“A Measure of Theory?”: Considering the Role of Theory in Media History

Journalism’s institutional discourses in the pre-Internet era: Industry threats and persistent nostalgia at the American Society of Newspaper Editors

“…As a resource for exploring how industry discourses sustain and produce institutional dynamics and prescribe possible responses to extant conditions and crises, videos of ASNE conference panel discussions, collected in the C-SPAN Archives, act as a previously untapped ‘forum where people [namely journalists and industry thought-leaders] reveal the process of deliberation and exhortation that undergird the deployment of practices’ which are so important for our understanding of journalism history (Roessner et al, 2013). Although industry discourses of the current crisis period have been examined ad nauseam in popular (Amanpour, 2016; Packer, 2014; Shafer, 2016; Tanz, 2017) and academic (Bogaerts and Carpentier, 2013; Creech and Nadler, 2018; Waisbord, 2013;) studies, historical perspectives offer a means for showing how ‘the connections we see in our current era and the past are either the working out of particular power relations, or the temporary alignment of fragile, provisional values’ (Anderson, 2017: 78).…”