Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (review)

In twelve freestanding essays written over the course of twenty years, David Paul Nord crafts an important media history that details the role of newspapers in creating, maintaining, and destroying public communities. Communication is fundamental to the development of community, and political organizations, religious sects, reformist movements, and special interest groups have used it to shape interest, traditions, and habits. Although the connections between communication and community are clear, the specifics of how journalism actually works within a community are not well documented. It is specifically this issue—the function of a newspaper in a community—that Nord addresses in this text. Nord suggests that overall the press serves communities in two main ways, providing the authority of "facts" that educate and inform the citizenry and offering a public forum for democratic participation and conversation within the public sphere.

Part one of Communities of Journalism focuses on the institutional history of American journalism from the perspective of how reporters, editors, and publishers create the news. Nord explores the practice of journalism in a variety of community settings, beginning with the first English settlements in the colonies and concluding with an essay on the role of newspapers in the late nineteenth-century municipal reform. In "The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism in Chicago," Nord directly addresses the concept of community within the public realm, through which shared values of "interdependence and identity, of sentiment and sympathy" coalesce with public institutions such as the daily newspapers (109). He finds that within the context of industrialization and urbanization during the late nineteenth century, newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News helped to create a new type of public community which blurred traditional distinctions between the public and private realm.

Nord, a professor of journalism at Indiana University, also offers a reinterpretation of the John Peter Zenger seditious libel case. Nord suggests religious dissent may have actually influenced political and legal decisions in the 1735 case. Using William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper the Liberator as a case study, Nord explores the public forum function of the press in building communities. Nord finds that the origins of democratic journalism based on Alexis de Tocqueville's vision of newspapers as integral to the democratic process come to fruition in the participatory journalism of the Liberator. He argues that traditional histories that couple the establishment of democracy in journalism with the rise of the penny press in the 1830s are wrong and that the penny press was actually hostile to the participatory function and instead primarily promoted local businesses and worked to build circulation and readership.

Part two of Communities of Journalism tackles the history of journalism from the reader's perspective. Understanding that reception is a complex process often mediated by social, political, and economic factors, Nord uses a variety of creative approaches to understand how readers actually use newspapers. Nord explains that readers may actually subvert the intended meaning of the news report and maintains that it is the context in which words are written that helps to create meaning. This theme is nicely illustrated in "Readership as Citizenship in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," where Nord studies the newspaper correspondence and commentary during the 1973 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. While local authorities attempted to use the Philadelphia's Federal Gazette to control information on the epidemic, readers used the newspapers as a forum to share their fears and concerns and as a place for community participation. Readers communicated with other readers via the newspapers, not only including factual information about the yellow fever epidemic but also offering interpretations of its moral and religious meaning.

Notably, Nord also studies both the content and the actual subscribers of the New-York Magazine to illustrate the democratic potential of magazine reading in...