Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Lutes, Jean Marie

doi:10.1353/aq.2002.0017

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The content and headlines of her stories followed the same pattern: ‘The Girls Who Make Boxes: Nellie Bly Tells How It Feels to Be a White Slave’; ‘Trying to be Servant: Nellie Bly’s Strange Experience …’ (Lutes, 2002, p. 218). In each news story, the woman’s voice was emphasised right from the headline.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Also, in the process, she became famous, which was exactly what she wanted. A dramatic new kind of journalism, based on first-hand experience (Ehlrich, 1989, p. 105) came into existence, and ‘her madhouse performance inaugurated the performative [sic] tactic that would become her trademark reporting style’ (Lutes, 2002, p. 217).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Her undercover technique became the surest way for a young woman to gain entry into journalism. Whatever stunts her successors may have performed to get published (Lutes, 2002, p. 245), Bly herself never carried out a stunt for its own sake. If she went undercover, it was to report wrongdoing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dislocating the Masculine: How Nellie Bly Feminised Her Reports

Vengadasalam

2018

Social Change

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Nellie Bly’s pioneering contribution to eighteenth-century journalism has not been adequately recognised. The author bridges this gap in America’s media history by scrutinising the strategies she employed to make herself heard. By building in gender into her writing and articles and by interplaying the sensationalist with the reformer, Bly emerged out of the silence to which women were relegated to in the so-called Progressive Era. Not only was she thus able to chart new paths herself personally as an investigative reporter, travel writer and warfront correspondent, but she was also able to bring in some reform into the system, expose corruption and open the doors for the legion of women journalists who followed in her wake.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dislocating the Masculine: How Nellie Bly Feminised Her Reports

Vengadasalam

2018

Social Change

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“…In this case, the girl was used as evidence, with her body subjected to great physical and sexual exploitation in the name of the story. Around the same time, Nellie Bly’s body was put at risk when she was admitted to an asylum as an investigative “stunt” piece for a newspaper owned and operated by men (Lutes, 2002). When women and girls’ bodies aren’t being used to make the news, they’re being exploited to tell newsworthy stories.…”

Section: Crime Media: History and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“This is what a 13-year old girl looks like”: A feminist analysis of To Catch a Predator

Tabor

2022

Crime, Media, Culture

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Through archival research and an intersectional thematic analysis, this paper examines three key episodes of early-2000s sensation To Catch a Predator and situates them within crime media and journalism literature. The paper analyzes themes of journalistic integrity and the subjugation of women and girls by a television program that claimed to use the former to stop the latter. Based on the analysis, To Catch a Predator engages in forensic journalism as demonstrated by the treatment of women and girls as bait, claims of ownership over women and girls’ bodies, lack of nuance in reporting, and the liberties taken in their journalistic practices. Ultimately, this paper shows how To Catch a Predator acts as a spectacle of vigilantism, by creating the child pornography it claims to fight and by glorifying punishment, contributing to the ongoing moral panic around child exploitation.

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“…Researchers used both observations of their surroundings and their own embodied experiences as equivalent kinds of evidence. Participantobservation was pioneered by journalists like Nellie Bly and Josiah Flynt, but academics, like the political economist Walter Wyckoff and the psychologist Amy Tanner, also adopted it (Pittenger, 1997;Higbie, 1997;Lutes, 2002;Pittenger, 2003;Pettit, 2008).…”

Section: Goffman's Natural Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

The con man as model organism: the methodological roots of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical self

Pettit

2011

History of the Human Sciences

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This article offers a historical analysis of the relationship between the practice of participant-observation among American sociologists and Erving Goffman's dramaturgical model of the self. He was a social scientist who privileged ethnography in the field over the laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the mental test. His goal was a natural history of communication among humans. Rather than rely upon standardizing technologies for measurement, Goffman tried to obtain accurate recordings of human behavior through secretive observations. During the 1950s, he conducted three major studies as a participant-observer, disguised from those studied through insincere performances. As originally presented, his dramaturgical theory did not draw upon the theater as the governing metaphor, but rather the confidence game. It is suggested that Goffman's writings exemplify what Gerd Gigerenzer calls the tools-to-theories heuristic. Goffman's depiction of the confidence man's behavior closely mirrored how he and his fellow sociologists described the practice of participant-observation. Both were represented as embedded and attentive yet coolly detached observers skilled at playing different roles as the situation necessitated. The similarities between his own professional behavior and the activities of the confidence man may have suggested to Goffman the latter as a model for human nature.

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Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Cited by 12 publications

References 30 publications

Dislocating the Masculine: How Nellie Bly Feminised Her Reports

Dislocating the Masculine: How Nellie Bly Feminised Her Reports

“This is what a 13-year old girl looks like”: A feminist analysis of To Catch a Predator

The con man as model organism: the methodological roots of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical self

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