Current Issue: Winter 2026
Volume 43 Number 1
Winter 2026
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lori Amber Roessner
ARTICLES
Extra! Extra! Sing All About It: Portraying Newsies in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Sheet Music
Eric Freedman, Joshua S. Duchan, Vladislava Sukhanovskaya, Julia Belden, and Finn Hopkins
Newsies were essential to the circulation pipeline, cheap labor making newspapers profitable. They became cultural tropes, foci of rags-to-riches fiction, paragons of diligence, and tragic incarnations of poverty. This study examines their portrayal—or misportrayal—in popular music between the mid-1840s and the late 1930s. Most prevalent is their depiction as pitiable and often homeless waifs, laboring for pennies to feed their families. The contrasting, upbeat depiction in a minority of songs portrayed them as cheerful, enthusiastic entrepreneurs, more akin to the saccharine representations in Walt Disney’s later film and Broadway show, Newsies, than to the economic, cultural, and social realities of their situation. This study helps us better understand how popular music, a major component of culture, largely ignored the critical role of young laborers in distributing news on behalf of corporate publishing companies, sometimes at grave risk of injury and death. It also illustrates how stereotyping these children painted a still-lingering, distorted mis-portrait of their work and lives for the sake of entertaining the American middle class and reinforcing their nostalgia and preconceptions.
Consultants who worked with local television news stations starting in the 1960s promoted themselves as objective outsiders who merely interpreted audience sentiment. Yet that description mischaracterized their role and undersold their impact. These journalistic outsiders were not objective, and their influence was significant. They imported an audience-centered approach to evaluating on-air talent that disrupted broadcast news. Through archival research of audience reports spanning the years 1963–1979, this study examines how McHugh and Hoffman (M&H), the first news consulting firm, helped stations identify their core audience and cater to viewer preferences and tastes in newscasters. M&H pushed newsroom leaders to consider how to make journalists marketable to lower-middle class viewers. Consultants’ advice on how to come across as authoritative and likable helped to shape journalists’ on-air presentation and reinforce restrictive norms for appearance and vocal delivery.
Yellow Seeds was a progressive student organization founded in Philadelphia, and the group played an important role during the Save Chinatown movement. Despite being active for less than a decade, Yellow Seeds produced the only bilingual newspaper for the Chinatown community in the 1970s. The self-titled publication helped promote Yellow Seeds’s effort in community outreach and offered a more nuanced picture of the power dynamics in Chinatown during that period. Using Yellow Seeds as an example, this paper argues that the role of the ethnic press can be contingent on the publication’s purpose, as well as the period in which it is situated. Looking at the entire known publication of Yellow Seeds, this paper discusses how its coverage and position have reflected the issues within the community, including the fight to save community spaces, the presence of multiple neglected groups, and the uneasy relationship between Yellow Seeds and other community institutions.
BOOK REVIEWS
Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow
Susan Bragg (Free Access Review)
Newspaper Woman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton
Wendy Plotkin
Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting
Mike Conway
Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America
Thomas A. Mascaro
Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Nicholas Hirshon
Binding Media: Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from Across the Americas
Will T. Mari
Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games
Zachary Rzicznek
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
The Paper (2025), Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, Peacock
Brian R. Sheridan (Free access review)
East German press, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), Berlin State Library, https://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ddr-presse/
Sheila B. Lalwani (Link pending)
ENDNOTES
Some Thoughts on Moving Forward with Journalism History
Debra van Tuyll
Endnotes
Lor Amber Roessner