17

Historical Approaches to Media Studies

Mark Hampton

Introduction

It has been more than 20 years since James Curran (1991, p. 27) referred to historical scholarship as the “neglected grandparent of media studies.” Since that time, media history has become increasingly prominent, with scholarship emerging from such diverse disciplines as history, literary criticism, communication, and sociology. The field has an institutional home in such research centers as the University of Sheffield's Centre for Journalism and History, the Aberystwyth University's Centre for Media History, and Macquarie University's Centre for Media History; such journals as Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (published by the International Association for Media and History), Book History (published by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), and Media History; and book series such as the University of Illinois Press's History of Communication series and the Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. In addition, leading journals in the fields of communication, media studies, and journalism regularly publish articles containing a historical focus, while mainstream historical journals increasingly include articles concerned with the mass media. Finally, media history has found an increasingly prominent home in specialized journals within business history, such as Technology & Culture, Enterprise & Society, and Business History Review.

At its best, media history is interdisciplinary, combining the methodologies of one or more “theoretical” disciplines with the historian's emphasis on empiricism and deep context. Both aspects are crucial. Sophisticated theory does not substitute for thorough engagement with primary sources, nor does consulting a massive amount of archival material compensate for the lack of well-framed research questions. At the same time, even when it stems from contemporary concerns, the best media history avoids anachronism, recognizing instead that the historical period under consideration is not merely the background to the present, but was shaped by concerns and structures that were different from ours. This chapter will describe a range of questions and approaches with which media history is concerned, and the types of sources that may be used. It draws heavily on my own experience working mostly on the history of journalism and print culture, in illustrating approaches and obstacles that will also structure the work of historians in other areas such as cinema and television, advertising, and media organizations. In addition to citing examples along the way, mostly from the field of modern British history, this chapter will provide case studies of two recent books in order to illustrate “best practice” in media history.

It may be worth clarifying at the outset that this chapter will not specifically address the methodologies of historically minded sociologists, literary critics, and other critical theorists. This is not in any way to minimize their contributions to media history. To the contrary, such works as John Thompson's The Media and Modernity (1995) and Jean Chalaby's The Invention of Journalism (1998) have done much to advance our thinking about how media function in modern society, and how this function has changed over time. Yet their methodologies are different from those discussed here. They are based mostly on secondary literature, and their originality lies more in theorizing existing historical scholarship than in analyzing primary sources. For the purposes of this chapter, such works provide valuable theories with which to engage, helping to sharpen the historian's research questions and approach to primary sources. They are not, however, the type of scholarship with which this chapter is concerned.¹

As Curran (2002) has pointed out, a great deal of media history is “media-centric,” inward-looking rather than illuminating connections between media and the wider cultures and societies in which they operated. Although there is certainly value to historical scholarship whose main purpose is empirical “recovery,” the most influential works of history are those that move beyond their immediate topic to address larger questions. For example, Michelle Tusan's Women Making News (2005) not only analyzes women's advocacy newspapers that had previously received little scholarly attention; it also contributes new insights about the suffrage movement, cultural constructions of gender, and extra-parliamentary politics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Similarly, Simon Potter's News and the British World (2003) uses multicontinental archival excavation not merely to examine how news organizations operated in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, but to understand the institutional basis for a transnational Britishness. What is notable about both of these books is that they are just as interesting to historians who are not, per se, concerned with media history, as they are to media historians. Indeed, some of the best media history is written by people who do not think of themselves primarily as media historians. Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, for example, who has published important work on the news market in late nineteenth-century Britain and the United States (2009, 2012, 2013), identifies himself more as a historian of business and institutions than as a historian of the media (personal communication, July 6, 2012).

Within the broader field of media history, several distinct approaches are possible: these include cultural or intellectual history, political history, social history, economic history, institutional history, medium history, and biography, though in practice most research projects will belong to more than one category. The researcher will need to decide whether to focus on a specific medium or genre (e.g., Conboy, 2010; O'Malley, 1994), on a specific theme that cuts across multiple media and genres (e.g., Webster, 2005), or on the interactions between different media (e.g., Becker, 2008). In addition, the scholar needs to decide whether to restrict his or her topic to a specific national case, which is the most common approach, or to write a comparative or transnational history (e.g., Hilmes, 2011; Richards, 2010; Wiener, 2011; Winseck & Pike, 2007). Each of these approaches implies different research questions, different ancillary disciplines, and different types of primary sources.

In addition to choosing a broader methodological orientation, the researcher will have to address the ever present challenge of casting the topic in a sufficiently expansive manner to be of wide interest while at the same time keeping it sufficiently focused to be manageable. This dichotomy is particularly pressing for postgraduate students caught between the increasingly competitive job market and the pressures to finish quickly – gone are the days when PhD students were allowed to spend six to 10 years writing a dissertation. At the same time, navigating this dual challenge as a postgraduate student is good preparation for an academic career, given that “accountability” regimes – whether they be the UK's Research Exercise Framework or the American tenure clock and post-tenure review, among other models – simultaneously emphasize the number of publications and “impact factor.”

In attempting to balance significance with manageability, researchers may wish to focus on a short time period that can be seen as a turning point or a synecdoche, or to address a longer chronology through a number of case studies. The former strategy can be seen in extremis in W. Joseph Campbell's The Year That Defined Journalism (2006), a book that focuses on a single pivotal year but examines the emergence of three paradigms that came to define twentieth-century American journalism, and L. Perry Curtis's Jack the Ripper and the London Press (2001), which begins from an even narrower starting point but effectively illuminates late Victorian journalism and cultural anxieties. Other examples include Dale Zacher's The Scripps Newspapers Go to War (2008), which examines an American newspaper empire's adaptation to World War I; Robert McChesney's Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy (1993), which focuses on a pivotal seven-year period in which the commercial basis of American radio was established, defeating attempts to organize radio along public service lines; and Siân Nicholas's The Echo of War (1996), which addresses the British Broadcasting Corporation's role in maintaining British civilian support during World War II. The latter strategy is exemplified by Michael de Nie's The Eternal Paddy (2004), a study of Irish identity in the British press over a period of nearly a century that employs case studies of four key events, and Richard Kaplan's Politics and the American Press (2002), which analyzes the national emergence of the journalistic norm of objectivity over half a century through a focused examination of Detroit.

Methodologies, Topics, and Research Questions

As noted above, types of media history include cultural or intellectual history, political history, social history, economic history, institutional history, medium history, biography, and community studies, among others. In practice, these approaches are not distinct, both because the best practitioners of a particular approach will draw on contexts that imply a second or third approach as well, and because many historians self-consciously combine these approaches. For example, the so-called “new political history” that emerged in the 1990s, through its focus on language, effectively merged cultural, intellectual, and political history approaches, while the “social history of ideas” places intellectual history within deep social contexts (Clark, 2004; Jenkins, 2003; Tosh, 2010). Some beginning researchers may wish to identify which approach to history most strongly appeals to them before choosing a topic; others may prefer to identify topics or research questions first, and then consider which approaches these imply.

When selecting a topic for one's first major research project, the media historian, like any other scholar, is well advised to avoid merely looking to “fill a gap” in existing scholarship; such projects tend to have little influence. Instead, it may be helpful to think about a field in which one is interested, and ask such questions as the following: Are there any widely prevailing, significant assumptions that most scholars seem to share, but which have not been sufficiently examined and could be incorrect? Are there events, institutions, or ideas of clear contemporary importance whose origins have not been adequately explained? Is there a clear difference between two eras with no satisfactory account for the change? For the comparative-minded scholar, are there surprising similarities or differences between two places that have not been sufficiently understood? Are there significant primary sources that have not been previously examined, whether through neglect or because they are newly available? To these questions, which are appropriate for all historians, the media historian may add: Are there topics whose previous study has been too media-centric, so that a more deeply contextualized re-examination might lead to a more accurate or sophisticated understanding? Such questions can be illuminated through an interplay between primary sources and secondary literature, though it is also important to note that many of the best questions will be discovered serendipitously, through browsing through primary sources with an open mind.

It may be useful to share my own experiences in selecting my first research topic in media history, my PhD dissertation topic, in order to illustrate at least three points that beginning researchers should keep in mind. First, one should select one's topic with a particular audience in mind. I came to my topic from the opposite direction of many potential readers of the present chapter: rather than a media scholar looking to apply historical methodologies to my field, I was trained as a historian and became interested in late nineteenth-century transformations in British political culture and subsequently in popular journalism. At the time, this latter subject was not very well developed and largely ignored by mainstream British historians, even as an increasing number of them used newspapers as primary sources (Bingham, 2012a, 2012b). Moreover, of the three most significant historical monographs that focused on this period (Brown, 1985; Koss, 1981–1984; Lee, 1976), two of them were more descriptive than thesis-driven. I became interested in Alan Lee's thesis that what he called a “liberal” theory of the press had predominated among political elites in mid-Victorian England, and that it had been undermined by commercial changes in the later nineteenth century. At the same time, I was dissatisfied by what I took as his implication that in this atmosphere idealism simply gave way to the pursuit of profits, and I set out to learn what had, in fact, become of “theories of the press” between 1880 and 1914. My audience, in the first instance, was historians of turn-of-the century British politics and culture.

Second, my dissertation writing experience highlights the ways in which selection of topic shapes the availability of primary sources. I divided my topic into three discrete focuses: elite discourse about the press, found especially in books and periodicals from the period; journalists' professional discourse, as seen in memoirs and handbooks and in the trade publications of an emergent professional organization, the Institute of Journalists; and a case study of a liberal editor's attempts to put his ideals into practice in wartime, namely C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian during the South African or Boer War (1899–1902). One practical difficulty I faced was that, although there was a great deal of published primary source material available, the historical profession tends to fetishize unpublished manuscript sources found in archives. Given my topic, however, this was not a straightforward task. It turns out that even the most idealistic journalists, politicians, and intellectuals tend not to pepper their unpublished personal correspondence with ruminations on the role of the press in society; nor do the business records of newspapers generally speak to this theme. To be sure, I did find some useful unpublished archival material – above all, in the case study of the Manchester Guardian – but published primary sources remained the most important source for my dissertation.

Third, my experience underscores the importance of adaptability. My research developed according to accidental discoveries in archives and in response to recommendations by other scholars I met during my research, which was mostly carried out in London in the United Kingdom. In addition, 18 months into my dissertation period – that is, halfway through the three years I was allotted – Aled Jones published his pathbreaking Powers of the Press (1996), which covered a similar topic to mine, with an overlapping chronology. Although Jones himself was quick to assure me that his book had not exhausted the topic, this did force me to consider how my topic would remain distinctive. In addition, even after completing my dissertation, the process of trial and error continued, as I thought about publication plans. I fairly quickly decided that the dissertation was less cohesive than I would have liked, and that in its present state it did not constitute the book I wanted to write. I decided, therefore, to write a book focusing on elite discourse, expanding it to cover the period from 1850 to 1950; the other two sections of my dissertation, dropped from the book, became three discrete articles. At the same time, whereas my dissertation had been aimed primarily at historians of late nineteenth-century Britain, I deliberately addressed the book to scholars concerned with contemporary media studies and journalism.

Sources

A wide range of primary sources exists for researching media history; as indicated above, the sources one employs will depend upon the topic one chooses and the research questions one asks. It will also, in many cases, depend upon the researcher's family commitments and financial resources; not every topic is equally practical for every researcher. Some topics will require extensive travel to distant archives – this can involve air fares, driving expenses, or rail fares; lodging costs; and sometimes even entrance charges to archives, costs that can add up to several thousand dollars very quickly. In some cases, one's own department or university will make travel funds available, whether competitively or as a matter of course; some libraries offer competitive grants for scholars with a specific need to consult their collections; and some disciplinary organizations provide small competitive grants for postgraduate students. In other cases, though, such costs will have to be borne by the researcher herself or himself. This section will provide a brief overview of the kinds of primary sources available, and methods of using them, along with selective examples; it is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.

An obvious source is media products themselves: newspapers and magazines; films, radio, and television programs; and the like. Despite an explosion over the past few decades of scholarship devoted to content analysis, the surface has barely been scratched, and a researcher can pretty easily find untapped content. Indeed, the content is so vast that the more difficult problem may be how to choose – that is, how to limit the scope of sources used while still making a claim to scholarly significance. As mentioned above, carefully defining one's topic is essential, and using case studies may be very beneficial.

At the same time, in many cases scholars are limited by the uneven availability or accessibility of sources, particularly television and radio recordings. For example, Vanderbilt University's Television News Archive holds broadcasts of American national television network news since mid-1968, but recordings of local news or pre-1968 news are more difficult to find. In other cases, researchers are constrained by the non-availability of travel funding: the British Newspaper Library at Colindale contains a wide range of historical newspapers from around the world, but most of them are not indexed and their availability, in practice, depends upon a researcher being able to devote long periods to labor-intensive reading, often on microfilm.

An increasing number of newspapers are available digitally, for example Readex's America's Historical Newspapers and Gale Cengage Learning's collection of pre-1900 British newspapers; both, however, require expensive subscriptions, and so they are best suited to researchers who have access to a subscribing library. On the other hand, the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent at Canterbury has a searchable database containing thousands of cartoons from newspapers and magazines, downloadable free of charge; the archive holds the originals on site, and will provide high-resolution digital copies for a fee. Similarly, the US Library of Congress has recently made available a large collection of historical newspapers accessible online at no cost to researchers. As Bingham (2010) notes, digitization opens possibilities for more efficient research, as well as new and sophisticated methodologies of data mining. As he also points out, however, the uneven digitization of titles risks distorting the historical record, if scholars focus disproportionately on what is available electronically; for example, two twentieth-century British popular dailies, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, have been digitized and are available from UKPressOnline, but the News of the World has not. Digitization also perhaps increases the temptation to take articles out of context, thanks to the easy ability to search by keywords, though as Bingham points out, this problem is hardly unique to the use of digitized newspapers. Prior to digitization, for example, scholars could be tempted to over-rely on those newspapers, such as The Times, that were comprehensively indexed, or to mine periodicals for keywords by using such periodicals indexes as the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, or the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. In any case, if used judiciously, online newspaper databases offer exciting possibilities for researchers (see also Mussell, 2012a, 2012b; Towheed, 2010).

Nor is digitization limited to print media. Video Active maintains a large collection of European television footage, while the United Kingdom's BBC and ITN have both made an increasing amount of footage available. The BBC's online archive includes not only its own material, but news footage from the Australian Broadcasting Company, CBS News, China's CCTV, and others. The Centre for Media History at Macquarie University has recently opened the Media Archives Project database and the Australian Media History Database. As with digital newspapers, many such collections are available commercially, while others are often available through one's university library.

Many media institutions maintain archives of correspondence and business documents, but they are not all equally useful, nor equally accessible. Some organizations, operating with a sense of their historical importance and commitment to open inquiry, have turned over at least their earlier archival material to public repositories; for example, the Manchester Guardian (forerunner of today's Guardian) has its collection at the John Rylands library in Manchester, earlier New Statesman materials are available at the University of Sussex, and the National Union of Journalists' archives are held at the University of Warwick's Modern Records Centre. Such collections are easily available to researchers, though even in these cases it is important to find out what an archive's access policies are ahead of one's visit. Other institutions maintain control over their own archives, which they regard, in the first instance, as company property rather than a public trust. Many of them will make their archives available to researchers, but devote limited resources to doing so and, as a result, cannot accommodate very many researchers at a single time. One example comes to mind from my own research: the Reuters archive located in the company's Canary Wharf office. When I used this archive in 2006, a single (very knowledgeable) archivist worked from a desk in an open-plan office among perhaps 200 other desks. Materials were located in an off-site warehouse, and after I identified the files I wished to consult, the archivist took me to the warehouse by taxi, placed the desired files in a suitcase, and brought me back to the Reuters office where I sat at the desk next to his and consulted the material. Again, such archives, despite an archivist's best intentions, simply cannot accommodate very many researchers at once; for this reason, it is particularly important to contact the archive well in advance of an intended visit.

Other archives may be less accessible, particularly for scholars researching commercial institutions that continue to operate today. These institutions may categorically refuse admission, or may ask very specific questions about one's purpose. In some cases, this is a matter of protecting the company's interests, whether by guarding its reputation or by controlling access to proprietary information. In other cases, as already noted, it is simply a question of the limited resources devoted to accommodating researchers whose interests are, of course, peripheral to the corporation's concern to return value to shareholders. The archivist for The Times (London), for example, several years ago refused my request to consult the archive because I was on a fishing expedition; if I wanted to consult the archive I needed to be able to identify more precisely in advance what I was researching. He told me that the number of requests for admission was fairly large, and he could not accommodate researchers who did not have specific archival materials in mind. To take another example, a newspaper (which I will not name) recently granted an acquaintance of mine limited access to company archives after persistent requests; the company has, though, required the researcher to sign a nondisclosure statement, allowing the company to inspect the resulting research prior to any publication. These kinds of refusals or conditions are legitimate decisions by companies that do, after all, own the materials; from the researcher's point of view, however, they are potential obstacles that have to be considered.

In addition to the archives of institutions, many individuals important to media history have archives, either in private hands or, more often, deposited with a professional archive. In many cases, the collection will be located in a region or with an institution with which the figure had a connection. For example, the papers of C. P. Scott, the long-time editor (and later owner) of the Manchester Guardian, are on deposit at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Similarly, the archive of press baron Lord Beaverbrook is located in the Parliamentary Archives (formerly called the House of Lords Record Office). In other cases, the collection may appear in a seemingly random place, often as a result of university libraries' special collections empire-building. For example, the archive of Cecil King, nephew of British press baron Lord Northcliffe and chair of the Mirror Group of newspapers, is located at Boston University.

In other cases, relevant archival material may not be conveniently assembled into a single archive, but may be scattered across numerous repositories, or across disparate collections within the same library. This may occur, for example, in the case of a prolific letter writer for whom no personal archive exists, or who did not keep copies of the letters he or she sent; that person's letters would be scattered among the archives of their recipients. More broadly, since most archival collections center around individuals, organizations, or institutions, research topics that are structured differently from the archives – for example, the study of a concept or a social practice – may require consulting multiple archives. The cinema historian Peter Miskell has noted that his work on the foreign distribution of Hollywood films has often required him to consult archives that are organized more helpfully for researchers interested in a specific director, writer, actor, or film, than in his chosen topic (P. Miskell, personal communication, September 25, 2012).

There is no formula for locating potentially useful archival material. Beginning researchers may often find clues in the bibliographies of existing secondary literature. When looking for a collection based on a specific individual or organization, a few minutes of searching online may be sufficient to discover an archive's existence. The task is more complicated when looking for material for which no specific collection exists. In the case of the United Kingdom, a large number of archives are searchable by keyword through Access to Archives, found on the National Archives website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/). Using this website, for example, I located material relating to postwar Hong Kong in such unlikely places as the Oldham Local Studies and Archive and the Surrey History Centre. Researchers are also advised to take advantage of networking opportunities; some of my own most useful leads have come from asking the advice of other scholars who work in the same field.

Most historians accept that their research may require extensive travel time, but this needs to be weighed carefully before committing oneself to a research topic. It is not merely a question of where archives are located. Different archives are more or less user-friendly, and this needs to be taken into account well ahead of one's research trip, particularly for researchers on a tight schedule or who are traveling a great distance. Many archives allow unlimited nonflash digital photography, either free of charge or with a modest per day fee, a policy that can dramatically reduce the amount of time necessary for collecting material, thereby reducing one's travel costs immensely. For example, I have collected thousands of pages of material from the National Archives (London) in a matter of days, allowing me to consult the material at a more leisurely pace upon returning from my research trip.

Other archives have more restrictive policies. Some, including the British Library, do not allow digital photography at all. Some require various unusual conditions. For example, at the Women's Library (London Metropolitan University), the charge as of summer 2010 was £4 for a one-day pass allowing only 25 photographs. In addition, the library required the user to fill in a copyright form describing every individual item photographed, and each pass – that is, every 25 photographs – required a new payment on a different floor than the archive. Aside from the prohibitive cost, the cumbersome paperwork requirement would make extensive photography impractical. Another archive I have recently used, the Hong Kong Public Records Office, allows photography only of items on which the Hong Kong Government holds copyright; other items can be photocopied. After the archivist determines that a requested item may be photographed, a member of staff will accompany the researcher to a designated room, and will turn the pages while the researcher takes pictures. The researcher is well advised to learn such policies in advance so as to plan his or her trip accordingly, or even, in extreme cases, to decide against a particular research topic. In most cases, archives that do not allow digital photography will have fairly high photocopying charges, often anywhere from 40 cents to $1 per page; this means that unless the researcher either has a large photocopy budget or can afford to devote a significant amount of time on site, it will not be practical to select a research topic that requires heavy use of such an archive. It should be noted, though, that digital reproduction – like photocopying for those with generous research budgets – can tempt the student to become injudicious in collecting too much material. In some cases, indeed, it can lead to information overload, creating the illusion that one has conducted “research” when one has merely collected a massive amount of archival material, not all of it relevant, that will still need to be sifted when one returns home.

Using the Sources

In conducting research based primarily on content analysis, it is important to give attention to the sources' context and provenance. Various contexts include presentation, production, and audience. Presentation is the most straightforward. A researcher examining a series of newspapers, for example, in order to see how a particular theme was conveyed, should look not only to the specific presentation of the topic at hand, but also to its placement within the paper as a whole. Was the topic covered on the front page – and if so, was it above or below the fold? Or was it relegated to a more obscure location? How many column inches did the topic merit compared to other topics? Was it addressed in hard news columns, in editorials, or in various lifestyle features? These are only among the most obvious questions; the point is that the researcher should not restrict himself or herself to content analysis of a single theme in isolation from surrounding content.

Production and audience can be more difficult, and they constitute a reason that even a project focusing primarily on content analysis often needs to include archival research. Wendy Webster's Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (2005) demonstrates this point. Although it centers on analyzing the ways in which films' and television programs' depiction of empire during World War II and the early period of decolonization helped to construct English national identity, it draws on far more than content analysis. Among other sources, Webster's book draws on BBC files discussing production and policy decisions and audience research, various government collections, and reviews and letters from a wide range of newspapers. Had Webster limited herself to content analysis alone, her book would have been decidedly less successful. Similarly, Hajkowski (2010) combines analysis of BBC programming content with archival material illuminating the process by which programming decisions were made.

If archival sources are often necessary for the contextualization of content analyses, they are even more crucial for research questions focused on biography, political history, or institutional history. For example, Simon Potter's Broadcasting Empire (2012) traces the diffusion of the BBC's model of public service broadcasting to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a task that can be accomplished only through extended analysis of internal memoranda within institutional and government archives in the four countries. Similarly, Zacher (2008), noted above, can understand how the Scripps company responded to the changing commercial and political environment during World War I only through examining company archives.

Yet historians often find, much to their frustration, that archival sources do not always contain the answers they seek (Howell & Prevenier, 2001). A historian's interest in a particular nugget of information does not mean that an earlier observer would have thought to notice it or record it for posterity, or that someone would have collected it in an archive. For example, Jones (1996) makes the point that the authors of anonymously published nineteenth-century journalism can only sometimes be identified by journalistic diaries or other sources; in many cases, that information is lost forever. Likewise, Simon Potter has noted that for much of their history, broadcasters neglected to save copies of their films, forcing researchers to rely on transcripts – and even those were not always saved (personal communication, July 6, 2012). Often this problem is largely accidental, though as Epstein (2012) has vividly demonstrated, archives can reflect the political interests of those who originally produced the documents. This difficulty cautions us to the need both to read documents critically and to draw conclusions judiciously, recognizing that the picture conveyed in the archive is not straightforwardly “reliable.”

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in audience response to media. This interest has grown both out of a concern for “history from below” and from the critical point that audiences, as much as authors, create meaning. Unfortunately, this approach is easier to articulate than to execute, particularly for the centuries before opinion polls, audience research, and modern sociology. For earlier periods, available evidence is often patchy or unrepresentative. The field of book history, in particular, has given growing attention to “reader response,” but surviving primary source evidence is disproportionately concerned with elite views. Where evidence is available of working-class reader response, moreover – for example, in the autobiographies discussed in Rose (2001) – it often refers to texts less ephemeral than newspapers and magazines (Hampton, 2009).

This point is highlighted by the recent development of the Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 (RED), an impressive and highly valuable database documenting the ways in which reading took place in Britain between 1450 and 1945. This project invites submissions of any documented reading experience within that period, and they are carefully vetted by the editorial team: as Bradley (2010, p. 152) notes,

This is an ongoing project, and its comprehensiveness will in the long run depend not only upon the cooperation of interested researchers, but more fundamentally on evidence that actually exists. Not surprisingly, most of the authors identified as being read are canonical authors, not obscure journalists, and a large number of the readers are themselves well known, upper- or middle-class figures; it is not clear that this will change as the project expands. As with any archive, the Reading Experience Database does not necessarily address a particular topic that may interest a given researcher: Nicholson (2012) notes, for example, that it does not provide an entry relating to the consumption of American humor in Britain.

This project underscores the partiality of the archival record in another way: according to Bradley (2010), as of early 2010 well over half of the “reading experiences” available in the database are from the nineteenth century. Given the dramatic growth of both population and literacy during the nineteenth century, this may well be a fair proportion, but it illustrates the added difficulty of recovering the reading experience for earlier centuries.

The point of the preceding is not to criticize the RED; the problem does not lie with the database's creators or methodology, but with the limitations of the evidence that exists. Nor is the point to argue for throwing up one's hands in despair; it is, rather, that gauging audience response, particularly for periods before the twentieth century, requires creativity and imagination. Nicholson (2012) illustrates the degree of judicious inference that a sensitive researcher can bring to this task; if the archival record does not explicitly tell us how British readers consumed American jokes, the topic with which he or she is concerned, it is nonetheless possible to draw tentative conclusions from the information that is available about readers and the culture in which their reading took place.

Case Studies

Having described in general terms the task of researching and writing media history, the remainder of this chapter will examine two books that are among the most impressive recent works in British media history, Adrian Bingham's Family Newspapers? (2009) and Laura Beers's Your Britain (2010). Both scholars primarily identify themselves as historians of modern Britain who have an interest in the mass media, rather than as scholars of the media who have employed historical methodologies; both were trained in history departments, in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Beers's book is her first, based on her PhD dissertation, while Bingham's is his second.

Bingham's Family Newspapers? examines the coverage of sex in twentieth-century British popular newspapers. It is chiefly a work of content analysis, resting on the assumption that the popular press both influences and reflects public opinion – though Bingham wisely avoids drawing conclusions on either score that are more ambitious than documentary evidence can justify. This, in turn, divides into two methodological points. First, even if it is oversimple to imagine that readers simply change their opinions as a result of reading a single article, repeated readings are bound to have a cumulative effect on readers' views. Although Bingham is unable, because of the limitations of available sources, to prove this through direct evidence concerning reader response, he is on solid theoretical ground here (see, for example, Calavita, 2005). At the same time, the commercial context in which the twentieth-century popular press operated insured that editorial content was shaped by readers' expectations – though Bingham, naturally, does not argue that editors and journalists were straitjacketed by their readers. Rather, this two-way relationship between mass circulation newspapers and their readers serves as the methodological underpinning of using a content analysis of these papers as a window into the understandings of sex within twentieth-century British culture.

Bingham's topic is a large one, and so the question of how to organize the material is particularly important. Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, he organizes his discussion according to six topics, including sexual advice, surveys of attitudes and behavior, court reporting, moral crusades, titillating content, and portrayals of celebrities' sexuality; each of these topical chapters is itself arranged chronologically, emphasizing change over time. There are trade-offs between taking either a thematic or a chronological approach. A chronological approach would have been unwieldy, given the vast amount of material. In addition, the changes over time in these six areas did not necessarily follow the same chronology, and trying to arrange the book chronologically might have led Bingham to miss these nuances.

On the other hand, the danger in arranging this study thematically is that it compartmentalizes newspaper content in a way that does not match the readers' experience of engaging with a newspaper. In other words, a reader might move quickly from one type of content to another – and not only sexual content, but sport, political news, and others. Focusing on discrete themes risks, then, missing the interplay between different types of content. Bingham's solution to this challenge is twofold. First, he frames his discrete analyses within a thorough contextualization, based on a mastery of secondary literature, of changes in the framework of the popular press, and of the nature of British sexuality. This allows his readers to understand how his content analyses relate to the wider cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. Second, he makes frequent connections between the themes of his separate chapters. This reminds readers that the thematic divisions are analytical conveniences, and that the various sections of the newspapers worked together in effecting cultural change.

Although there are pros and cons of organizing his book in a primarily thematic rather than a chronological framework, such a choice is unavoidable. What Bingham accomplishes through his thematic organization, combined with the measures he takes to counteract the risk of fragmentation, is to allow him to make nuanced generalizations about the changing representation of sexuality within the popular press. In his conclusion he is able to aggregate the changes depicted in separate chapters, showing that although the transformations occurred at an uneven pace, on balance many of the loosening of attitudes often attributed to the “permissive” 1960s in fact had made their way into the popular press by the 1940s and 1950s. He is also able to show that across several different themes, newspapers attempted to use sex as a way of increasing circulation, while still remaining within the boundaries of a “family” newspaper.

Bingham's book also illustrates the value of using archival sources to frame content analyses, as well as the limitations of the archives. Various unpublished documents on which Bingham draws show readers' views of newspaper content, governmental policing of the boundaries of public decency, and management concerns about succeeding in a competitive commercial environment. This use of archival material immeasurably enriches Bingham's content analyses, making it possible to gain a sharper understanding of the conditions of production and reception. At the same time, to return to a theme discussed earlier in this chapter, Bingham is limited by the evidence that is available. Not every question he might have is answered. He notes, for example, that The Times and the Guardian have far more comprehensive editorial archives than most of the mass circulation papers he is examining, while evidence pertaining to reader response is particularly spotty. The latter is true even in the case of the archive of Mass Observation, the social research organization founded in 1937 to record British daily life through open-ended interviews with “representative” Britons.

Whereas Bingham's book is best described as a work of cultural history, Beers's Your Britain contributes most importantly to political history. In particular, it employs archival research to interrogate the long-standing left-wing view in Britain that the capitalist-owned press prevented the emergence of a Labour government in interwar Britain, one that otherwise would have naturally followed from universal suffrage. In the first instance, Beers is addressing political historians interested in the political transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but who have largely neglected the role of the mass media (Beers, 2012). Like Bingham's study, then, Beers's speaks to concerns that were already prominent beyond media historians; like Bingham, she uses a substantial amount of primary source material to address such concerns in original ways.

Beers concentrates most heavily on policy history. Among her research questions, several predominate. Specifically: How did the interwar Labour Party move beyond its assumption of a hostile press in order to attempt to improve its coverage? How did the party seek to shape coverage on BBC programming, taking advantage of a new medium over which a single company held a legal monopoly? How successful was the party in shaping its media image? To what extent did the party have to change its platform in order to receive more favorable coverage?

Given the importance that interwar Labour Party leaders and leftist intellectuals attached to the media, it is not surprising that Beers is able to find a significant amount of archival material through which she can examine the party's efforts. She combines party records with material from the Conservative Party archive; the private letters of leading politicians of all parties; the archives of the BBC, the Trades Union Congress, Mass Observation, and such British state offices as the Foreign Office, Home Office, and Treasury; and political posters and published primary sources. She supplements this deep archival focus with a modest amount of content analysis.

Like Bingham's study, Beers's combines thematic and chronological approaches. In contrast to Bingham's, though, her book's organization is more heavily chronological, befitting a book whose subtitle emphasizes the “making of the Labour Party.” In contrast to political historians who have attributed Labour's 1945 electoral land-slide almost entirely to the experience of World War II, Beers shows that the party began transforming itself from a working-class party to a national reformist party during the interwar period, largely through its engagement with the press and broadcasting.

Both of these books highlight a point with which this chapter began: that the best works of media history address well-defined analytical research questions through extensive primary source scholarship. They are not “media-centric,” but examine the media in larger contexts, whether political, cultural, economic, or social. They also illustrate that even the best media history will remain to some extent tentative and speculative, in deference to the limitations of the sources that are available.

NOTE

1 In addition, this chapter focuses on practical questions concerning historical research in media studies. For theoretical examinations of this topic, see Brügger, 2002; Nerone, 2003; Schudson, 1991; and Chapter 16 by Richard K. Popp in the present volume.

REFERENCES

Becker, C. (2008). It's the pictures that got small: Hollywood film stars on 1950s television. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Beers, L. (2010). Your Britain: Media and the making of the Labour Party. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Beers, L. (2012). Author's response (Roundtable on Your Britain). Media History, 18, 104–107.

Bingham, A. (2009). Family newspapers? Sex, private life and the British popular press, 1918–1978. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Bingham, A. (2010). The digitization of newspaper archives: Opportunities and challenges for historians. Twentieth Century British History, 21, 225–231.

Bingham, A. (2012a). Ignoring the first draft of history? Searching for the popular press in studies of twentieth-century Britain. Media History, 17(3–4), 311–326.

Bingham, A. (2012b). Reading newspapers: Cultural histories of the popular press in modern Britain. History Compass, 10, 140–150.

Bradley, M. (2010). The Reading Experience Database. Journal of Victorian Culture, 15, 151–153.

Brown, L. M. (1985). Victorian news and newspapers. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.

Brügger, N. (2002). Theoretical reflections on media and media history. In N. Brügger & S. Kolstrup (Eds.), Media history: Theories, methods, analysis. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.

Calavita, M. (2005). Apprehending politics: News media and individual political development. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Campbell, W. J. (2006). The year that defined journalism: 1897 and the clash of paradigms. London, UK: Routledge.

Carey, J. (1997). The problem of journalism history. In A critical reader (E. S. Munson & C. A. Warren, Eds.) (pp. 86–94). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Chalaby, J. (1998). The invention of journalism. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Clark, E. A. (2004). History, theory, text: Historians and the linguistic turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Conboy, M. (2010). The language of newspapers: Socio-historical perspectives. London, UK: Continuum.

Curran, J. (1991). Rethinking the media as a public sphere. In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and citizenship (pp. 27–55). London, UK: Routledge.

Curran, J. (2002). Media and power. London, UK: Routledge.

Curtis, L. P. (2001). Jack the Ripper and the London press. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

de Nie, M. (2004). The eternal Paddy: Irish identity and the British press, 1798–1882. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Epstein, J. (2012). Scandal of colonial rule: Power and subversion in the British Atlantic during the age of revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hajkowski, T. (2010). The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–1953. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Hampton, M. (2009). Representing the public sphere: The new journalism and its historians. In A. Ardis & P. Collier (Eds.), Emerging media, emerging modernisms: Transatlantic print culture, 1880–1940 (pp. 15–29). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hilmes, M. (2011). Network nations: A transnational history of British and American broadcasting. London, UK: Routledge.

Howell, M. C., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From reliable sources: An introduction to historical methods. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Jenkins, K. (2003). Rethinking history (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.

Jones, A. (1996). Powers of the press: Newspapers, power and the public in nineteenth-century England. Aldershot, UK: Scolar.

Kaplan, R. (2002). Politics and the American press: The rise of objectivity, 1865–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Koss, S. (1981–1984). The rise and fall of the political press in Britain (Vols. 1–2). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Lee, A. J. (1976). The origins of the popular press in England. London, UK: Croom Helm.

McChesney, R. W. (1993). Telecommunications, mass media, and democracy: The battle for the control of U.S. broadcasting, 1928–1935. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Mussell, J. (2012a). The passing of print: Digitising ephemera and the ephemerality of the digital. Media History, 18, 77–92.

Mussell, J. (2012b). The nineteenth century press in the digital age. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nerone, J. (2003). Approaches to media history. In A. N. Valdivia (Ed.), A companion to media studies (pp. 93–114). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Nicholas, S. (1996). The echo of war: Home front propaganda and the wartime BBC, 1939–1945. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Nicholson, B. (2012). Jonathan's jokes: American humour in the late-Victorian press. Media History, 18, 33–50.

O'Malley, T. P. (1994). Closedown? The BBC and government broadcasting policy, 1979–1992. London, UK: Pluto.

Potter, S. J. (2003). News and the British world: The emergence of an imperial press system. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Potter, S. J. (2012). Broadcasting empire: The BBC and the British world, 1922–1970. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J. (2010). Cinema and radio in Britain and America 1920–1960. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Rose, J. (2001). The intellectual life of the British working classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Schudson, M. (1991). Historical approaches to communication studies. In K. B. Jensen & N. W. Jankowski (Eds.), A handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research (pp. 175–189). London, UK: Routledge.

Silberstein-Loeb, J. (2009). The structure of the news market in Britain, 1870–1914. Business History Review, 83, 759–788.

Silberstein-Loeb, J. (2012). Exclusivity and cooperation in the supply of news: The example of the Associated Press, 1893–1945. Journal of Policy History, 24, 466–498.

Silberstein-Loeb, J. (2013). The emergence of global news. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Tosh, J. (2010). The pursuit of history: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history (5th ed.). London, UK: Pearson.

Towheed, S. (2010). Reading in the digital archive. Journal of Victorian Culture, 15, 139–143.

Tusan, M. E. (2005). Women making news: Gender and journalism in modern Britain. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Webster, W. (2005). Englishness and empire, 1939–1965. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Wiener, J. H. (2011). The Americanization of the British press, 1830s–914. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Winseck, D. R., & Pike, R. M. (2007). Communication and empire: Media, markets, and globalization, 1860–1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Zacher, D. (2008). The Scripps newspapers go to war. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.