The crisis of World War I, including the challenges of reporting from the fighting front, sparked public discussion about the reliability and status of journalism. In response, unprecedented changes to the education of journalists were introduced around the world, including in Australia. By the 1920s, the majority of Australian universities offered a Diploma in Journalism, developed in collaboration with the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA). Yet despite the AJA's commitment to developing professional standards, by 1945 these courses were either defunct or struggling. This article explores the introduction and subsequent failure of tertiary journalism education in the context of discussions within the AJA about educational 'relevance,' and whether journalists required improved 'thinking' or improved 'skills'. Analysis of the establishment of these university courses highlights debates around the professionalism, status, and ethical practice of journalism in the interwar years, at a time when the newspaper industry was expanding.Writing on New Year's Eve 1919, British newspaperman William Kennedy Jones declared journalism was not a profession, which implied 'the existence of certain fixed principles, ascertained facts, codes of conduct, etc. knowledge of which could be acquired by study'.Journalism, he argued, was 'of too recent growth' to have these characteristics; to describe it as a trade 'came nearer to the truth'. Journalists required an innate 'news instinct', which could not be acquired by 'all the teaching of all the universities'; a journalist was 'born, not made'. 1 Jones was commenting directly on the establishment of a two-year journalism diploma at the University of London, introduced for returned soldiers in the aftermath of World War I. This was the first tertiary journalism course in Britain, although American
This article surveys the historiography of the global advertising industry, identifying the key challenges and debates raised by American and British scholars, and then discusses two important questions for historians of Australian advertising. First, if advertising is a globalised and 'Americanised' industry, exactly how Australian is the Australian advertising industry? Second, can we understand how advertising works by analysing advertisements, or are new forms of analysis required? The article introduces a fresh analytical approach that seeks to answer these questions before discussing the scope, methodology and preliminary findings of a historical study of the Australian advertising industry that is currently utilising this approach.Before the publication of Robert Crawford's nuanced study in 2008, little attention had been paid to the history of the Australian advertising industry. 1 Given the industry's cultural and economic significance, the absence of a national advertising historiography is surprising but advertising's global nature means that the historiography developed by scholars from the United States and Britain across the 20th century is more useful for understanding the Australian industry than it might otherwise be.This article begins with a survey of the contributions of American and British scholars to the historiography of the global advertising industry, identifying the key challenges and debates they raise. The survey suggests two important questions for historians of Australian advertising. First, if advertising is a globalised and 'Americanised' industry, exactly how Australian is the Australian advertising industry? Second, can we understand how advertising works by analysing advertisements or are new forms of analysis required? The article then introduces a fresh analytical approach that seeks to answer these questions before discussing the scope, methodology and preliminary findings of a historical study of the Australian advertising industry that is currently utilising this approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.