ABSTRACT
This article re-frames the early twentieth-century news partnerships of African-American Pullman porters and the black press as an example of networked journalism that functioned efficiently for decades, well before the Information Age. Networked journalism refers to a twenty-first-century style of reportage that leverages the efforts of many people to tell a story, from local amateurs acting as citizen journalists to professional journalists working for official news outlets. Pullman porters, who served America's wealthy aboard luxury sleeper cars for nearly 100 years, used the railways as an antecedent to computerized social networks. They achieved modern notions of information crowdsourcing and collaborative news editing, which helped shape and convey political thought in the black press after World War I. This historical analysis examines the Pullman porter's alliances with five prominent African-American newspapers from 1914 (at the start of the Great War) to 1939 (the end of the Harlem Renaissance): Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh Courier. This study reveals that the Pullman porter's contributions to journalism ranged from clandestine news aggregator and distributor, to men who left the porter profession altogether to become full-time journalists.
