This page is an archive of links to blog entries, aggregation pages and things I’ve written about newspapers and journalism on my previous blogs.
It’s titled “Old News” because something like “The Future of Journalism, With or Without Newspapers” wouldn’t fit on the menu. The image at the right represents very old news — the first continuously published newspaper in America.
But here’s a more significant text: A turn-of-the-twentieth-century journalist’s appraisal of things the newspaper does for us, modeled very loosely on the church’s list of “works of mercy,” Mr. Dooley on Newspaper Publicity. Dooley’s creator, Finley Peter Dunne, probably loved newspapers, but he was willing to satirize the public’s over-estimation of them — or their publishers’ egos and hubris. That was more than 100 years ago.
I also discuss newspaper history issues at my other blog (and maybe book-in-progress) called JHeroes.com or “Newspaper Heroes on the Air,” which is about the portrayal of journalists in radio dramatic series. Some of those series created romantic-hero reporters, super-her0 reporters, or amusingly human reporters. Others dramatized the lives of real-life journalists, from Horace Greeley and Nellie Bly to the publishers of the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette in the 1940s. Give a look — and listen, since every entry includes at least one playable radio show from the past.
Articles from my older blogs:
- May 31, 2009: The save-journalism and save-newspapers debate
- March 15, 2009: Learning from history: Saving journalism, not newspapers.
- Dec. 26, 2004: Saving Journalism May Not Mean Saving Newspapers (Duplicate copy)
- 2000-2005 About weblogs as journalism
- 2005-2009 Media ethics links
- 2006-2008 Online news writing tips
- June 2004: News on Demand: Using RSS aggregators to follow the news (for PC World magazine, with a comparison chart and a supplement that didn’t get into the magazine)
- December 2003: Notes about the Harvard Narrative Journalism Conference
- 2003-2009 More ‘topic’ pages from the old blog
- 2003-2004 AEJMC Newspaper Division resources (a really ugly green and yellow color scheme, based on the one then in use at the AEJMC home page)
Bob Stepno's Other Journalism 
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