ABSTRACT
Some of the oldest clichés circulating in journalism mythology refer to the power of the press. Notions about such power typically rest on assumptions about the impact of messages on people and public opinion. Since media content is thereby said to influence institutions, ideas and places, research into news usually begins with content. Entire research agendas center on how or when news coverage affects public opinion or policy, and who or what is reported as being powerful or powerless. What these projects ignore is how news stories are selected and organized, and whose definitions of power are in effect. Studies of news sources show how people or organizations outside the newsroom manage more and less successfully to manipulate journalistic decisions. Nonetheless, this gives insufficient attention to how journalists, with what experiences and acting by what processes, produce the news. What is proposed here is a study of the work lives of journalists – by examining the conditions and circumstances in which they produce news, with particular attention to how these conditions and circumstances are gendered. This chapter offers some general methodological, philosophical and historical speculations on behalf of that programmatic agenda. These claims are backed up with evidence grounded in autobiographical descriptions from several women who worked for newspapers in Britain and the USA in the early and mid-twentieth century.
