The press, placed back inside history.
Journalism History treats the press as a force inside history, not a footnote beside it. Media historians trace Sunday papers, election-night computers, press barons, talk radio, film reporters, and presidential attacks on journalists with careful context.
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Journalism History is a media-history series about the press as a maker of public memory. It does not treat journalism as background scenery. Newspapers, radio, television, film, publishers, reporters, and audiences become the central actors in stories about politics, culture, technology, and democracy. The show’s conversations are led by professional media historians and grounded in books, archival research, and close attention to historical evidence. Its register is academic, but the episodes remain approachable. A listener hears the machinery behind familiar myths. Sunday newspapers appear not just as bundles of newsprint, but as containers for leisure, classifieds, architecture, sports, technology, women’s sections, children’s pages, and mass culture. Election Night 1952 becomes a story about television credibility, UNIVAC, Walter Cronkite, Eric Severide, and anxiety over machine forecasting. Episodes on press barons and wartime politics examine how powerful newspaper owners shaped public understanding of Hitler, the New Deal, isolationism, racism, and anti-Semitism. The series also studies journalism’s image of itself. Film reporters, Watergate mythology, investigative process, and the long careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein all become evidence in a broader cultural record. Political conflict is a recurring thread. The show compares Richard Nixon and Donald Trump’s hostility toward journalists, while also considering why presidents, publishers, and broadcasters keep fighting over control of the public narrative. It is not nostalgia. The past is treated as useful pressure on the present. Episodes regularly return to accuracy, civic responsibility, audience engagement, technological change, and the question of what journalism makes possible. The result is a careful, historically literate series for people who want more than headlines about media trust. It explains how the press gained influence, where it failed, and why its history still shapes what citizens know.
Made for: For listeners interested in journalism, media history, history, politics, and the cultural power of newspapers, radio, television, and film. It especially suits students, educators, reporters, and history-minded listeners who like careful context over hot takes.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its historian-led attention to journalism as both evidence and actor: a record of events and a force that helped shape them. It links archival stories to present-day questions about democracy, technology, ownership, race, audience engagement, and public trust.
Journalism History is a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to re-examine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.
The Sunday paper had movie ambitions; yes, you can ask about its newsreel phase.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp look at how the five-cent Sunday paper became a testing ground for popular culture, syndication, and early mass media.
Journalism History frames the Sunday paper as a cultural machine, not just a packet of headlines. The episode moves through magazines, comics, song sheets, paper dolls, cut-out toys, dress patterns, classified ads, women's sections, architecture news, sports, technology, and…
A clear, pointed look at newspaper power, isolationism, and prejudice before World War II.
The Newspaper Axis centers major newspaper publishers in the foreign-policy crisis of the 1930s, following how isolationist politics shaped what Americans read about Hitler, the New Deal, and the path toward World War II.
A measured look at how Nixon's press battles echo through Trump's attacks on journalists.
Journalism History revisits Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's battles with the press through a steady discussion of grievance, leverage, and media power.
A 1952 election night turns new computers into awkward tests of journalistic authority.
Election Night 1952 plays as a story about television newsrooms trying not to repeat an old embarrassment while a young computer industry tries to look useful in public.
Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper world is traced through tight control, circulation stunts, and Nellie Bly's asylum reporting.
Joseph Pulitzer comes through as an immigrant success story with a sharper edge: a publisher who helped drive American newspapers toward yellow journalism while keeping an unusually tight grip on the machine behind it.
Broadcast history, preserved in signal and tape.
British radio, carefully kept alive.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Paul Moore frames The Sunday Paper, A Media History around the claim that Sunday editions became an 'anchor for consumption and popular culture' rather than just news.
Episode 146, "The Newspaper Axis," argues that six press barons in the United States and Britain helped normalize isolationism toward Adolf Hitler.
Journalism History revisits Richard Nixon and Donald Trump through their wars on the press in a conversation with Mark Feldstein.
Election night 1952 became a credibility test after the 1948 Dewey-Truman mistake and the first serious TV experiment with computers.
Journalism History's From the Vault: Newspaper Titans: Joseph Pulitzer revisits Pulitzer and Hearst as newspaper rivals, then follows Pulitzer's rise and St.
Gregory Svernovsky says Democrats entered 1990s talk radio behind Rush Limbaugh, whose audience and tone made the medium a Republican advantage.
Journalism History's 'From the Vault: Journalists on Film' follows Richard Ness through the genre he mapped in Encyclopedia of Journalists on Film, a book built from more than 4,400 movies.
["Journalism History episode 143 turns Ken Ward's Last Paper Standing into a century-long account of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, from the 1850s gold rush to the Rocky's 2009 closure.", "Terry Finneman and Nick Hirschhorn host Ward, whose research on journalism history in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains explains why Denver stayed a two-paper town for so long.", "The conversation tracks William Byers's covered-wagon race, the Post's ad-pressure tactics, and the 1926 Scripps Howard challenge that set off repeated circulation wars.", "Ward's answer is that changing advertising economics and reader habits eventually made the Rocky Mountain News unsustainable, even after the joint operating agreement kept both newsrooms alive for years."]
Melita Garza of Texas Christian University traces how San Antonio newspapers covered the Great Depression removal of Mexicans, noting that Mexicans were more than 46% of deportees from 1930 to 1939 despite being 1% of the U.S.
This episode examines the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v.
This episode explores the origins of investigative reporting in the early 1800s by abolitionists, drawing parallels to modern practices.
This episode explores the origins and early development of high school journalism in the early 1900s, focusing on the tension between student control and authentic product creation.
An interview with Catherine McGar about her book on Washington journalism during the Cold War, challenging simplistic views of reporters as dupes.
This episode examines the media framing of Monica Lewinsky during the 1998 sex scandal, providing historical context for the problematic coverage she endured.
This episode examines Franklin Roosevelt's media relations and legacy as a communicator, marking the 90th anniversary of his presidency.
This episode explores how Rebecca Stiles Taylor used her column in the Chicago Defender as an early form of influencer to rally audiences around social justice causes.
This episode explores how the gay rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s used public relations to reframe media coverage leading up to the Stonewall riots.