In 1870, Ernest Fanny Boulton and Frederick Stella Park were arrested in London. Their crime? Presenting as women outside their theatrical act.

Fanny and Stella had appeared in newspapers before, known for their colorful personas as entertainers, sometimes praised and sometimes criticized for their performances. Boulton was revered for being the “best amateur performer off the boards,” while Park had a talent for interpreting matrons, dowagers, and old women in pantomimes. As long as their gender-bending impersonating talents were put to the good use of gentlemanly entertainment, there was nothing wrong with their behavior.

But this time, they were written up because the police had decided that their performance had gone too far: they carried their feminine personas from the stage onto the street. Fanny and Stella were arrested with a “potential suitor,” a young wealthy man seemingly unaware of the identities of the two. They were wearing their finest attire—Stella, a cerise satin dress with an open square body and a silk scarf wrapped around her neck; Fanny, a green embroidered gown paired with golden-plaited hair in Greek style (as reported by the arresting officer)—when they were charged with public indecency for luring wealthy men under false pretenses.

Boulton and Park were neither the first nor the last crossdressers in Victorian Britain. At the time, it was not unusual to see men playing women on stage. The word “drag” was invented as an acronym back in the 16th century to describe the phenomenon of men “Dressed Resembling A Girl” to interpret female theatrical roles on stage, as women were not allowed to be actors during this period.

Fanny and Stella, photographed by Frederick Spalding about a year before their trial in 1870. Public domain.

But Fanny and Stella weren’t mere cross-dressing actors: they also lived public lives as women as often as they did as men. Sometimes, they attended society outings as Frederick and Ernest, but other times they showed up in satin dresses and white gloves, kept their plaited wigs on and behaved with all the mannerisms of upper-class women of their time.

Today, politicized digital media and viral videos subject trans and non-binary individuals to unwarranted, sensationalized scrutiny—sometimes putting their lives at risk. While the technology to carry out systematic scrutiny and online verbal attacks is relatively new, the public appetite towards making trans-focused stories a matter of public safety has been there since the Boulton and Park trial in the 19th century, if not before.

Boulton and Park’s trial aimed to establish exactly what type of danger the pair posed—whether the unspeakable act of sodomy (homosexuality as a concept we know today still was in its infancy) or maybe theft and deception, the latter a fear stemmed from a common type of highway robbery in which carriage drivers stopped to help a damsel in distress only to be robbed at gunpoint by thieves in disguise.

First, a medical professional was called in to prove sodomy, subjecting Boulton and Park to an invasive physical procedure. When that was inconclusive, they turned to a lengthy trial to determine whether the pair’s double identity could constitute a crime.

Side by side the courtroom trial was an equally relentless trial by media. The legal proceedings only took on their full significance as newspapers and tabloids turned Fanny and Stella into a spectacle, emphasizing the oddity of the two “women personators”—as they referred to them—to sell copies. Thanks to the reach of print media at the time, the pictures and sensational details from the trial were broadcast up to the remotest corners of the nation. While Victorians may not have had television, let alone TikTok, to keep up with trending videos, trial illustrations circulated so rapidly that people could feel they were present at the tribunal, watching as the events unfolded live.

Early in the trial, cartoonists drew Fanny and Stella with feminine features, indistinguishable from other women. In the sketch showing their arrest on Bow Street, they were graceful figures whose appearance suggested nothing unusual or wrong. Without prior knowledge of the context, one might assume they were ladies of respectable society. But as the trial proceeded, and a public appetite for news of Fanny and Stella grew, the media’s depiction of the women shifted significantly. Increasingly, Fanny and Stella were depicted as grotesque, their masculine features emphasized and their faces frowning, mugshot-like.

The press coverage also fueled harassment of others. A remark by the unforgiving press about Fanny and Stella wearing long-haired wigs while in the privacy of their homes, for instance, quickly was printed in the tabloids. In the days following, readers across the nation heckled and harassed those who they suspected were wearing a wig. Meanwhile, columns in the daily press such as Dundee Courier and Newry Reporter reported a craze of normal citizens in “eccentric clothing” being harassed on the streets.

By transforming an otherwise trivial case into a public sensation, the media outlets gave people ammunition with which to judge and execute fellow citizens who didn’t conform to the societal standards of gender and appearance. From London to Edinburgh, and metropolitan Liverpool to rural Cornwall, Fanny and Stella, in their visible queerness, become a new symbol of what to fear. The relentless debate fueled by the media cost Fanny and Stella—along with countless others—their freedom.

Today, Fanny and Stella’s trial is being replayed repeatedly in regard to restrooms, drag story hours, and participation in sports. Trans people don’t need to be thrust into a court of law to face incessant judgement, misgendering, and abuse. Simply existing is grounds to be dragged, unwillingly, into the public eye.

Whenever the conversation sparks, be it on a right-wing or left-leaning outlet, the media and the public draw connections between trans women’s gender identity and their intrinsic danger. As a result, trans women are at risk of attack, as was the case for Lauren Jackson, who was beaten up while walking toward the female restrooms at a state beach in Oregon by an attacker who was emboldened and (mis)informed by extreme right-wing outlets.

In the blink of an eye, new examples of how we are failing genderqueer and trans people come up: most recently, the death of non-binary student Nex Benedict brought the news flow to a halt, forcing the media to grapple with the connection between hatred, online and offline, and how it disproportionately affects queer and non-binary people.

In Fanny and Stella’s case, one cartoon unexpectedly changed the destiny of the trial and turned it into farce. In the sketch, officers are depicted searching through the two ladies’ dressing rooms, garment by garment, looking for incriminating evidence to establish whether their attire could be considered theatrical props (which would make the defendants innocent) or proper ladies’ frocks (rendering them guilty). Presented with this surreal scene, public opinion shifted. Rather than treating it as a criminal case involving sodomy at the very least and possibly treason, they recognized the trivial hair-splitting nature of the case, and the rage subsided toward Fanny and Stella and their alleged criminal capabilities. When the next paper installment came out, and politicians moved on to other campaign-winning topics, they had already moved on.

It is time people face today’s similar absurdity, and acknowledge that marathon losers (trans athletes receiving a disproportionate attention, considering they constitute the 0.0003%), as well as bathroom users, are simply people just going about their daily lives. By debating private lives as topics of public concern, we jeopardize the already precarious safety and existence of those involved. By elevating everyday instances to priority politics, we play a risky game and obscure the real issues politicians should spend their time on, instead of focusing on what’s inside people’s knickers.

When we allow gender affirmation to be presented as an issue of protecting public safety, we allow trans people to be scapegoated across all areas of public life, from public spaces to sports and education. The absurdity is worthy of mockery, but the dangers are infinite.

The post When Victorian Newspapers Put Gender-Bending on Trial appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The writer went on to demand that Congress make citizenship harder to obtain, so the government would be protected “against the vicious and criminal, the incompetent and the unfit.”

Sound familiar?

The Trump administration’s endless, bigoted campaign against immigrants may seem shocking. But the rhetoric accompanying that campaign, down to the metaphors comparing immigrants to small, loathsome animals, is nothing new. Much of what we hear today echoes opinions like the ones expressed in that editorial, published in the San Antonio Light, during the early years of the nation’s worst economic downturn, the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst’s own eugenicist views were proliferated throughout the newspaper titan’s media empire, which included the San Antonio Light. Hearst, who, as Fortune noted, owned “the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” had a platform that reached an estimated 5 million daily and 7 million Sunday subscribers in major American cities.

In San Antonio, the Hearst editorial messages reverberated through both English- and Spanish-language media. The Light’s “vermin” editorial, along with its other anti-immigrant diatribes, were at once xenophobic and ironic, as they were published in a city that represented the crucible of Spanish-colonial culture and the U.S.’s Mexican American future. These immigration arguments, however, were far from parochial—they were regional, national, and even transnational. In turn, they made San Antonio’s print culture a case study for the nation’s immigration debates of that day—as well as our own.

While media technology was very different in the early 1930s, at least one important thing was the same then as now: News organizations were divided into camps with polarized ideas about who might be considered American. Many newspapers, including the Spanish-language outlet La Prensa, met the Hearst attacks with equally vociferous counternarratives extolling the virtues of immigrants to the United States.

In examining the 1930s back-and-forth between the news camps, something emerges that might be called “the mediated immigrant.” Unlike the real-life immigrant, composed of flesh and blood and known through personal experience, the “mediated” or “newspaper” immigrant is constructed of the themes, narratives, and rhetoric that U.S. broadsheets and tabloids offered their readers.

San Antonio was a perfect environment for cultivating this mediated immigrant. There, the arguments over immigration weren’t theoretical; the United States was in the process of kicking hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country, and Texas sat at the center of the story.

During the Great Depression, approximately 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated to Mexico, courtesy of city and county governments nationwide. The formal and largely voluntary repatriation program—which required immigrants to process through local Mexican consulates—was the gentle way to go. Many people were rounded up by law enforcement and deported after a court hearing.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some who had never lived in Mexico, were forced from the United States through Texas, whose 1,254-mile frontier with Mexico is the longest of any U.S. border state. Caravans of hundreds of immigrants crossed the state as they fled with their worldly goods and farm animals packed up or tied to cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons. Others poked their heads out of train windows, taking in the dry, dusty landscape of Texas—their last view of the U.S. home they were leaving for an uncertain future in Mexico.

It was an exodus of biblical proportions. Yet the actual story received scant news coverage in papers such as Light, whose editorial page preferred broader, bigoted denunciations.

Meanwhile, the independent English-language San Antonio Express—a powerhouse which represented the Southwest’s banking, ranching, and railroad interests and their investments in Texas’s economic, cultural, and social relationship with Mexico—focused its reporting not so much of farmworkers being removed, but of their employers, U.S. farmers and ranchers, who were suddenly left with fruit and vegetables rotting in fields, and chores undone. The Express’s editorial page campaigned against legislation being debated in Congress that for the first time would restrict Mexican immigration, arguing that Mexicans did “work native white men generally will not do.” In making this argument, the Express called Mexicans “indispensable,” even as it marked them as racially distinct.

It was left largely to La Prensa to convey the exodus’s human dimension, including the starvation and poverty that befell many when they returned to an economically paralyzed Mexico.

Under the Mexican immigrant publisher Ignacio Lozano, La Prensa had become the foremost exemplar of Spanish-language news in the country. Founded in 1913, it circulated in almost every state in the nation, and also in Mexico. Its sister publication, La Opinión, which Lozano started in Los Angeles three years before the stock market crash of 1929, is still in business today. Through his news outlets in these two major American cities founded by Spanish-speaking immigrants, Lozano would help define what it meant to be Mexican and American.

La Prensa emerged as a champion of Mexicans in the face of attacks during this period of forced migration. For instance, one U.S. official in El Paso—referred to only as one “high North American bureaucrat”—characterized the Mexican deportees as “‘lunatics,’ demented people, and prostitutes,” providing a veneer of justification for their removal. La Prensa was quick to report the Mexican consul general’s protests of the smear.

Likewise, La Prensa sprang into action when John C. Box, a congressman from East Texas and a leading proponent of closing the door to Mexican immigration, complained in the language of white nationalism about the “Mexican peon population … injuring farmers and farm life and working and middle class Americans of every group” as well as “injuring public health, burdening charities.”

Countering this image of Mexicans as weak, undesirable, and racially inferior, La Prensa quoted Texas railroad builder Col. Samuel Robertson’s homage to the Mexican role in developing Texas: “Neither the Americans of the pure white race, Englishmen, Welshman … not even the negroes could have opened these lands, infested with snakes, coyotes and vermin; no race other than the Mexican has been macerated in the hands and legs, by the strong spines of the cactus; these workers of Indian blood are forgotten heroes who have made civilization possible in the [Rio Grande] Valley.”

Through this vivid prose of the early 20th-century press, the mediated immigrant took on a form still recognizable today: In Hearst’s newspapers, Mexicans were vicious criminals who constituted vermin. On La Prensa, Mexicans were indigenous heroes who conquered vermin. For the San Antonio Express, the immigrant was a critical economic component whose existence Texas depended upon to thrive.

However they were characterized, as La Prensa assured its readers, Mexicans would remain a part of the nation. Presciently, and on its front page in a banner headline, the paper offered the most vigorous rebuttal to the anti-Mexican hysteria that fueled calls for limiting immigration from Mexico, when its columnist Rudolfo Uranga declared:

There will always be Mexicans in the United States, whether temporarily or permanently … Even though some anti-Mexicanists and xenophobes shout furiously for their removal and exclusion … they will not achieve it because it is no longer possible in our century.

Uranga wrote those words in 1929. Now almost a century old, his writing carries all the more relevance.

The post How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In San Pedro, a blue-collar coastal neighborhood defined by the Port of Los Angeles and its large population of Italians and Croatians, I never thought about my cultural identity. Japanese-Americans were once a large presence on Terminal Island, but when the government rounded up the Japanese fishermen and their families in the early hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, most never returned.

So the ties that bound me to the Japanese-American community were modest at best. Even then, I knew how valuable The Rafu Shimpo was. How much it meant.

The first time I appeared in The Rafu, it was during my full ’90s-era glory: giant hair, off-the-shoulder black jersey dress, and a faraway expression.

I had been selected as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA and I was acutely aware that The Rafu profiled the new inductees in their annual graduation issue. As incredible as it was to receive the honor from UCLA, I think what meant the most at the time was that I would be featured in the pages of The Rafu Shimpo.

For Japanese-Americans, getting into the The Rafu meant you made it, you were somebody, at least among the vast interconnected community of friends, family, and relations. Friends of your parents who got The Rafu would send clippings. Even for me that community validation was important.

That’s a small slice of what this newspaper has meant to generations of Japanese-Americans. A look at the whole pie reveals that The Rafu Shimpo is the last of its kind: a bilingual Japanese-American daily with two separate news staffs covering politics, civil rights, crime, healthcare, sports.

The Rafu Shimpo’s editorial staff in the 1930s

 
The Japanese edition started first in L.A.’s Little Tokyo in 1903, but its English companion has been running since 1926, when Louise Suski was hired to get it going. The Rafu has spent over a century covering one of the earliest Asian-American communities in the U.S. Six generations now have lived and grown up here, with The Rafu documenting all of it, with the exception of that dark period during World War II when Japanese-Americans were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps. Remarkably, The Rafu returned to publication in 1946, less than one year after Japanese-Americans resettled in Little Tokyo. I was conscious of this legacy when I became the English-language editor of the paper in 2002, after working at other Japanese-American outlets and a newspaper in Japan.

When Publisher Michael Komai announced in March that the paper was in a financial crisis and could close in December, I was devastated. And then came the meetings, phone calls, emails, and texts. Many Japanese-Americans and others have come to rely on the paper and cherish it as a link through 113 years of Japanese-American culture and history. They voiced their concerns over the state of the paper and asked how they can ensure The Rafu continues on.

If The Rafu closes, the community itself will develop a sort of collective amnesia.

To give you one example: A white man in his 60s recently came into the office. He had befriended an elderly Japanese-American woman who had recently died and stopped by our office to pick up copies of her obituary. “I just wanted somebody here at the newspaper to know how much what you do meant to her,” he said, explaining that his friend, who was a member of the Nisei generation (American-born children of Japanese immigrants), read the paper everyday from cover to cover.

My aunt called to let me know she had contributed to the subscription effort, and others revealed that their parents worked at the newspaper and even fell in love here. (This is also what happened to me: I met my husband Eric when he worked in the advertising department.)

Rafu was not as central to my parents’ lives. They were among the post-World War II generation that moved their children away from Japanese neighborhoods to, in their case, a predominately white suburb. It was when I visited my Nana Asayo in Gardena, another L.A.-area Japanese-American hub about 30 minutes away from San Pedro, that I was exposed to The Rafu. Nana, who died in 2012 at 104 years old, subscribed almost the entirety of her life. My first attempts to read Japanese were by her side glancing at the newspaper’s front page.

An archival image of The Rafu Shimpo’s typesetters

 
She was proud of being Nisei, born and raised on the plantations of Hawaii. During World War II she took care of my mom and uncle in a tarpaper barrack at the arid Gila River internment camp in Arizona. The news that she would receive an apology from the U.S. government for this harsh, unjust treatment, came in the pages of The Rafu.

I first joined The Rafu staff in 2000. In the early years, I remember reporting on the fight to keep a jail from being built next to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, the quest by Little Tokyo Service Center to find a home for the Budokan gymnasium, and Japanese-Americans finally receiving their college and high school diploma decades after they were uprooted from their schools and homes during the internment period.

Even then, we had crises. The paper was dealing with the rising cost of printing and mailing, plus a lack of vision about how to deal with these issues. Relations between staff and the publisher soured considerably after the abrupt dismissal of the printing staff in the late ’90s. An attempt to restructure the paper and turn around its declining fortunes resulted in the departure of our longtime associate editor and several other reporters. At the end of this process, I was asked to lead the English section in 2002. Since then, I have dealt with the departure of more key staff members, and reductions in the number of days we publish and the physical size of the paper.

In my time as editor, we’ve continued to cover issues the mainstream media hasn’t touched. For example, the sale of the nursing and retirement homes managed by the long-standing nonprofit Keiro Senior Healthcare, which has catered to the needs of aging Japanese and Japanese-Americans for 50 years, to Pacifica Companies, a private for-profit equity firm. Once The Rafu brought this issue forward, readers organized, held rallies, signed petitions, and garnered considerable support from politicians in Washington and Sacramento to prevent the sale. It is hard to imagine this kind of action without a publication like The Rafu Shimpo there to unify and amplify the voices of the community’s diverse factions.

While we’re proud of these moments, we’re struggling with how to preserve the past while embracing the present and future. Our mostly elderly readership is passing away. Their more-Americanized children don’t feel they need to get news from us to navigate their world. Many get their dose of Japanese and Japanese-American culture at blogs like Angry Asian Man and via Twitter. And the community has dispersed out from Little Tokyo and intermarried with groups of other backgrounds. Ask most Yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese-Americans) and their only connection to Japanese America is through basketball leagues.

A typical delivery bag for The Rafu Shimpo, used up through the 1980s

 
Are historically significant relics of the past like The Rafu still relevant amongst the Yonsei (fourth), Gosei (fifth), and Rokusei (sixth) generations? My answer is yes. First, for those based in Los Angeles, there are too many moneyed power players here in Little Tokyo, whether private developers or government entities such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority, that threaten to alter the neighborhood, one of the last three remaining Japantowns in California. In recent months, a number of historic businesses have closed or been forced to relocate, driven out by higher rents.

Second, even younger generations have an interest in connecting with their Japanese-American heritage. We have been reaching out to young writers and Asian-American Studies professors, who can in turn reach out to their college-aged students. This summer, one of our brightest interns will be spearheading an effort to have student union clubs from all over the Nikkei diaspora (all generations of Japanese immigrants), contribute their work to The Rafu. We are looking into the viability of a Rafu app—to reach our new readers where they read—while we clean up our website and engage with and increase our social media presence.

Our goal right now is to get 10,000 new subscribers (equivalent to raising $500,000 in new income), so the newspaper will survive. These new subscribers would bring The Rafu the capital infusion it needs to update old equipment, pay staff better, and restructure the publication.

Ten thousand is a daunting number. But it’s something many Japanese people won’t flinch at: There’s the Japanese term manpo kei. It involves walking 10,000 steps a day for a long, healthy life.

The post A Cultural Touchstone Fends off the End of an Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The purchase is good news because it’s a vote of confidence in the continuing relevance of metropolitan newspapers. Adelson is one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful business tycoons, with a net worth estimated at more than $20 billion. He is such an important Republican funder that presidential candidates half-jokingly refer to their bids for his support as the “Adelson primary.” Adelson is also hugely influential in Israel, where he owns newspapers and is close to the prime minister, and in China, given his casino company’s dominant presence in Macau. The fact that Adelson (his sons, technically) deemed their hometown paper a coveted trophy (they paid an inflated $140 million for it) is a sign that newspapers may be making a comeback, at least as billionaire status symbols. Ten years ago when I worked at the Los Angeles Times we practically begged deep-pocketed Angelenos to make an offer for the paper, but to little avail.

Business tycoons, like the rest of us mortals, are susceptible to trends and fads, and when someone like Adelson considers newspapers as desirable a commodity as sports franchises or yachts, other prospective buyers tend to follow. Indeed, Jeff Bezos’ 2013 purchase of the Washington Post may have done more than anything in a long time to make newspaper ownership cool again. And that’s what this industry needs—billionaires eager to rescue newspapers for their cool factor. Certainly no one has been rushing to buy them these days for their profitability.

The bad news, of course, is that Adelson’s injection of resources into the newspaper will likely come at the expense of its independence. Why, after all, does he really want to control the paper? You now have the wealthiest tycoon in the city’s leading industry controlling its largest news outlet. Adelson no doubt believes he is providing a civic good by ensuring the viability of the newspaper’s future, but he also has a strong agenda when it comes to litigation and regulatory issues affecting his casino empire, and how they are covered in the press. Even if Adelson turns out to be a more benign owner than liberal critics are assuming he will be, it’s safe to assume that the Review-Journal will not be known in coming years for its aggressive reporting on the casino industry or on Adelson’s business dealings in Macau.

By the same token, while Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post provided a needed boost in resources to one of the nation’s most important newspapers, it’s safe to assume that the Post won’t be taking the lead in covering how Amazon is altering the retail landscape and influencing legislation in various jurisdictions. But at least Bezos isn’t a Washington insider, giving his journalists a great deal more autonomy than their counterparts in Las Vegas are likely to enjoy.

Debates about media ownership, about who controls the printing presses and airwaves, have long been an impassioned subject in this country, and for good reason. The First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to directly control who can or can’t own newspapers, but Washington has for decades imposed media ownership limits via its power to award licenses to run TV and radio news broadcasters. The somewhat antiquated media ownership rules, and the public debates around them, blindly champion the ideal of so-called localism, of preferring media owners embedded in the communities they cover.

Adelson’s ownership of the Review-Journal suggests the potential downsides to local ownership of media. So does history: It was the local ownership of many TV stations in the deep South that blocked national network coverage of the civil rights movement a half-century ago.

At the same time, the critically-acclaimed movie Spotlight offers a veiled homage to the underappreciated advantages to out-of-town ownership. The movie, about the Boston Globe’s inquiry into the epidemic of Catholic priests abusing minors and its cover-up by the church, barely alludes to the fact that the newspaper was at the time owned by the The New York Times. Much of Spotlight’s dramatic tension revolves around the journalists’ willingness to stand up to, and upset, powerful local interests, but little is made of the fact that their institutional employer was insulated from such pressure by the fact that its owner wasn’t local.

Having worked at four different newspapers, I know there are always trade-offs when it comes to who owns media, and that the character of owners isn’t solely determined by whether they are local or out of town, individual or corporate. It is hard to come by truly judicious and independent owners who can act as truly neutral community arbiters. The profile of the ideal media owner, from a public interest standpoint, is an individual or family with deep roots in a community that is focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the news business, and won’t compromise that journalistic integrity to advance other business interests. Think of the Sulzbergers of New York or the Grahams of Washington.

Problem is, such owners are becoming an endangered species, given the challenges to the traditional newspaper business model. Many 20th-century newspaper-owning families were admirably principled and civic-minded, but it’s also true that they were making big profits that shored up their independence. In its present crisis, the newspaper business needs more people like Bezos and Adelson to enter the fray, to subsidize newsgathering with fortunes made in other businesses. The hope is that such individuals will do so because they believe it’s a worthy philanthropic cause, or because they think they can re-engineer the business model over time to make decent returns on a once distressed asset.

The worry, however, is that new owners will wade into the business not for those reasons, but to help their own pre-existing agendas. Which is why we should all keep an eye on what happens in Vegas. Contrary to Sin City’s marketing slogan, whatever happens there with the Review-Journal and its new owner is unlikely to stay there. It will help shape a national trend.

The post I’m Happy Sheldon Adelson Wants to Own a Newspaper appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But Sullivan’s departure from the blog world is a good moment to reconsider a revolutionary form that has matured–and to think about what is essential about blogs and makes them likely to endure. (Credit, or hat-tip, as bloggers might put it, to this question of essential nature, is due to the Greek philosopher Plato, and a reminder that even when writing about new technology, it always helps to have a grounding in the classics of humanities.)

The pajamas—what bloggers other than myself were widely reported to wear as they typed away—aren’t essential. But blogs are well positioned to survive, in part because a blog is about an individual, not an institution, in an era when individuals matter more than institutions.

The value to the reader of a blog is provided by the individual journalist, not the brand for which he or she happens to write. Andrew Sullivan’s readers followed him from AndrewSullivan.com to Time, The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast. People read Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting on the Middle East because it is by Jeffrey Goldberg. It doesn’t matter to readers whether it appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Bloomberg View. Paul Krugman’s readers don’t care whether he is writing in Slate, The New York Times, or The New York Review of Books. If Krugman left The New York Times and started writing for the Washington Post, readers would follow him there, just as technology columnist Kara Swisher’s readers followed her from the Wall Street Journal to Recode.

Blogs, by their nature, offer a point of view and have a voice, and that’s the way that journalism and media are heading. The advantage of the blog over the publication or media outlet is fundamental here: It’s less complicated for an individual to form and express an opinion than for an institution to express one. Bloggers, unlike old-fashioned journalists, don’t follow the convention of attempting to pretend not to have any opinions about the news they are covering. They also are freer to express idiosyncratic, outsider views than newspaper columnists, even the best of whom are constrained by their institutions and their audiences.

And while the ability to produce opinion quickly can be abused, blogs provide the kind of connection and curation that is necessary to understand a world with so much news and information. Successful blogs use hyperlinks to send us out into the web; the blog is guide and greeter. A great blogger can be a personal information concierge, and is likely offering that service for free. Blogs are often bargains.

And not just for readers. The blog’s most enduring feature is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can start one, and that remains the subversive, democratizing, revolutionary beauty of it. The Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge, one guy with a laptop, can drive the news cycle as decisively as 100-year-old institutions with hundreds of millions of dollars invested in printing presses or television studios, highly educated editors or super-attractive anchors.

I’ve been on both sides of this divide. I ran the Harvard Crimson, a century-old institution with a brick building and presses in the basement. I worked at and have written for big newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, and I tried to revive in print an old newspaper brand, the New York Sun, with a news and editorial staff that eventually totaled more than 50. Since the Sun ceased print publication in September 2008, I’ve been operating FutureOfCapitalism.com and SmarterTimes.com for a cost that is less than 1 percent of what was spent producing the Sun.

As Andrew Sullivan acknowledged in his retirement note, bloggers are prone to burnout. But so are old-fashioned journalists. In some ways it is easier to take a vacation when you have colleagues to keep things running while you are gone. In other ways, though, it may be easier to take your laptop along and blog from the beach when you don’t have a staff back at the office to worry about. The best bloggers, such as Glenn Reynolds, Elizabeth Spiers and Megan McArdle, combine blogging with other activities, such as teaching and book writing. I’ve found blogging and book-writing to be a nice combination of the fast and slow games, the instant and the long-lasting.

I’ve seen the advantages and disadvantages of the old media world, and of the blog world, too. Blogging runs the risk of solipsism. The reporting resources and reputations of institutions are useful in getting phone calls returned, landing interviews, gaining access, and attention. But the issue isn’t whether, given a choice, we might return to the pre-blog world, or inhabit or invent, as Ben Smith imagines, a “post-blog” world. There is no turning back. Like it or not, we live in a blog media world.

The post Blogs Are Not Dead appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The critique that journalism has been corrupted by commercial entertainment is remarkably old. It goes at least as far back as the 1830s when mass-circulation papers first appeared. These “penny papers” were accused of lowering journalistic standards for including human-interest stories and, ironically, for conducting interviews. The tabloid papers of the late-1800s were tagged with the pejorative “yellow journalism” because they included comics and their front pages featured larger headlines and photographs. The “yellow” papers were condemned for promoting style over substance, entertainment over education, and emotion over reason. Sound familiar?

As a media scholar who studies the history of U.S. journalism, I’ve long been fascinated by this recycling of journalism debates. Why do we see the same century-old rationales being used to distinguish “good” journalism from “bad”?

The answer to this question lies in the class tensions that have surrounded the commercial news industry in America since its inception. The American news market has long been divided into two sectors—one “serious,” one tabloid—that serve as a proxy for deeper social antagonisms. These divergent news markets and antagonisms have, at times, been aligned with different political camps.

In the “golden era” of broadcast journalism during the 1950s and 1960s, three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) controlled American television, and their news programs enjoyed a nearly universal audience that crossed social lines. Network anchors formulated a middlebrow journalistic voice that seemed to transcend the high and low taste divisions that fractured the 19th-century news landscape. But before we praise this era for reaching a great class compromise, let’s clarify the definition of middlebrow culture. It is not, as historian Joan Rubin points out, a happy medium between working and upper class taste; rather it is a cultural style that seeks to spread and democratize elite culture.

Newscasters of this era saw themselves as information experts who served the public by translating the “official” knowledge of intellectuals and government authorities into a popular language the lay viewing audience could understand. Pop culture, visual stylization and the display of emotion—things that could engage a popular audience as opposed to merely inform them—were seen as impediments to factual reporting. Thus, newscasts were visually austere, matching the dispassionate anchoring style epitomized by Walter Cronkite. Of course, this middlebrow culture created a vacuum for tabloid journalism in the U.S. news market and it was only a matter of time before someone filled it.

Enter Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born mogul and owner of News Corp first began his conquest of global media in Britain. In the late-1960s, he repurposed two London papers—News of the World and the Sun—into popular and profitable tabloids. Murdoch’s papers were criticized for their pun-heavy, sensational headlines (“headless body in topless bar”) and their racy, “tit-and-bum” editorial approach. Believing the same down-market strategy could work in the U.S., Murdoch purchased a handful of American newspapers in the 1970s and transformed them into British-style tabloids—most notably, the New York Post.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Murdoch’s print ventures in the U.S. were either losing money or yielding mediocre profits. Interestingly, he attributed this to Americans’ lack of class-consciousness. In Australia and the UK, news consumers embraced the tastes of their own class, he told one biographer. In contrast, Americans are driven by what he called a “self-improvement ethic” that leads them to have aspirational tastes. So Murdoch adopted his tabloid strategy to the medium that dominated suburban American: television.

In 1986, Murdoch launched Fox Broadcasting Company, the first network to break the longstanding dominance of the Big Three. Fox succeeded where previous attempts at launching a fourth network failed in part because of its brilliant counter-programming strategy. Fox positioned itself against the middlebrow sensibilities of network programs like The Cosby Show with brash, edgy shows like Married with Children and Cops. Fox was the anti-genteel. A Current Affair was Murdoch’s first successful television news program in America. Like Fox’s sitcoms and reality shows, A Current Affair was self-consciously lowbrow and proudly anti-elitist. Even more established and serious programs like 48 Hours and Nightline parroted its innovative use of graphics and sound effects. Foreshadowing today’s cable news, A Current Affair anchors like Maury Povich spoke in personal terms, displayed emotion, and openly took the audience’s side.

It would take another decade—until 1996, when he founded Fox News—for Murdoch to create a truly British-style tabloid on American television. The conventional narrative of Fox News is that Murdoch and CEO Roger Ailes recognized an untapped market for conservative news viewers. However, like the front pages of the “penny” and “yellow” papers of the 19th century, the success of Fox was also deeply tied to the network’s innovative presentation—colorful sets, swooshing graphics, ticker feed, and music played between segments. The network also skillfully positioned itself as the champion of “the folks” and the nemesis of elite journalists. Each time prominent journalists excluded Fox from the circle of quality news organizations, these critics unwittingly helped forge an association Murdoch and Alies found immensely desirable—the association between working-class tastes and conservative politics.

The contest to define “real” journalism persists because it is about more than journalism. And it will go on as long as there are pronounced differences of class—and related differences of taste—among the news audience. In the meantime, we should remain aware of the class connotations of how we denounce “bad” journalism. Media criticism, like media, can divide us by fortifying current class-party alignments, thus marking conservative news as populist and liberal news as elitist.

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Mathews asked Kushner about his newspaper’s business model, which Mathews said is “betting on subscribers” to support the publication.

This isn’t a bet, said Kushner, but a no-nonsense approach to business: “If we give our customers more, in return, they will give us more.” That means, he said, the paper is committed to giving back not just to subscribers and advertisers, but to the community as a whole—through coverage, through business, and through advertising. One example of “community-building,” said Kushner was a “golden envelope” program, where the Register gave subscribers a $50 check to sign over to the nonprofit of their choice.

Turning to Banks, Mathews asked how a working journalist can get an understanding of the many communities in L.A. and the complex city as a whole.

“I have really good friends who are regular people, who are not journalists,” she said. “They have regular concerns.” One of those friends told her to write about new regulations prohibiting plastic bags. That column ultimately got much more feedback than other recent “important” columns she’d written.

And of course, it’s also about keeping your eyes open to what’s happening in the world. Banks said that this is difficult for reporters to do today both at the Times and around the country because they’re stuck at their computers, constantly refreshing stories and making sure posts are current. She’d like to see reporters getting out more and writing “more stories that give you a sense of the city you live in.” There there needs to be “more talking about communities in ways everybody can relate to,” she said.

In addition to what’s happening in the city, the panelists felt papers have traditionally had some responsibility to make readers familiar with who was running it and what they wanted to do with it. But today, Mathews asked Woo, where do politicians and others go to have big conversations in Los Angeles?

Woo said that the Los Angeles Times is no longer serving the civic role it played in the late 20th century. A newspaper, he said, is more than a business: “It’s a civic institution that builds a city’s sense of itself.” You need a big newspaper in order for a city to have a dialogue about big ideas. The newspaper’s civic duty is especially important in Los Angeles because it’s a city that lacks a strong identity. People tend to consider themselves residents of Sherman Oaks or Ladera Heights rather than L.A. as a whole. And for a newspaper to feed that view can be dangerous.

And given that Los Angeles newspapers have retreated from some of their ambitions, Mathews asked: If you had all the money in the world, what would you put in the newspaper?

Kushner said that the short answer to that question—and the question of what kind of newspaper a city deserves—is simple: “What kind of newspaper do the residents of a city support by subscribing and support by advertising?” He said that the biggest challenge of running the Register “is apathy.” People assume the newspaper will be around whether or not they support it—which simply isn’t true.

Banks disagreed. The days of people subscribing and investing in their local newspaper are gone, she said: “Young people are not subscribing to a physical paper like this.” What they’re looking for isn’t an exclusive relationship but “to feel appreciated and see themselves in our paper,” she said—“to know the things they’re concerned about are the same things we’re concerned about.” Banks said that she’s a fan of investigative and hard-hitting journalism, but ultimately it’s about a more intimate relationship between publication and reader: “They have to feel that we feel their pain, that we understand them.”

In a “lightning round,” Mathews asked for snap judgments from the panelists on issues such as whether Los Angeles deserves a tabloid with outrageous headlines like New York.

No, said Banks, just read the comments that come after online stories for that kind of discourse.

Should newspapers be free, or should you always have to pay to read?

Kushner pointed to his organization’s mix of free community newspapers and paid subscriptions. He also pointed out that it isn’t a question of not being able to afford a paper—a household can’t get out of a movie theater without spending the equivalent of a month’s subscription to his paper.

How partisan should a newspaper be?

When a city can only support one newspaper, said Woo, there’s less room for partisanship. Banks said that the newspaper should be nonpartisan, but not scrupulously so—that common sense should lead.

And what about the financial model—should a newspaper be privately or publicly owned, for-profit or nonprofit?

Kushner argued that there is no difference between a for-profit and nonprofit enterprise, besides tax status—either way, revenue needs to exceed expenses. Banks said that a privately held business makes for a healthier newsroom environment because staff members don’t feel as if they have fluctuating stock prices hanging over their heads.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked about balancing big-picture coverage of the entire city and region with smaller community coverage.

Kushner said that the Register believes in both kinds of reporting, and publishes over 20 local newspapers throughout Orange County that feed into the larger Orange County Register for that reason. “The whole,” he said, “is made up of its parts.”

Woo added that there’s a difference between what people know and what they want to know. There’s a natural tendency for Angelenos to break their loyalties down to the smallest common denominator—to localize everything. And so newspapers need to transcend the boundaries we put around ourselves.

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The next morning, father, following his ingrained habit, immersed himself in the newspaper stories about the earthquake, sharing his reading with mother. The headline of the Los Angeles Times read: “Scores Perish in Southland Quake.” I was three months short of my third birthday.

My own love affair with Los Angeles newspapers began when I was 8 years old, when Raul and I took turns fetching the Sunday morning paper, the Los Angeles Examiner, off our front lawn. Raul and I loved the color comic strips that served as an outer wrapper for the rest of the bulky paper. The newspapers of the late 1930s and ’40s gave children an enormous variety of funnies to enjoy: Blondie, Popeye, Krazy Kat, Barney Google, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, and Mutt and Jeff were just a few of them. We peeled off this funnies section and spread their pages out on the living room floor.

Father read the Examiner every day, in later years switching to the Herald-Express. He perused the sports section only when it ran stories about professional boxing and horse racing. I knew about Seabiscuit long before the bestselling book a half century later. Father and I listened together to the radio broadcast of Santa Anita track announcer Joe Hernandez’s call of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap when the storied thoroughbred defeated a field that included Kayak II. His attention wasn’t just sporting.

Betting on the ponies was extremely popular back then, and his workplace, the Pacific Glass Company, like other companies, had workers who doubled as bookies. The Herald devoted a good deal of space to information that was helpful to readers who handicapped and bet on the horses. This coverage likely explains the change in my father’s newspaper loyalties.

Father’s faithful reading of newspapers distinguished him from most of our relatives, who never read anything. It astounded me that so many of their homes were completely devoid of reading material. But our particular line of Rodriguez men had an especially deep relationship with newspapers. A 1906 photograph of my father’s first birthday showed his father—my grandfather, then a copper miner in Clifton, Arizona—standing next to my father with a folded newspaper in his right hand.

Father was loyal not only to newspapers but also to the glass workers labor union. He was very interested in politics and was a devoted supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he listened to FDR’s radio addresses to the nation, the so-called Fireside Chats, I sat on the living room floor listening along with him, thrilling to the sound of the president’s voice. So when, still a child, I began reading the newspapers’ more serious material and its criticisms of this beloved president, the experience shook me. On the first day I read him, the Examiner’s Westbrook Pegler mocked Mrs. Roosevelt and her newspaper column, called “My Day.” I was shocked but learned an early lesson about freedom of the press.

Raul and I sold newspapers for several years, and it became second nature for me to read the headlines as I stood on my corner. There were many headlines and many newspapers then. In addition to the morning Times and Examiner, readers could pick up the Herald-Express or the tabloid Mirror, also an afternoon paper. The Daily News, owned by Manchester Boddy, who would later give his estate—now Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge—to the county, was the only local daily that supported Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his subsequent New Deal. (The city’s only Democratic newspaper would cease publication in 1954).

With the onset of World War II, radio came of age, its immediacy an appealing alternative to waiting for the morning or evening paper. The first news of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was broadcast on the radio. Our family was gathered around the kitchen table that Sunday listening to a musical program when CBS announcer John Daly interrupted with a news flash of the bombing. We listened the next day when President Roosevelt gave the address to Congress in which he declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. The Los Angeles Times front-page headline of December 11 was “Axis Declares War on America.”

I followed the news of the war principally by listening to radio broadcasts about the Battle of Britain and the bombing of German cities like Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin. Hearing of news events was fine, but seeing them was even better. The Tower Theater downtown showed only newsreels, many about the war, and I went often to see them. And television was just around the corner.

But it is the headlines I remember—of the fall of German-occupied Rome to the Allies on June 5, 1944, and of the Allied landings on the Normandy coast the following day. The Times’ headline of June 6 consisted of one word: “Invasion!”

Post-war Los Angeles was a far more violent place than today’s Los Angeles, and the newspapers let us know it. On January 17, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found near Leimert Park. The Hearst papers—the Examiner and the Herald-Express—were known for their exploitation of the sensational, and no one did crime stories better than Herald reporter Agness Underwood. Some credit her with popularizing the name Black Dahlia, which was given to the murder victim, Elizabeth Short. In the middle of the case, Underwood was promoted to editor of the Herald’s city desk, becoming the first U.S. woman to hold such a high position at a major metropolitan daily. The Black Dahlia story was astonishingly popular and reached even into the high school I attended. It was rumored that a colleague of mine had been questioned by the police in connection with the crime. (He didn’t do it.)

In 1962 the Herald-Express and the Examiner merged to become the Herald-Examiner. That publication announced the news of its own demise years later on November 2, 1989, with a headline that read, “So Long, Los Angeles.” Despite the swan song, the paper published for several more weeks, running the following on November 11:

The Times pompously declares in its Nov. 2 editorial that the Herald-Examiner folded because ‘the public’s appetite for such reportage is satisfied by lesser television talk shows.’ In the same editorial phrases such as ‘working class tastes’ and ‘entertaining sensationalism of yellow journalism’ are used. This display of arrogant elitism will make the loss of the Herald all the more painful. The Herald considered its readers as peers writing for them and not at all as a didactic parent.

Newspapers were essential for living here. I could not have done without the movie reviews and screening times for a great number of movie houses. (Like Woody Allen, I had to see a movie from the beginning and never deviated from that rule.) I loved the columnists, with whom it was possible to connect personally. A Times reporter named Bill Kiley took a 7 a.m. beginning Spanish class I taught at Valley College, and I ended up being an item in his friend Matt Weinstock’s column; he became my favorite columnist. I also exchanged letters with the legendary L.A. Times columnist Jack Smith, chiding him about pieces he had written about Spain.

It was often said that there was nothing as useless as yesterday’s newspaper. But old papers weren’t entirely useless back then. Thrifty types like me saved the old papers and periodically bundled them up, tied them with twine, and earned pocket change selling them at a salvage center.

In the pre-smog days, Los Angeles backyards had incinerators where old newspapers were often burned along with the rest of the household trash. But after the smog came—but before the arrival of garbage disposals—garbage was gathered in sturdy cans whose contents were emptied every several days into city trucks and hauled away. Old newspapers were very helpful—we lined the garbage can with them. Those who took their politics seriously could put their least favorite politicians’ photos on the bottom of their can.

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