Journalism Bulletin, essentially a newsletter for journalism teachers, relaunched as Journalism Quarterly in 1924 and began laying the groundwork for the emergence and early development of journalism as a field of study. Under the guidance of four editors whose collective tenure spanned 40 years, discussion of journalism progressed from brief and typically informal commentaries, focused on education and practice, to a growing engagement with empirical research alongside reflection on the field’s methodological and epistemological underpinnings.

As highlighted above, the emergence of journalism education at American universities provided context for the birth of the journal, with the attendant need to establish institutional footing, including curricular and disciplinary belonging. Quarterly’s role in supporting university-based journalism education was made explicit in its inaugural editorial, which stated that the journal would “stand for the improvement of the schools and courses devoted to journalism,” seeking “to present the problems and achievements of the members, and professional matters in which the members are interested” (Journalism Quarterly, 1924, p. 23).

In practice, this meant that in its earliest years, the journal was preoccupied with designing the nuts and bolts of journalism training. More than half the sampled articles in the first decade discussed journalism primarily in relation to teaching it. Authors considered fundamental questions around the structure of journalism education, such as how many schools of journalism were needed and to what extent the curriculum should be prescribed. Others contributed commentaries on the potential roles of external bodies, including professional societies (Mann, 1925), in journalists’ training.

While these discussions were especially dominant in the earliest years of the journal, they continued to appear regularly until the late 1930s, concomitant with significant expansion and diversification of professional training at U.S. universities. For example, MacDougall (1938) advocated policing and consolidating the reporting curriculum, battling against a proliferation of topics: “The entire journalistic curriculum should be a continuous course of study rather than a gallimaufry of separate courses in indefinite sequence” (p. 282).

Other contributors were keen to hold onto newsroom-based training. A journalism professor at Rutgers University, who ran a country weekly as a laboratory for student learning for 8 years, emphasized the importance of hands-on learning, despite the fact that it

is so much easier, and takes so much less time, to sit in a comfortable university room, casting your eyes over a row of bended student backs at infrequent intervals than to get out in a small town and actually supervise the performance of a myriad duties. (Allen, 1938, p. 397)

Concerns around journalism’s recognition as a legitimate profession represented a significant subtext in debates during these early years of Quarterly, highlighting anxieties that continue to reverberate today (Solkin, 2022). Authors—whether professional journalists or journalism educators—frequently considered potential lessons from academic training associated with established professions such as medicine, law, and theology (Schramm, 1947). Indeed, an early invited contribution came from a medical doctor, who wrote a critical essay on the problems of journalism: “The Doctor’s Prescription: A Plea for Better Journalism” (Dorland, 1928) was the earliest article in our sample to include any references to literature.

In seeking to fix journalism’s institutional location in the academy, extensive debates appeared in the journal about the epistemological groundings of journalism as a practice and a field of inquiry. These debates were particularly important because the earliest research-based contributions to Journalism Quarterly were historical, with an emphasis on the formative years of journalism. The disciplinary affinity to history, however, existed in tension with the emergence of a new generation of journalism professors trained in the social sciences and keen to apply their approaches to the study of news, publishing arguments that prefigured the birth of communication studies as a discipline. For example, Willey (1935) advocated utilizing “the social sciences to train real professional workers for that most important agency of the social sciences—the newspaper,” adding, “We have an opportunity to be of unlimited service to journalism through the utilization of the social sciences” (p. 35). Arguing for the importance of pragmatist philosophy, Ballard (1936) noted that one “immediately perceives the valuable relationship of writing, psychology and the social studies to the main task” (pp. 280–281).

In the mid-1930s, the journal also began to include more contributions drawing on empirical research beyond historical accounts, including what would now be recognized as basic survey research and content analysis. What seems a deliberate shift in editorial policy was reflected in a 1933 addition of the masthead tagline: “Devoted to investigative studies in the field of journalism.”

Around the same time, the journal began to turn its gaze outward, looking beyond its initially narrow focus on the United States. From 1933 onward, the Quarterly published reports and research briefs on global journalism, later consolidated in a regular special section on “Foreign Communications” that provided briefings from journalists and scholars across Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The attention to global developments intensified with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and subsequent U.S. involvement in World War II. For example, veteran international reporter Vernon McKenzie, in a commentary on propaganda in Germany and Czechoslovakia in the mid-1930s, reminisced about a meeting with Adolf Hitler in his Munich apartment during which Hitler stated, “There will be complete freedom of the press, except for enemies of the Fatherland” (McKenzie, 1935, p. 37).

This historical trajectory—characterized by an emerging engagement with empirical research and broader global contexts, and drawing on insights from both humanities and social science disciplines—was recognized by Ralph Casey, who served as Quarterly editor from 1935 to 1945. In 1944, he wrote of three stages in the progression of journalism education. In the first phase, he suggested, “Teachers busied themselves writing the first textbooks of the craft and organized the early newspaper short courses” (Casey, 1944, p. 55). In a second stage of “growth and development,” teachers developed an interest in the foreign press, as well as in the history of institutional journalism, through greater engagement with humanities and social sciences; the result, he said, was a more varied and diverse curriculum, the development of research, and greater respect for journalism training. “In editorial sanctums, curmudgeons who learned their journalism through eating ink and sleeping on the exchanges at night . . . were slowly coming around to the notion that journalism graduates could be competent craftsmen” (p. 55).

The third stage, which Casey saw as emerging, was one in which a school of journalism becomes a “school of communications” (p. 55), broadening its engagement to encompass technical, economic, and social content. He turned out to have accurately predicted the direction of intellectual travel: Driven in part by government funding for research on communications in the context of wartime propaganda, journalism came to be understood as a field within the discipline of communication studies (Glander, 1999). Tellingly, the tagline on the Journalism Quarterly masthead changed in 1946 to “devoted to investigative studies in the field of communications,” signaling that the journal was ready to broaden its focus beyond print journalism. Contributors began urging that to meet the changing demands of a profession newly grown to encompass radio and television, journalism education should be located within this emerging communications discipline (Schramm, 1947).

As the journal aligned itself with communication research, its attention expanded to encompass new content transmission tools, particularly after the war. Then as now, rapid technological change gave rise to debate and concern. For Ebon (1946), developments including radio facsimile, the use of press agency material in radio broadcasts, and instantaneous wireless transmission contributed to emergence of “a new type of reporting, both fascinating in its technical accomplishments and dangerous in its political potentialities” (p. 5). Quarterly authors also began to take an interest in television, considering the relevance of this new technology for journalism. In an article reviewing arguments by industry stakeholders about the potential of television news, for example, Heath (1950) declared, “I don’t think TV news will ever be any good. TV cannot foresee where and when the news will take place, and much of the news will always have to be explained to be understood” (p. 409).

By the 1950s, informal journalistic commentaries had been largely replaced with empirically based contributions, reflecting a broader “empirical turn” in the study of journalism (Wahl-Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2020). Surveys and content analyses applied quantitative approaches in ways that would be recognizable to contemporary scholars, though authors commonly used polemical language in describing their findings. For example, a 1963 large-scale content analysis of magazines and book covers concluded that “most magazines available on the corner newsstand are riddled with a metastasis of sex and violence themes” (Otto, 1963, p. 25). Multiple contributions on the development and application of research tools also appeared in our sample in the 1950s and early 1960s, from new forms of content analyses and experiments to Q methodology. In addition, contributors began exploring novel and timely topics, such as the radical right press (Wilcox, 1962) and visual communication (MacLean & Kao, 1963).

The first 40 years of the journal, then, reflected a turbulent time for journalism training, practice, and scholarship. Through its pioneering early work, Journalism Quarterly contributed to establishing the foundations for the systematic study of journalism. Scholars in the next period of the journal’s history built on these foundations.

Journalism Scholarship Finds Its Footing: 1965 Through 1994

After serving as editor of Journalism Quarterly for 19 years, Ray Nixon passed the reins to Edwin Emery, whose tenure began with the first issue of Volume 42 in 1965. We saw this change in editorship as a good starting point for a “middle period” of the journal, marked by a clear—if somewhat fitful—transition to conceptually guided, empirical journalism scholarship.

“Conceptually guided” is an apt term, as the direct application of contemporary theory remained rare. Indeed, most of the articles included in the sample from this period offered no theoretical or conceptual framework at all, even generously defined. In the 1960s, in particular, many were essentially essays, with authors employing an informal, journalistic style to write about everything from a mid-19th century Iowa editor (Thorp, 1966) to Bombay’s multilingual newspaper scene (Hirschmann, 1966).

Most of the rest suggested researchers interested in moving beyond mere description were casting a wide net for conceptual hooks on which to hang their work. With the emergence of “journalism studies” still in the future and “communications studies” still evolving, there was considerable borrowing from other fields. Some journal contributors turned to psychological ideas around perception or cognition; others drew on sociological notions of professionalism or newsroom socialization; still others found economic theories or models helpful. Some of these authors provided literature around even broader concepts, such as press freedom (mostly documenting challenges to it in far-flung nations) or news values, then presented data related in some way to the idea. For example, a study drawing on literature related to “modernization” explored media use by the “incandescent paupers” in the slums of Delhi (Mishra, 1970, p. 223).

But more concerted attempts at theory testing and development also were sprinkled throughout the sample during these years. Agenda-setting, agenda-building, and gatekeeping all appeared multiple times, while other studies explored the knowledge-gap hypothesis, play theory, or the spiral of silence. A 1979 article on the “missing agenda,” for example, found that reporting on a landmark U.S. environment act was generally poor—perhaps, the author suggested, because an abstract topic and complex legislation meant reporters were “simply unprepared . . . to untangle the fascinating symbolic and substantive minuet being performed” in Congress (Schoenfeld, 1979, p. 583). In another example, one of the first sampled studies to consider “electronic text news” found that Viewtron, a service created in the early 1980s by Knight-Ridder Newspapers, covered essentially the same issues as traditional news outlets, and its users were comparably informed (Heeter et al., 1989).

Although some authors were implicitly or explicitly critical of news practices or practitioners, none of the sampled works drew directly on critical or cultural theory: Most theories and methods instead derived from the social sciences, as an earlier generation of scholars had urged. More than a third of the sampled items used a survey, alone or in combination with another method (with those studying journalists attaining what today would be giddily high response rates, typically well over 50%). Most of the other empirical studies also relied on quantitative approaches, dominated by content analysis but also including experiments and Q method, which involves a form of factor analysis.

Although some of the “surveys” might today be viewed as in-depth interviews, qualitative methods were relatively scarce. Examples included a lone ethnography, of media use among native villagers in Alaska (Harrison, 1972), and a handful of participant observation studies. Other articles offered no discernible method at all. These ranged from an essay on why junior college journalism instructors, such as the author of the article, deserve respect (Walker, 1969) to a piece about the love–hate relationship between William Randolph Hearst and a weekly supplement editor that begins with a wonderful anecdote involving a high-powered stag party, a nude model, and a papier-mâché pie—and continues apace (Peters, 1971).

Although history faded in prominence from the earliest years of the journal, it continued to inform journalism scholarship from the 1960s through the 1990s; that said, authors were more likely to string together anecdotes than to conduct rigorous analysis of historical materials. The U.S. colonial period featured heavily, but historical takes on journalism in this period were eclectic. There was the Kansas minister in the early 20th century who tried his hand at editing the Topeka newspaper “as Jesus Christ might have done it” (Ek, 1974, p. 22), evoking some decidedly un-Christian reactions; an entertaining yarn about two prominent small-town editors converging on St. Louis for the 1896 Republican convention (Mangelsdorf, 1967); and a sobering account of the role of the press in an 1871 Arizona “Indian” massacre launched “in the chilly darkness before dawn” (Blankenburg, 1968, p. 61).

However, fewer than a third of the sampled items from this period referenced a specific event or cultural phenomenon; the rest had no identifiable peg. Political elections, debates, and party conventions featured heavily, as did specific legal or regulatory rulings, and such singular events as the Detroit Newspaper Strikes of the 1960s or the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. Given the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s in much of the world—and the heralded impact of news coverage of the unrest (Gitlin, 2003; Roberts & Klibanoff, 2007)—the extent to which cultural upheaval was under-researched by contemporary Quarterly authors is striking. A search of the full data set for the word “Vietnam,” for example, yields just 13 items about the war among all 4,427 articles. The sample of items from 1965 through 1994 captured three of these: an explanatory piece on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network, written by its former news director (Moody, 1970), a timely look at the trial of Lt. Col. William Calley for his role in the My Lai massacre (Brenner & Mauldin, 1974), and a retrospective, published more than a decade after the war’s ignominious end, of magazine photographic coverage (Patterson, 1984).

Other seismic cultural changes got even shorter shrift in the sample. Two articles looked at U.S. campus unrest (Starck, 1971), including an article examining responses to the Kent State shootings by writers of letters to the local newspapers, many of them applauding the National Guard (Lander, 1972); two more on the “women’s liberation” movement, both in relation to the ill-fated U.S. Equal Rights Amendment (Butler & Paisley, 1978; Davis, 1982); and one dealing with environmental concerns (Bowman & Hanaford, 1977). Only two sampled articles reflected upheaval outside the United States, one on the Chinese Cultural Revolution (as seen through the elite U.S. press; Coffey et al., 1977) and another on apartheid in South Africa (Giffard & Cohen, 1989). A historical look at early 20th-century U.S. immigration (Mondello, 1967) rounded out the sample of items related to cultural transformation.

As this look at occurrences attracting journalism scholars’ attention from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s suggests, Journalism Quarterly remained overwhelmingly focused on American journalism and its audiences during this period. Only a small minority of sampled items were devoted to journalism outside the United States, such as a look at the Chinese-language press in the Philippines (Lent, 1970) or press–government relations in Peru (Alisky, 1976); most of these were written by scholars affiliated with an American university, either as students or faculty.

It is worth quickly noting that contributions about journalism to the Quarterly during this period not only were broadly ethnocentric but also were dominated by male authors. Although there were more female writers during this middle period than in the early years of the journal—men outnumbered women by 137 to six over the initial 40-year period—their presence was still small. Of a total of 286 first and second authors in this portion of the sample, more than four fifths were men. The journal also published articles containing what today would be shockingly sexist language. Consider, to take but one example: “A PR man is . . . a newspaperman who somewhere along the road to a Pulitzer sold his soul to the devil for higher wages, better hours and pretty secretaries in place of copyboys” (Nicolai & Riley, 1972, p. 371).

While national and international upheaval was arguably under-studied during this period, ongoing changes inside the newsroom walls were closely monitored by these Quarterly contributors. Roughly a third of the sample explored the content of news coverage. Authors studied how newspapers looked, for instance their shift to a “graphically pleasing” modular design following the launch of USA Today in 1982 (Utt & Pasternack, 1984, p. 883), along with media handling of diverse topics, from hard news such as business (Hynds, 1980) or crime (Antunes & Hurley, 1977) to lifestyle material such as religion (Buddenbaum, 1986) or travel (Underwood et al., 1979). Journalists and newsroom practice also were scrutinized. Ogan and colleagues (1979), for instance, found that the typical manager of a U.S. daily newspaper was a “white, Protestant, married man in [his] late 40s with one child and [a] college degree” (p. 803), while Laakaniemi (1987) discovered that too many journalists were over-worked procrastinators who rarely thought long or deeply enough before writing their stories. News audiences and news organizations also attracted the attention of Quarterly authors during this period.

Several topics prominent in the early years of Quarterly appeared less often as time went on. There was a massive decline in articles focused on teaching journalism. And while the viability of methodological approaches was repeatedly examined in the early days, by the mid-1960s, journalism scholars seemed to feel they had figured out how to do what they wanted to do; only two sampled articles in this middle period focused on methods themselves. Nor was much attention paid to ethics or diversity, topics that would appear more frequently in later years. Griffiths and Goodman (1989) provided a rare example of ethics scholarship, finding that U.S. radio news directors “feel a conflict between their professional ethics and the pragmatics of maintaining their jobs and making a living” (p. 606). Most of the diversity stories were contemporary, considering issues of race and gender—albeit not in proportion to the prominence of either in the public discourse of the time—though one took a historical approach; in examining the role of “a lady correspondent among the Sioux Indians,” Jones (1972) described how a “strikingly attractive” reporter, who was “once divorced, once widowed,” came to realize, belatedly, that “the white man did not have a corner on culture” (pp. 656, 662).

But the tiniest category of all was one that would later command enormous attention: technology. Just five sampled articles in this period considered technological innovation, from the computer-assisted ability to generate sophisticated infographics (Smith & Hajash, 1988); to an exploration of whether audiences noticed the odd headline sizes made possible by “the powerful combination of computers and phototypesetters” (Everett & Everett, 1988, p. 627, and no, audiences did not); to a consideration of whether “facsimile newspapers,” envisioned in the 1930s as a means of “producing newspapers in the home via radio,” was “foolishness or foresight” (Koehler, 1969, p. 29). This author may have had the technological niceties wrong, but her insights into evolving perceptions of technological change, as well the conclusion she reached, proved prescient:

Considering developments now on the horizon, it is yet conceivable that electronic facsimile, called a “coming wonder” in the 1930s, a “Cinderella” in the 1940s, a “communications infant” in the 1950s and a “sleeping giant” in the 1960s, may one day transmit newspapers into the home. (p. 36)

The Maturation of Journalism Scholarship in a Digital Age: 1995 Through 2022

In 1995, the journal’s name changed from Journalism Quarterly to Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. The move signaled the publication’s remit as the flagship journal of AEJMC, an association composed principally of U.S. schools offering coursework in both journalism and “mass communication” as growing numbers of students sought careers in advertising, public relations, and other communications fields. Debates about how best to educate future journalists remained salient but were no longer the sole concern; Ralph Casey’s prediction in 1944 that a focus on “communications” rather than journalism was the way forward had well and truly been realized. For us, the name change serves as an appropriate starting point for our third and final era of the journal, from 1995 through 2022.

The new name, of course, did not mean the journal changed its orientation overnight; indeed, Quarterly had published articles on topics beyond journalism from its earliest issues, and the journal’s subhead had changed to “Devoted to Research in Journalism and Mass Communication” by the 1960s. However, the formal broadening of the journal’s emphasis came at a propitious moment for the media and technology environment as well as for the maturation of journalism research.

The mid-1990s saw the emergence of the publicly available internet, which quickly came to redefine the essence of “mass communication,” ultimately fragmenting audiences and undermining legacy media business models. These technological developments—first with connected computers that facilitated emergent forms such as blogging, followed by mobile communication, smartphones, and social media—complicated what constitutes “journalism” and “journalist,” blurring boundaries that once seemed obvious to the journal and its readers (Carlson & Lewis, 2015).

Concurrently, this was the period when “journalism studies” emerged as a discernible subfield within the broader discipline of communication research (Franklin, 2009). With the launch in 2000 of both Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism and Journalism Studies, followed by establishment of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association in 2004, journalism studies as a research domain gained a new “institutional foothold” (Carlson et al., 2018, p. 8). Thus, even as “journalism” was becoming a slippery concept in the larger landscape of media and technology, “journalism studies” became a clearly defined area of scholarship—and researchers had a growing variety of venues in which to publish their work, particularly after the launch of additional journals including Journalism Practice in 2007 and Digital Journalism in 2013.

In effect, the Quarterly in 1995 was signaling a wider approach to communication research just as other forces in the field were ushering in more specialization. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the number of studies published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly that focus principally on journalism issues declined. As “journalism studies” blossomed and became institutionalized, Quarterly appears to have been more of a bystander than a central participant. In fact, an analysis of publication paths of top-performing scholars in communication and media studies found that journalism studies was “the most important and most extensive cluster” within the field of communication, but that the key journals were the newer ones focused on journalism while “the oldest journal in the field, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly[,] is not a salient part of this cluster” (Demeter et al., 2022, p. 460). Our analysis cannot determine the reason, but one possibility is that journalism scholars outside the United States viewed Quarterly as an “American” journal; single-country studies about the United States still dominated Quarterly articles about journalism well into the mid-2010s. “Journalism studies,” although still largely Western, was from the start more international in outlook than the flagship journal of AEJMC.

Nevertheless, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Quarterly remained a vibrant venue for publishing research about news-related topics. Overall, this latter period of journalism research in JMCQ points to scholarly maturation, evident in the use of theories and methods, in the scope of authorship and gender dynamics, and in the range of topics studied.

If only a limited number of studies had been “conceptually guided” in the middle period of the journal, by the late 1990s it was common for articles to overtly reference or build on a concept—albeit sometimes without the thoroughgoing literature review and conceptual framing that has become the expectation for journal articles published today. In his 1995 analysis of news sources after Hurricane Andrew, for instance, Salwen (1995) wrote an introduction that doubled as the literature review—all in a tidy 69 words. Many of the late 1990s Quarterly articles gesture to the role of theory only obliquely or in passing.

In the past decade, however, Quarterly has more fully aligned with contemporary scholarship norms, with almost all recent journalism articles devoting a literature section to one or more theories. Of the theories invoked between 1995 and 2022, framing and agenda-setting were most prominent. Other theories drew from a range of disciplines, with social psychology well-represented in articles drawing on concepts such as cognitive elaboration, heuristics, and anchoring effects. This emphasis on individual-level psychology extends the growth in audience-related news studies seen in the earlier period; in the more recent years of the journal, nearly three of every 10 sampled articles focused on audiences and effects. Quantitative methodologies also remained prominent, dominated again by content analyses, surveys, and experiments.

The maturation of scholarship is also evident in gender representation in authorship as well as in the enlargement of research teams. In contrast to the previous male domination of Quarterly, the 1995–2022 period—which encompasses editorships by all three of the women who have led the journal over its 100-year history—sees a shift toward more gender parity among authors. Overall, men outnumbered women 2-1 as authors of papers about journalism during this final phase, but we did not end as we began: It’s 17-4 in favor of men from 1995 to 1998, but from 2019 to 2022, men and women were evenly represented as authors of journalism-related articles, at nine apiece. Women also were much more likely to be first or sole authors than in earlier periods. And as we counted only first or second authors, we likely are under-playing women’s increased visibility in the journal because the number of authors per article has grown substantially in recent decades. Through all 70-plus “Journalism Quarterly” years, only 23 of 363 articles had three or more authors, and most of those appeared in the 1980s and later. From 1995 to 2022, in contrast, nearly a third of the 85 sampled journalism articles had three or more authors; a 2019 article wins the most-co-authors prize with eight (Ji et al., 2019).

The field’s maturation is further evidenced in the way journalism scholars grappled, sometimes presciently, with key research questions as well as societal concerns that would grow in consequence during the period. For example, at a time when the implications of newspaper chain consolidation were just becoming apparent, Coulson and Hansen (1995) studied the Louisville Courier-Journal’s news content after its purchase by Gannett. In a clairvoyant preview of the even worse fate that would befall many American newspapers through ruthless cutbacks in the 2010s, they found that the “news hole” grew, but “the average length of stories dropped, hard news coverage declined, and the number of wire-written stories exceeded staff-written pieces” (p. 205). Issues of diversity and representation also gained prominence. For instance, Engstrom and Ferri (1998) surveyed 128 local women TV anchors and found that “they rank concerns with their physical appearance, conflicts between the roles of wife/mother and newscaster, and difficulties in balancing career and family as their major career challenges” (p. 289)—early evidence of challenges that continue to confront many women in television news. Pointing to a future where LGBTQ concerns would more fully come into view, Streitmatter (1995) offered a first-of-its-kind account on the origins of the gay and lesbian press.

But it is the rise of the internet and networked technologies that forms the central storyline of the 1995 to 2022 period, with journalism scholars making a range of conceptual and methodological adjustments to account for the profound changes of digitization. As early as 2000, Flanagin and Metzger (2000) zeroed in on an issue that sounds all-too-relevant in 2023: the relationship between emerging technologies and misinformation. “People increasingly rely on Internet and web-based information despite evidence that it is potentially inaccurate and biased,” they wrote. “Many of the existing institutional, structural, and cognitive methods people employ to discern the relative value or accuracy of information . . . may not be as effective with the Internet” (pp. 515–516).

The most recent years of the journal, then, see journalism research increasingly likely to take on issues broadly concerned with journalism’s place as an aspect of “mass communication.” This shift, coinciding with the rise of “journalism studies” as a distinct sub-discipline with its own dedicated journals, may have diminished the influence of Quarterly within this narrow field but kept it open to questions that connect journalism to broader issues of relevance to society in the 21st century.

Conclusion

Our review of 100 years of journalism scholarship as reflected in the pages of the Quarterly has afforded us a fascinating view of change: change in the study of journalism, certainly, and change in journalism as a profession, but also and importantly change across our world through much of the 20th century and into the 21st. Along the way, we encountered studies about countries that no longer exist—from East Germany to Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union—and events that have shaped our lives, from international wars to national social movements to local elections, from the rise of television to the rise of the internet to the newest revolution in machine learning. We have seen how journalism scholarship has evolved from a field overwhelmingly dominated by American men to one that provides intellectual nourishment to people of other genders, other nationalities, other perspectives. In the end, we found the story told about journalism in the pages of the journal over the past 100 years to be a highly engaging one, with a richly entertaining cast of characters, a broad palette of eclectic topics, and an increasingly multifaceted and nuanced portrayal of the fundamental role of journalism in democratic societies and beyond.

Above all, we found it to be the story of a field perpetually forging a new path. Beginning with a narrow focus on how best to teach journalism or to learn about its history, evolving through the application of conceptual and empirical approaches of growing sophistication to understand not only the practice but also the impact of journalism, we came in the end to a contemporary understanding of journalism as a bottomless well open to exploration by all who are intellectually curious and have an interest in a subject that still offers the hope of making the world a better place. That, we believe, is what has motivated journalists over the past 100 years, and journalism scholars, too. We have come a long way in increasing understanding of our topic; we still have, and as the world continues to change will always have, a long way to go. But if the first 100 years of Quarterly are any indication, the journey will be a fascinating and rewarding one. We look forward to discovering what the next issues of Quarterly hold.