21

The Rise of the Professional Communicator

Kevin G. Barnhurst

The rise of the professional communicator is part of an ongoing story about the elevation of craftwork to a higher plane as knowledge work. The story can trace a main branch of its lineage to medieval Europe and the ideas that set in motion what became the modern world. The term profession has roots in the Middle Ages, when divinity, medicine, and law emerged as primary occupations for gentlemen of the era to pursue. The three learned professions owe their deep foundations, as “true” professions and the measure of other occupations, to their early start in Western history. But the organization of professions in the sense understood today is a product of the nineteenth century. Sociologists have considered “professions” either a bundle of traits that characterize certain occupations or a way of organizing occupations that tends to enhance their power. Workers today in the communication industries are professionals in the more recent sense of the term. The distinctions among professions (and ongoing arguments about who qualifies as a professional) are perhaps trivial in light of the fundamental quality of all groups claiming professional standing.

That quality is the relationship of professional workers to knowledge. A profession is a social organization that establishes itself through knowledge practices. Communication workers acquire professional status by establishing work patterns and output norms, educational programs, associations, and other activities typical for their line of work. The norms and structures of the group may seem to make them professional, but the force underlying professional activity is ideas. Professions depend on a relationship with knowledge that colors their relations with the state, institutions, other groups, and individuals in society. In social communication, news-work is a central case in the history of professionalism, especially in the United States, where communication work took part in a national faith in professionalism.

Organizing media work along professional lines has had consequences for power relations in the workplace and in conceptions of and relations with the public. In turn, the project of making communication work professional has larger implications for conditions of knowledge affecting the other knowing professions. In recent decades communication professionals have struggled and lost some status through the reorganization of knowledge into digital forms, and the fate of the professional hangs in the balance.

Establishing the Early Professions

In the emergence of professions one can see a relationship between power and knowledge and a pattern of extending that relationship as professions acquired their earliest trappings. In medieval Europe, knowledge centered on truth and recognizing God behind all truth (McKeon, 1930), and so power traced its roots to religion, which gave legitimacy even to kings. What everyday folk knew about objects in the world belonged not to knowledge but to a lower order of knowing (Markus, 1970). Augustine, like Plato, assumed that human observation could not reach true knowledge (Copleston, 1950). The rise of universities set up independent and, within their limited sphere, democratic locations of knowledge. The religious orders were quick to claim chairs of theology that established their place in universities. Theology and philosophy were sciences, and theologians and philosophers possessed knowledge (Copleston, 1953), even though those in authority, in the commonplace of the era, had “a nose of wax” that the powerful could bend toward their own ends (Armstrong, 1970; Hyman & Walsh, 1967). But universities were important for asserting knowledge as an autonomous, somewhat self-governing seat of power alongside the church, setting the pattern for professions to push for recognition within universities.

Growing out of a foundation in universities, one pillar of professions became access to knowledge independent of God's truth. Some Renaissance thinkers emphasized how knowledge could bear practical fruit, and the scientific movement of that period led to a separation from philosophy and toward the main thesis of empiricists: that factual knowledge depended on the observer's direct acquaintance with events. (The corollary was to separate humans from nature and facilitate an extractive view of the natural world.) In the fourteenth century, the English philosopher William of Ockham argued that observing regular sequences was the only way to discover the causes of phenomena (Copleston, 1953). Ockham's thesis stands behind subsequent notions of communication, and journalism began as an activity to produce useful goods by extracting stories and facts from social life.

By the seventeenth century Francis Bacon (1863) suggested in an essay on heresies that God's knowledge is power (scientia potestas est), a phrase that came to justify the pursuit of knowledge for its practical utility. Printing was a key example of how practical invention “changed the face of things and the state of the world” (Copleston 1953, p. 104). For Bacon (1851) human knowledge and human power amounted to the same thing, and as a new sense of “science” emerged, theologians and philosophers lost power. They no longer held the center of knowledge; others, especially scientists, did. In the modern sense, science follows Bacon's (1908) axiom, “for knowledge itself is power” (p. 96). The axiom also underpins much of the activity and sense of purpose behind occupational groups involved in communication, especially journalists.

Another core value in communication practice goes back to Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when truth was a quality of gentility. European society divided between gentle and non-gentle persons, and little about life had the substance, consequence, or divisiveness in society as the project of marking where and how to draw the line between the two (Shapin, 1994). The only distinction of greater cultural significance was the separation of Christians from heathens. Gentlemen were capable agents for sensing, and could reliably report on, nature and society. The system still considered women as well as the poor and lower classes unreliable, even before the law. The status of women has improved, but communication practice and especially journalism accept a genteel perspective on the obligation to inform those with less access to the powerful. That service mission helps support a claim to professionalism.

A pillar of professional standing is expertise. From among the gentle, specialists in knowledge emerged: not only men of learning (docti) or letters (literati), but also learned laymen, usually either physicians or lawyers (Burke, 2000). Expertise grew more important during the Enlightenment project to amass knowledge (Heyer, 1988). In the Enlightenment, encyclopedists divided knowledge into fields that a handful of accomplished experts dominated (Darnton, 1979). Knowledge became specialized and its operation professionalized, following an order derived from the data of the senses and from rationality that grew out of experience. As the division of labor became stronger in intellectual activities, public communication became more important. Without it elites could lock up knowledge “to the detriment of all” (Yeo, 2001, p. 246). Much later journalism developed part of its special status from that same democratic urge to disseminate knowledge widely. But in the Enlightenment era, the work of encyclopedists and the division of knowledge work gave rise to the charge, familiar to journalists today, of spreading only superficial knowledge.

Professional Organization of Knowledge

New professions grew out of a relationship among the ideal of science, the urge to solve practical problems, and the growth of social organization to apply the knowledge resulting from scientific inquiry. The age of science as systematic thought about the physical world was in full swing by the early seventeenth century but existed in something of a vacuum as “pure science” for more than a century (Carr-Saunders & Wilson, 1933). Practical thinkers and inventors from outside of learned communities were more likely to apply ideas from science when confronting concrete problems, and so for instance, military engineers along with scientists gave rise to the profession of civil engineering. A propitious combination of practical problems and scientific solutions depended in turn on the rise of bureaucratic organization. Large-scale engineering projects required new kinds of organization for industry, which depended in turn on ways of accounting, financing, and insuring projects. The sites around them reorganized as well, giving rise to new local government offices along with expert handlers of property, such as surveyors. National laws created new conditions for transport, such as the merchant marine, and for materials extraction such as mining. Unlike the original learned professions, the newer knowledge workers emerged not from the sacred zones of religion or universities but from the profane zones of war, commerce, and government.

The then-new professions claimed technical competence but also moral standing (Carr-Saunders & Wilson, 1933). They established examinations or other methods of selecting their members to assure standards of competence, and they imposed discipline on their members largely through peer pressure and respect for tradition, although harsher measures could exclude a member from the professional ranks (Hughes, 1958). Periods of apprenticeship integrated both aspects of the profession, so that the training merged practice and attitude of mind not unlike preparation for a religious vocation. Stages in the development of professionals became a predictable career not unlike the journey in medieval craft guilds from apprentice through journeyman to master of the trade. But among professions the economic conditions usually ride in the background. New professions emerged only by controlling access to specialist knowledge through the high costs involved in securing qualifications. And training came not only dear but also associated with markers of status from the sources of patronage or sponsorship (Elliott, 1972). The market was one of the main conditions surrounding the rise of professions (Larson, 1977), along with an identified problem, scientific solution, bureaucratic order, and industrial organization, but always on a background of moral order. The resulting kinds of knowledge become ingrained in the professional's actions and character, like the sense journalists have for a practical “nose for news” along with their zeal to serve the public good in twentieth-century communication practice.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a process developed for emerging professions, along with an attendant sociology of professions. Sociologists identified typical activities: occupational grouping, training, building a formal association, seeking external recognition, and ethical code writing (Moore 1970; Wilensky 1964). Full-time workers could move toward professionalism only if their occupation involved “brain work” along with the manual labor necessary to put the group's knowledge into action. An element of status was part of the first activity, which accompanied non-manual work but could depend on whether the occupation grew out of an existing profession as at first a subspecialty or the new professionals served a high-status clientele. The first generation in a new knowledge area tended to be older experienced workers (Elliott, 1972), who then devised ways to select others for the occupation, usually through training in its arcane knowledge. In the third activity workers organized into an association and created organs that gave it institutional form, such as publications, a library, or perhaps meetings (Hughes, 1958). The new profession would then go public in the fourth activity, seeking recognition of its standards and conditions for entry, sometimes through licensing or other legal requirements. Establishing a code of ethics marked the fifth activity and the entry of the profession into maturity. Ethical codes reassured a public suspicious of specialty knowledge but also assured the occupation enough freedom and autonomy to carry out its mission of public service. Occupational groups doing manual labor with no claim to “brain work” could not gain a foothold in professionalism, but mature professions had in common all or most of the same traits, the functional qualities distinguishing learned professions from common labor.

The functions involved in establishing new professions in general did not apply to all occupational groups entering the processes of professionalism, giving rise to disagreements over kinds of professions, whether some were “true” based on their characteristics and trajectory in acquiring traits. It is clear that the foundations of professionalism were in place in the later nineteenth century. Their root was philosophical, emerging from widespread ideas about work and society. They depended on an economic groundwork that grew out of industrial conditions and involved organizational shifts that emerged earlier with bureaucracy but led into “scientific” management thinking like Taylorism in the early twentieth century.

Workers in “the media,” a term first applied to the press and radio of the 1920s (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2012), did not all move at the same pace, go through the same activities, follow them in the same order, or reach the fullness of professionalism with codes of ethics and an elaborated sense of public service, because conditions differed for each industry in what became known as “mass communication” in the 1930s. Trades connected to advertising agencies such as commercial artists, for instance, developed courses and textbooks early in the twentieth century along with some organizational structures. But serving commercial clients was not seen as a disinterested mission, and graphic artists did not acquire a professional level of social conscience until decades later, when they began to see an instrumental role for themselves informing the public and a public-service role protecting the environment in the design of material products and creating conditions for democracy with cogent, accurate information.

Communication Work Becomes Professional

However, news work developed all of the traits of professionalism by fairly early in the twentieth century and came to be weighed as a form of knowledge (Park, 1940). Populist notions about serving everyday readers supplied a ready-made mission to serve the public. Newspaper businesses were manufacturers that had already adopted industrial organization in the later nineteenth century, and the long history of newspaper involvement first with political parties and then with political movements such as Abolition placed the press alongside government as a watchdog protecting the public estate. Newspaper publishers had moved easily between high positions in the press and government in the nineteenth century (Pasley, 2001) and in the twentieth were aware of their position of power as political knowledge brokers subject to public suspicion. Industrial developments encouraged professionalism not for publishers but for the newsworkers they employed. Allowing news reporters, writers, and editors to claim professional status and allowing their occupation as “journalists” to acquire professional traits would reassure the public of the service newspapers provided for democracy.

The new occupational structure for journalists emerged quickly in the Progressive Era. The press had already transformed itself from party to general-interest organs, and the labor of newswork reorganized (Hardt & Brennen, 1995). Newspapers had long depended on correspondents, literary men (for the most part) who traveled abroad or moved through the urban world as observers in a style not unlike that of early modern gentlemen. In the nineteenth century John L. Given, who wrote for the New York Evening Sun, remembers the day when a writer could stroll or stand “idle at a street corner waiting for something to happen.” There was “no rush or jostle about newspaper establishments,” said Colonel A. K. McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times, John Addison Porter of the Hartford Post recalled that the newspaper office valued “literary skill and book knowledge.” The prime example of the literary newsman was Charles A. Dana, editor and publisher of the New York Sun, whose adage for success was, “Never do anything in a hurry” (quotations from Wilson, 1985, pp. 26–28). Education, taste, and access to society and power made correspondents desirable and worldly witnesses, and their affluence or literary aspirations made remuneration a lesser concern. But industrial newspapers required a constant flow of material to fill the columns, especially as display advertising emerged and newspapers grew in size with larger formats and, late in the nineteenth century, with more pages to fill.

In the early phases of becoming industrial, newspaper offices employed a second kind of worker, news gatherers in factory style who combed the city for occurrences that would grab editors' and public attention. Editors like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer “narrowed the distance between the news event and its deadline, intensified the pace of office work,” and turned news into a perishable product that lost value if “not harvested, processed, and delivered in a matter of hours” (Wilson, 1985, p. 26). Unlike correspondents involved in literary work, newshounds competed for the stories and stunts that would sell copies on the streets and worked under time pressure. John Given recalls a worker could get fired for being “a little slow getting to a telephone” (quoted in Wilson, 1985, p. 31). The typical young worker spent long hours for little pay and typically left the job after a few years (Smythe, 2003). Lincoln Steffens called news reporters of the era machines (quoted in Matheson, 2000, p. 565). By turning occurrences into stories quickly, newshounds processed the stuff of everyday life into texts that paid them by the column inch, filling the insatiable maw of the industrial press.

Making newswork professional involved a merger of the correspondent and the scavenger into the “journalist” (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2002). The process began in the nineteenth century and launched one basic activity typical of professionalism. Publishers and editors appear to be the first to have claimed journalism as an “editorial” profession (Banning, 1998), but a new occupational grouping took decades to solidify at the street level. Newsgathering required the physical labor of going to sites of potential occurrences and the manual labor of composing at the typewriter (Salcetti, 1995), an invention that had come into common use for business correspondence in the mid-nineteenth century. But the fusion of corporal with literary labor gave journalism the “brain work” dimension of professionals. Whether (and which) editors remain “journalists” has come to depend on contract terms and conditions in newsrooms, but the higher status of correspondents contributed to the growth of professionalism, as did the relationships journalists could develop with persons of status. Members of high society engaged in charities, debutante balls, business openings, and the like at least tolerated (or by the twentieth century sought) attention from the press.

Newspaper publishers supported the second activity typical of professionalism, establishing a system of training. Publisher Horace Greeley in 1860 said that he “would not hire a college graduate” (May, 1986, p. 20), but General Robert E. Lee gets credit for the earliest effort to establish journalism education at Washington College (Banning, 1998). Publishers later pushed individually or through press associations for university journalism classes, programs, and schools and funded the effort. As early as the 1870s, classes in journalism ran for some years at Cornell and the University of Missouri (Mott, 1962). Certificate programs and curricula emerged by the end of the nineteenth century, and schools of journalism appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. The universities of Missouri and Illinois established degree programs, and Joseph Pulitzer proposed to endow a school at Columbia University.

Founding associations, another activity typical of professionalism, began in the nineteenth century. Editors and publishers organized first, founding press associations in Illinois in 1865, Missouri in 1867 (Banning 1998), and other large states in the 1880s. Regional associations followed, such as the Inland Press Association in 1885, and the American Newspaper Publishers Association began in 1887. Workers in the emerging journalism occupation also founded associations. The National Editorial Association began in the 1880s (Winship, 1904), and a group of “newspapermen” formed the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in 1908 as a private society for those in the “vocation” to meet but also to foster their development as a profession. A year later Sigma Delta Chi, a journalism fraternity, began at DePauw University in Indiana (Glenn, 1949). The society spread to other universities but did not become the Society of Professional Journalists until much later. Editors of major newspapers organized separately in 1922, meeting in New York to found the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Mott, 1962). Because professions tend to stand on expertise and have considerable financial autonomy, they generally avoid affiliation with organized labor, but in the Depression era journalists formed a labor union, the American Newspaper Guild, in 1933.

Publications and meetings are common forms among all professional groups as an aspect of giving associations an institutional presence. Groups of publishers and key editors met and founded a “trade press,” the term for specialty periodicals serving an industry by region or sector of the national economy. Trade publications illustrate the emerging debate over professionalism in newswork (Cronin, 1993, Plaisance, 2005). A magazine called The Journalist began in 1884 with a staff drawn largely from the New York Press Club. Although the pages of the magazine called for newswork professionalism, its main campaign was to increase pay. Newspaper publishers in 1892 founded Newspaperdom, a trade journal for the industry. But professional aims filled the monthly magazine Editor and Publisher from its founding in 1901 and may have led to its success in a period of professional aspiration among newsworkers. It absorbed its main competitors (including a third trade magazine, The Fourth Estate) beginning in 1907. For journalists the Sigma Delta Chi fraternity began The Quill in 1912, and teachers founded Journalism Quarterly as a scholarly journal in 1924. Not all meetings led to publications. The University of Wisconsin held a newspaper conference in 1912 and the University of Kansas in 1914 to discuss the problems of journalism, for instance. But publishing tended to grow out of meetings and intertwined with the other activities typical of professionalism in newswork.

Resistance to government regulation has long been a tenet of the press (Bleyer, 1918), but journalism has received external recognition growing out of protections for the press. The ideal of “freedom of the press” emerged by the eighteenth century in England, acquiring a limited meaning: the “freedom from licensing and nothing more” (Siebert, 1952, p. 364), which became the main definition in the North American colonies. The commercial and industrial conditions surrounding news-work seemed to threaten those ideals by the end of the nineteenth century (Salcetti, 1995). Despite their growing role in informing the public, journalists could not reap the financial rewards that other professionals could command, because newswork retained aspects of manual or factory labor and did not provide direct services to the public. Publishers mainly benefited from customs and laws growing out of the First Amendment to the US Constitution protecting freedom of speech. For practitioners the main marker of public recognition was the published byline. The Journalist magazine crusaded for bylines in the late nineteenth century as a way to win higher pay and status for newswork.

The other typical activity of professionalism involved the creation of a code of ethics. The Missouri Press Association developed an ethical code in the nineteenth century (Mindich, 1998; Williams, 1929), and a general discussion of ethical standards for journalism appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines early in the twentieth century (Bleyer, 1918; Connolly, 1902), as well as in the trade press and industry associations (Rosewater, 1903; Winship, 1904), largely in response to the yellow journalism of the era. With the urging of President Warren G. Harding the American Society of Newspaper Editors adopted a code in 1923 at its first annual meeting (Mott, 1962). Some of the norms for professional work in journalism that emerged by the early twentieth century are factual accuracy, neutrality, and objectivity. Originally defined in contrast to partisanism (Carey, 1986), objectivity is perhaps the most contested standard for professionalism in newswork (Kaplan, 2002; Mindich, 1998).

Professional norms emerged in dialogue and conflict with the relations of journalism to its sponsoring business enterprise and to its stance toward the public as an audience, although the two interrelate. Publishers like Hearst and Pulitzer were key advocates for other elements of professionalism but also pursued audiences and financial success through sensationalism, the focus on events most shocking, captivating, and perhaps base rather than on serious occurrences and political issues. H. L. Mencken was one of the few to make a virtue of the journalist's service to publishers' financial ends:

As journalists pursued occupational independence, getting readers and making money were one side of the bargain. From the other side they could claim professional status because of personal qualities, such as self-discipline, neutrality, and expertise as observers instead of their earlier role as partisan advocates.

The public service mission of journalism harks back to eighteenth-century arguments on whether to allow the press to cover legislative bodies. The notion of “estates of the realm” was a product of the medieval world, when the social orders divided into three realms, clergy, nobility, and commoners. The idea of newspapers as the fourth estate of the realm emerged in British parliamentary debate in 1787, attributed to Edmund Burke (Schultz, 1998). The journalist as a watchdog on the public estates may have emerged as metaphor for its public mission in the Progressive Era, when muckrakers engaged in advocacy for the reform of government and end to business wrongdoing (Bennett & Serrin, 2005). Later the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947) proposed a broader mission, the social responsibility to inform the public, but so broad an ideal was slow to gain acceptance among journalists. Investigative journalism of the 1960s embraced the metaphors of the fourth estate and watchdog (Osiel, 1986) and met with notable success in the Watergate era, and the ideas also spread to Latin America (Waisbord, 2000).

Consequences of Professionalism

Professional norms and role expectations are not unique to the United States (Donsbach, 1981), and critiques of journalism in countries that follow a literary tradition sometimes urge journalists to adopt the objective and denotative tradition from the US press (Broersma, 2010). But the US case matters because the peculiar combination of private media ownership and the counterbalance of newswork occupations made professionalism a central element in the media system early on, to say nothing of its influences decades later on other media systems. The US case also provides a kind of fable for what other systems might avoid (Starck & Sudhaker, 1979).

Although the learned professions acquired autonomy through their mastery of knowledge, control over who could practice, direct personal contact with clients, and other typical activities, journalists through the end of the twentieth century had more tenuous circumstances. They could not usually claim exclusive access to arcane knowledge, and most depended on news companies for employment (with notable exceptions). From early in the twentieth century their organizations claimed a vital influence on public life, but the indirect contact of individual journalists with a reading clientele gave them no easy access to independent sources of income. After more than a century of US enthusiasm for and cultural organization around professionalism (Bledstein, 1978), a debate about whether journalists are, can, or should be professional continued. The structures of work and workplace seemed to limit journalists' professional aspirations. Once journalists accepted unions, their relationship with management embodied a labor model of occupational organization. But other groups aspiring to professionalism such as government workers formed unions at about the same time. The industrialization of healthcare has led medicine into a similar complex overlay of expectations rooted in manual labor and “brain work.”

The practice of journalism sets up similar complexities. The structure of beat reporting follows something more akin to industry and puts journalists into direct intercourse not with the public they aim to serve but with authority figures and experts, raising suspicion about their service mission. Insider status for journalists may make them beholden to official sources, as well as making their stories reliant first on government and industry. The embedding of reporters in combat units, unlike the medical corps tradition within military branches, aims to protect reporters rather than to provide personal services to clients. The distinction highlights service but also expert knowledge, both weak components of professionalism in journalism.

Relations to audiences may also have suffered as journalism pursued professional status. As the project of professionalism advanced in the twentieth century, journalists moved further from the working classes and became more likely to hold college degrees. Their higher education and class differentiation gave them more status, an aim and byproduct of professionalism, but attenuated claims to the broadest avenues of public service. The models of pro bono and charity service available to the original professions even while they served primarily elites could not apply to an occupation without a general client base. The public service claims of journalism depended on appeals to advancing democracy, which lost their broad base as newsworkers themselves changed. And concepts of audience were also changing, primarily from the general public of mass society to the variegated consumer markets of the late twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, Francis E. Leupp, a long-time Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post, wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly explaining the causes of “The Waning Power of the Press”: industry consolidation, the rise of cheaper outlets, specialized segmentation of knowledge, competition within the news industry, organizational imbalance between business and editorial operations, the “universal mania of hurry,” aggregating events at the expense of interpreting them, the vulnerability of news stories to the politics of owners, the exploitation of sensation and scandal, and the lack of time for journalists to read widely to inform themselves (republished in Bleyer, 1918, pp. 30–51). Each cause has its reflection in one or more aspects of professionalism. Besides the contradictions emerging from contact and conflict with competitive markets and audience tastes (or vulnerabilities), professionalism was then and is now in conflict with journalism as knowledge work in the public service. Segmented expertise gives rise to professionalism but conflicts with journalism, its hybrid bundle of tasks – the physical labor of gathering and transcribing events alongside the mental labor of interpreting patterns of events – and its social responsibility to make events intelligible to the citizenry. Leupp's diagnosis could describe conditions facing US journalism a century later, when the easy explanation for malaise in journalism is in competitive conditions involving economics and technology for producers and audiences. But the chief issue involves the regime of knowledge, concepts of time and space (which shifted in both eras; Kern, 2003), and the status of work.

As news media migrated to digital formats, access to publication and bylines attenuated. Anyone could publish a website or write a blog, and so journalists' status depended more on other sources, particularly their employment by a name-brand news outlet, but at the same time their employment became less secure. As audiences shrank for the media publishing in legacy formats such as newspapers and newscasts, the authority of publication alone came into question even as online publication faced skepticism. Instead of enhancing the expertise of journalists, the shift to networked computer platforms meant a deskilling of newswork along with attaching greater status to digital skills that news organizations were slow to develop themselves, leaving an opening for other kinds of knowledge workers to advance. The shifts reflect changes in conditions of knowledge under late or post modernism.

Industrial journalism brought to fruition and general circulation the early modern empiricism of Bacon, coupled with printing from moveable type and clockworks to schedule the hours of work. But it also corralled the elements Michel Foucault excavated in “disciplinary institutions”: hierarchical observation and surveillance, judgment of the abnormal from the norm, pedagogy for the well-rounded citizen (of whom the journalist was an exemplar), and so forth (Foucault, 1977, p. 173). By the turn of the twenty-first century, the relation of power to knowledge had inverted, and the practices of journalism in relation to other persons, groups, institutions, and the state, especially official sources and audiences, illustrate that power is knowledge. The rise of professionalism brought communication work into conflict with other cultures around the world and with other cultural values in the United States, such as diversity (Glasser, 1992), but mostly into conflict with itself, with consequences for its fate in the twenty-first century.

REFERENCES

Armstrong, A. H. (Ed.). (1970). The Cambridge history of later Greek and early medieval philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bacon, F. (1851). Of the proficience and advancement of learning. London, UK: William Pickering.

Bacon, F. (1863). Part I, Aphorism III. Novum Organum (vol. 8, pp. 67–68). Boston, MA: Taggard & Thompson.

Bacon, F. (ca. 1908). Of Heresies (1597) from Meditationes sacrae. In J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, & D. D. Heath (Eds.), The works of Francis Bacon (vol. 14, pp. 94–96). Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin.

Banning, S. A. (1998). The professionalization of journalism: A nineteenth century beginning. Journalism History, 24(4), 157–163.

Barnhurst, K. G., & Nerone, J. (2002). The form of news: A history. New York, NY: Guilford.

Barnhurst, K. G., & Nerone, J. (2012). The media in North America. In N. Higgins (Ed.), The USA and Canada 2012. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bennett, W. L., & Serrin, W. (2005). The watchdog role. In G. Overholser & K. Hall Jamieson (Eds.), The institutions of American democracy: The press. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Bledstein, Burton J. 1978. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Bleyer, W. G. (Ed.). (1918). The profession of journalism: A collection of articles on newspaper editing and publishing, taken from the Atlantic Monthly. Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/professionofjour00bleyrich

Broersma, M. (2010). The unbearable limitations of journalism: On press critique and journalism's claim to truth. International Communication Gazette, 72(1), 21–33.

Burke, P. (2000). A social history of knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Carey, J. (1986). The dark continent of American journalism. In R. K. Manoff & M. Schudson (Eds.), Reading the news (pp. 146–196). New York, NY: Pantheon.

Carr-Saunders, A. M., & Wilson, P. A. (1933). The professions. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Connolly, C. B. 1902. The ethics of modern journalism. Catholic World, 75(448), 453.

Copleston, F. (1950). Medieval philosophy: From Augustine to Duns Scotus. Westminster, MD: Newman Press.

Copleston, F. (1953). Late medieval and Renaissance philosophy. Westminster, MD: Newman Press.

Cronin, M. (1993). Trade press roles in promoting journalistic professionalism, 1884–1917. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 8(4), 227–238.

Darnton, R. (1979). The business of enlightenment: The publishing history of the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Donsbach, W. (1981). Legitimacy through competence rather than value judgments: The concept of journalistic professionalization reconsidered. International Communication Gazette, 27(1), 47–67.

Elliott, P. (1972). The sociology of the professions. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon.

Glasser, T. L. (1992). Professionalism and the delusion of diversity: The case of the education of journalists. Journal of Communication, 42(2), 131–140.

Glenn, W. M. (1949). The Sigma Delta Chi story (1909–1949). Coral Gables, FL: Glade House.

Hardt, H., & Brennen, B. (Eds.). (1995). Newsworkers: Toward a history of the rank and file. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Heyer, P. (1988). Communications and History: Theories of media, knowledge, and civilization. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Hughes, E. C. (1958). Men and their work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Hutchins Commission (1947). A free and responsible press. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hyman, A., & Walsh, J. J. (Eds.). (1967). Introduction. In Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions (pp. 1–8). New York, NY: Harper & Row.

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

Kern, S. (2003). The culture of time and space (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Larson, M. S. (1977). The rise of professionalism: A sociological analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Markus, R. A. (1970). Augustine: Reason and illumination. In A. H. Armstrong (Ed.), The Cambridge history of later Greek & early medieval philosophy (pp. 372–373). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Matheson, D. (2000). The birth of news discourse: Changes in news language in British newspapers, 1880–1930. Media, Culture and Society, 22(5), 557–573.

May, W. F. (1986). Professional ethics, the university, and the journalist. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 1(2), 20–31.

McKeon, R. (1930). Selections from the medieval philosophers. New York, NY: Scribner's.

Mencken, H. L. (1918). Newspaper morals. In W. G. Bleyer (Ed.), The profession of journalism (pp. 52–67). Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Mindich, D. (1998). Just the facts: How objectivity came to define American journalism. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Moore, W. E. (1970). The professions: Roles and rules. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Mott, F. L. (1962). American journalism: A history 1690–1960 (3rd. ed.). New York, NY: Macmillan.

Osiel, M. J. (1986). The professionalization of journalism: Impetus or impediment to a “watchdog” press. Sociological Inquiry, 56(2), 163–189.

Park, R. E. (1940). News as a form of knowledge: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 45(5), 669–686.

Pasley, J. L. (2001). “The tyranny of printers”: Newspaper politics in the early American republic. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

Plaisance, P. L. (2005). A gang of pecksniffs grows up: The evolution of journalism ethics discourse in The Journalist and Editor and Publisher. Journalism Studies, 6(4), 479–491.

Rosewater, E. (1903). Ethics of journalism. Report of the Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Convention, 80–89. National Editorial Association, Omaha, Nebraska, July 7–10.

Salcetti, M. (1995). The emergence of the reporter: Mechanization and the devaluation of editorial workers. In H. Hardt & B. Brennen (Eds.), News workers: Toward a history of the rank and file (pp. 48–74). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Schultz, J. (1998). Reviving the fourth estate. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Shapin, S. (1994). A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Siebert, F. S. (1952). Freedom of the press in England, 1476–1776. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Smythe, T. C. (2003). The Gilded Age press, 1865–1900. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Starck, K., & Sudhaker, A. (1979). Reconceptualizing the notion of journalistic professionalism across differing press systems. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 4(2), 33–52.

Waisbord, S. (2000). Watchdog journalism in South America. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Wilensky, H. L. (1964). The professionalization of everyone? American Journal of Sociology, 70(2), 137–158.

Williams, S. L. (1929). Twenty years of education for journalism: A history of the School of Journalism of the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA. Chicago, IL: E. W. Stephens. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/twentyyearsofedu028313mbp

Wilson, C. (1985). The labor of words: Literary professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Winship, A. E. (1904). New responsibilities of journalism. Report of the Proceedings the Nineteenth Annual Convention, 33–41. National Editorial Association, St. Louis, Missouri, May 16–19.

Yeo, R. (2001). Encyclopaedic visions: Scientific dictionaries and Enlightenment culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.