Abstract

The term journalism history is of relatively recent coinage, more recent than the term journalism, of course. But the discourse now called journalism history has a longer history, one that tracks the rise of news culture as a realm of first print culture and later media culture. As each new formation of news culture appeared, new genres of doing the history of news developed. Throughout this history of journalism history, the boundary separating it from other forms of media history has been porous and blurry. Since the 1970s, journalism history has been wrestling with an identity crisis, one that in many ways anticipates the broader crisis in the identity of journalism today.