University-based journalism education has suffered from a lack of respect in the academy and the profession. One contributing factor may be that outside of the professional skill set, it is not clear if a defined body of knowledge about journalism exists that all journalism students, journalists, or the public should know. While the concept has several different meanings, developing a core body of knowledge could help journalism education improve its standing as an academic discipline and make an important contribution to the professional practice of journalism. The contribution of journalism history to the development of core knowledge in journalism could be identifying the specific incidents that have resulted in, or are representative of, the defining characteristics and features of American journalism
Content analysis is the most common approach to exploring the use of specific words within media studies. This approach has significant limitations that can be addressed through the application of other related approaches to understanding mediated content, including sociolinguistics and conceptual history. The emergence of large databases of digitized newspapers opens the possibility of an integrated approach that draws on elements of each of those related paradigms. An analysis of the rise and fall of the terms “jingo” and “jingoism” in the British press from 1878 to 1900 demonstrates how this integrated research paradigm can be productively applied to gain insight into how newspapers serve to broadly distribute words attached to specific concepts.
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