University Place

Willard Grosvenor Bleyer and UW Journalism

– Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as was my dad. She went to high school at Divine Savior Holy Angels. And I went to a grade school that was called St. Mary’s, so we would call us Divine Savior Partial Angels. [laughter] Catholic jokes sometimes don’t always go over real well. [laughter] Then she came to UW-Madison to get an undergraduate degree in journalism. And then she got a master’s degree at UW-Madison in journalism. And then, for variety, she’s getting a PhD here at UW-Madison in…
– Journalism.

– Journalism. She will be done in May 2019. Mark your calendars for the party. [laughter] She’s got a very interesting topic. As a Cooperative Extension person, I’m pretty tuned in to how the university, through the College of Agriculture over the centuries, has shared science with Wisconsin, but this is going to be interesting hearing about how the journalism folks have been sharing research from other parts of the university with the people across Wisconsin. Tonight she’s going to be talking to us about “Promoting Innovation: Journalism, Science, and the Wisconsin Idea.” Please join me in welcoming Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [applause]

-Thank you. [applause] Great, so before I go ahead and get started, thank you all so much for coming out tonight. I have planned to leave a few minutes at the end of this talk for questions. So if you have questions, I encourage you to write them down or remember them or save them for the end. I’ll be more than happy to address those. But first, I want to kind of warn you that this presentation starts with an argument. Whether or not you agree with that argument, we can debate that later, but I need you to at least appreciate the argument that I’m going to lay out. And that is that the United States is a country that is built on a foundation of newspapers. It is a country where newspapers have long been incredibly important to not only the political processes but just the general flow of information from corner to corner of this vast expanse. As early as the turn of the 19th century, several foreign observers came to the United States and were struck by not only how many newspapers there were but how far they were distributed and how many people read them with regularity. They had not seen this in Great Britain, in France where they came from.

Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist, wrote in 1840 that he was impressed by the enormous circulation of the daily press in the United States and the number of newspapers and their ties to political associations. He believed, after his observations made in the United States, that free press was vital to the preservation of liberty. Thomas Hamilton, a British traveler, wrote in the 1833 book “Men and Manners in America” that “the influence and circulation of newspapers is great beyond anything ever known in Europe. In truth, nine-tenths of the population read nothing else. Every village, nay almost every hamlet, has its press, and newspapers penetrate to every crevice of the nation.” So this centrality of the press to the political functioning of the United States was one of the reasons that Willard Bleyer, director of the journalism program at the University of Wisconsin, was so concerned when he looked out at the landscape of media at the turn of the 20th century. For when Bleyer looked out, what he saw, instead of all of this potential, were threats to democracy. He saw a media industry that had consolidated, independent newspapers were disappearing, and media chains were growing larger. He believed that he saw reporters who didn’t actually report things as much as they edited wire copy or press releases that were handed to them by press agents. He also reporters who did not provide accurate accounts of complicated stories.

They, number one, didn’t cover the scientific advances that were so critical to this seemingly modern age of the turn of the 20th century, but when they did report complicated stories, they often reported false claims. In many cities that had had multiple newspapers just a few decades earlier, there were only one. And in cities where there were still multiple newspapers, a lot of those newspapers were owned by one person or one corporation. He saw new media technologies everywhere, the radio, the telephone, the motion picture, that were challenging the hold on the public imagination that was previously enjoyed by newspapers. And he saw newspapers that printed sensationalized news that was, in some cases, faked in an effort to win readers and beat competition in circulation. These aren’t necessarily anything new. If anything, these are some of the very concerns that we’re dealing with today when we talk about the state of the America media system. For Bleyer, the news, this food that fed democracy, was, in his words, poisoned. Or, in the less dramatic reading of it, it was at the very least very polluted and at the risk of turning very, very bad.

So across the media landscape, he saw ways that the news was being compromised. He also saw newspapers that were doing little to encourage rational dialog on matters of political importance and reporters who were uneducated, unprofessional, and inaccurate who were serving as the weak links in the chain of democracy. So Bleyer came up with two solutions among many other solutions that he introduced that I’m going to talk about tonight. The first build on this idea of Bleyer that a strong professional, well-educated press would ensure the future of democracy. Journalism could help achieve progressive goals and shared information in newspapers could tie citizens to one another, helping them overcome the challenges of an urban, industrialized, and more mass society. The university was the place where this training could happen. Bleyer then began advocating for a course program at the University of Wisconsin that would prepare the next generation of journalists for these challenges that were unique to this seemingly new era. It would teach them to think critically and separate fact from fiction. It would give them a wide breadth of knowledge, not just skills courses, that would allow them to report on a wide variety of topics, from science to politics.

And drawing on the tenets of the Wisconsin Idea, it would unite journalism research with its professional practice to create better journalism and ensure a better educated electorate. Bleyer also believed that in an increasingly complex society experts could produce research that would be applicable to the social, political, and economic problems of the day. On campus at the University of Wisconsin, he saw researchers who were doing this. He saw researchers who would concentrate on state-oriented issues, such as the use of scientific methods to improve agriculture, and was heavily influenced by this Wisconsin Idea. As a result, he saw the potential for community uplift in a press that would inform individuals about the workings of their institutions, like the university. He believed that newspapers could improve public life by disseminating information about research and could make citizens feel connected to the university by keeping them informed about discoveries made on campus and how those could change their lives. Here he saw a new way that a university could improve the flow of information by establishing a press service that would publicize the research done on campus and working closely with journalists to ensure that they were writing accurately about what was being done here. When Bleyer first voiced these concerns about newspapers and kind of the general media landscape in the early 20th century, he was reflecting on the industry that had a relatively short history and one that had undergone a series of rapid transformations and dramatic changes. The newspapers Bleyer was reading hardly resembled the newspapers that had been printed at the beginning of the 19th century, just 100 years prior.

Indeed, newspapers as we know them today or knew them a decade ago or two decades ago, depending on your own personal reading habits, are hardly representative of journalism trends or media trends that kind of started this whole thing at the beginning. So I just want everyone to kind of appreciate the newspaper and what counts as news and what counts as journalism as something that sociologist Robert Park kind of referred to as this evolving species, this product that’s always in constant conversation with its environment and adapting to suit the needs of a particular era or a particular group. So just to give you some perspective, the history of news as an institution, as I mentioned, is relatively brief. It’s only about 400 years old. The occupation in which someone gets paid to write about stories in current events and publish them on a regular basis, well that idea is only about 250 years old. The idea these people who are paid to write down pieces of information and publish them should fulfill some sort of nebulous function related to politics or informing citizens of political news, well that’s about 200 years old. And this idea that the news that is written down, regularly published, should be objective, factual, and accurate in addition to being non-partisan, that’s only about 100 years old, but I feel like some people might say that even that is still up for debate. [laughter] So, as I mentioned, the history of journalism or the history of news is one of constant transformation. The first newspapers of the period in America, again just to give some context, looked somewhat like this.

They were very text-heavy. They were very dense. They were not published with much regularity. They were primarily the work of publishers who printed newspapers primarily as a way to advertise that they had a print shop that could print many other things for you. They printed these newspapers weekly. In general, they did not carry news as we think of news today. There was hardly any local news that would appear in these newspapers. One of the reasons that there was no local news when this started was quite simply due to the political climate in the colonies. England was fond of prosecuting people who ran afoul of their sedition laws. So the easiest way to not get in trouble with the crown was just to not print anything about the local news in the colonies.

No one would have a problem with that. The other reason that there wasn’t a lot of local news is that, quite frankly, cities were small. Cities resembled small towns. It was faster for you to find out what was happening with your neighbors by actually going and talking to them rather than waiting for a weekly publication to come out. There’s some wonderful research done by a University of Wisconsin alum named David Nord about sort of this religious route of the information flow in the colonies. And one of the things that he points out in this is that you’d often go to church, for example, to not only hear the word of God but hear the word or the gossip of your neighbors. So it was these gathering places where news was really exchanged. These were primarily neutral but eventually that changes, and gradually newspapers become more political. So now we’re in the 19th century.

And throughout the first half of the 19th century, the dominate way of thinking about the newspaper was as an explicitly political channel. Newspapers, by and large, had a specific viewpoint and covered the world through that specific lens. A newspaper’s political leaning then defined its editorial mission, more or less. That means that newspapers often reported conflicting versions of reality. It was not uncommon for you to see the results of a debate, for example, printed one way in a Democrat paper and another way in a Republican paper. People have looked at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, have found that if you read a Republican paper, you were left with the impression that Abraham Lincoln knocked those debates out of the park, that Stephen Douglas left, his head hung in shame, and the crowd was on the side of Lincoln all the way. If you read a Democrat paper, you got the complete opposite view. And that was to be expected. People did not turn to their newspapers for unbiased, objective information.

They expected to have things covered with a political lens. These newspapers, though, were also not limited to political parties. By the 19th century, pretty much every political movement, every social movement had its newspaper. And this is one of the reasons that we start to see not only the number of newspapers start to increase in the United States, but also, again, that importance of newspapers to the flow of information, and the country starts to really emerge during this time period. As you can see here, in 1759, we only have about 17 newspapers that are published in the colonies. That number jumps up to more than 1300 newspapers by 1833, which is a pretty dramatic increase in a relatively short period of time. In many instances, by the mid-19th century, newspapers were replacing letters as a primary form of communication. And they were also becoming important tools in the westward expansion of the country, which brings us quickly to the beginning of newspapers in Wisconsin and starts to sort of set the stage for Willard Bleyer to enter our story. The first newspapers in Wisconsin were either party newspapers, again which were aligned with specific viewpoint, booster newspapers, which expressly advocated the interest of one place or one town, or some combination of the two.

As European settlers moved westward, newspapers fulfilled an important function in settling these new territories. In places like Wisconsin, these newspapers played a pivotal promotional role. They helped advertise a community to potential settlers and attract investment. So the first newspaper published in the state of Wisconsin was the Green Bay Intelligencer, published in 1833. You can see the small house-like structure is a drawing that we have of their first kind of headquarters and office. The oldest newspaper in Wisconsin that is still continuously published, the Milwaukee Sentinel, was founded in 1837 as a way to advertise Solomon Juneau’s landholdings. He first published it as a weekly, and if you were to look, you’ll have to trust me on this because I know the type is rather small, if you were to look at it, you would see that it clearly fulfilled a booster function. In the very first issue of the Milwaukee Sentinel, Solomon Juneau writes, again this is 1837, he writes about a front-page account of a respectable elderly gentleman who had traveled 50 miles from the hinterland to Milwaukee’s east side. Noting on his journey that this man observed “that the vegetation is unusually luxuriant this time of year.” And the report, again front-page lead story, concluded with a bold editorial statement that “we doubt whether there could be found in Michigan or eastward in parallel latitude so large vegetable growth this late in the season.” In many cases, these newspapers were a signal of a town or city’s importance.

They were a sign that you have arrived and you had something going on there that was worth writing about. These newspapers often featured hyperbole mixed with facts. So they did carry important information on land prices, weather, job opportunities. If you look at some of these older newspapers, you’ll see advertisements for positions like doctors, blacksmiths, other occupations that a town needed filled. Lots of advertisements for single women as well, especially the further west that you get. In other cases, they attacked cities, both near and far. Again, a lot of these places were competing for these same investments or for these same resources. The Milwaukee Sentinel referred to Chicago, a city that was frequently battling with Milwaukee for superiority on Lake Michigan, as “our gassiest neighbor at the head of the lake.” [laughter] And this was clearly a reference to Chicago being built on a putrid swamp and having this really awful smell and also the propensity of people from there to think they’re better than everywhere else. They framed information that would have been seen as negative in a positive light.

A newspaper in Minnesota, for example, did admit that its winters were quite cold, but it said that those cold, dry winters are much better for you, both health wise and character wise, than the more humid but milder winters of St. Louis. [laughter] And this was really common. Newspapers would also not report information that might be seen as negative. So sometimes they wouldn’t report news about crimes or sicknesses. Again, these newspapers were trying to attract settlement. And just, before I get too carried away with this because I love this era of newspapers so much, newspapers were only one of the many pieces of print material that was flowing back to people in the hinterland but also people in Europe and elsewhere. So while we said they were an important part of westward expansion, they’re just one part of sort of this puzzle. They were one of a number of print products which also include brochures, letters, and other things that were sent back to people. And, again, just to give another plug to some of the great work done here on campus, the historian Kathleen Conzen, another UW graduate, wrote a fantastic booked called “Immigrant Milwaukee” about the flow of letters back to German potential immigrants and their movement to Milwaukee.

So throughout most of the 19th century, the newspapers in Wisconsin then were either these booster Solomon papers or party press. These editors react in all aspects of the business enterprise, and the job was often a struggle. More newspapers failed than were successful. And these editor publishers were responsible for selling subscriptions, tracking down delinquent subscribers, courting advertisers, tracking down information, boosting the places where they worked, and also, on occasion, becoming involved in politics. So being an editor during this time really encompassed a lot of different duties. However, the industry starts to change in the mid-19th century. And as it does, Milwaukee, along with St. Louis, Detroit, and other Midwestern cities, become the centers of journalistic innovation as these western newspapers changed their format to better suit the need of these rapidly growing cities. They no longer solely focused on boosting, although that’s still definitely a part of these newspapers. And it is in this moment where Willard Bleyer really starts to get involved because as this newspaper industry is shifting.

Bleyer is born in Milwaukee in 1873 and comes of age in a family of newspaper owners. Massive amounts of people were moving to urban areas in the later decades of the 19th century. Chicago is usually the one that people talk about as experiencing this huge influx of immigrants and migrants, but Chicago’s not alone in this. In many of these places where these newspapers flourished, the growth of urban areas outpaced the ability of these cities to provide basic municipal functions. And this is where newspapers, a new type of newspaper publisher kind of sees an opportunity to step in. New York had been the center of journalistic innovation. But New Yorkers were complacent in the 1880s. There was really no incentive to change. They had a media system where there were sort of these boring, pricey business papers and then the New York Times, and they were doing fine.

But it was really these Midwesterners who saw a market opportunity that ended up impacting New York. This new view of a newspaper centered on attracting the largest circulation possible. Some people have called this a reader’s champion approach to journalism. This new view of the newspaper viewed the newspaper as a civic institution free of party, with the goal of attracting the largest possible readership. As I mentioned, LW Nieman of the Milwaukee Journal is at the forefront of this. Along with him are EW Scripps and the Detroit News, Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner. What these individuals do are introduce a newspaper that was, again, independent of party. Editorial independence was important ideologically but also commercially. Quite simply, if you don’t have a political leaning, anyone can buy your paper, but if you have a clear political leaning, you potentially alienate, let’s say half of your readers.

So by steering clear of being closely aligned to a political party, you can just sell more papers. They carried lots of promotions. They offered more news and more local news. They carried expanded sections, so they start to broaden the definition of what counts as news. This is the time period where we start to see things introduced like comic sections, real estate sections, automobile sections, sort of these different types of news catered to different types of readers. They also conduct a thing called crusades, which were these really strong investigative reporting series that often dealt with dysfunctional city governments. Politics were no longer seen as a satisfactory avenue towards change, and they seemed corrupt or flawed in a way that they didn’t seem before. So often newspapers stepped in to fill this role, and one of the famous examples of this in Milwaukee was the Milwaukee Journal’s reporting of the Newhall House fire in 1882. The Newhall House in Milwaukee was the equivalent of the Pfister today.

It was, quite simply, the fanciest hotel you could stay at, but it was also a fire trap. There had been a number of building violations that had been reported to authorities but went unreported and unresolved. Eventually this turns into a huge early morning fire in 1883 and it claims nearly 80 victims. The Journal is the only newspaper in Milwaukee who does not have financial ties to the ownership group of the hotel, so they are the only ones who feel this independence and this freedom to really heavily criticize the owners as well as other members of city government for not checking up on what could have been fairly easy fixes. This becomes a major win for the Milwaukee Journal. Readers are grateful. The Journal is able to kind of prove itself rather quickly under a relatively young owner. And, in a short amount of time, the Journal becomes the leading newspaper in Milwaukee in terms of circulation. So, while these crusades fulfill kind of a great, we could look at them as this idealistic, they are solving problems that are going unsolved, there’s also a commercial incentive behind them.

So by the turn of the 20th century, newspapers became big business. They had undergone a series of dramatic transformations. They were really the growth industry of the 19th century. But they also start to require more capital to own and operate. Advertising was also becoming increasingly important as part of their business plans. And there’s also an increase in the amount of news available. And all of these are going to kind of serve to complicate the media environment. So, again, as Bleyer starts to look out, he sees a more complicated media environment. He sees newspapers being the primary source of information for Americans and he knows communication is critical to developing a rational public, but the world, in fact, was growing more complex.

Again this was the age of the corporation as well as government corruption, increased immigration, rapid industrialization and urbanization. Newspapers were also operating in an increasingly complex media landscape. Reporters, editors, and publishers were not the only players on the media scene anymore. This now included a variety of strategic communication professionals, public relations practitioners, press agents, and advertising executives. Not only that but reporters were also tasked with filtering out more and more news. The telegraph, the telephone, and other technologies inundated editors and reporters with information. So, among all of this, there was this call for professionalization, and at the heart of this call for professionalization was a call for increased training of reporters and the establishment of a code of ethics that would serve to separate the good reporters from the bad. And also, again, to create these news products that would deliver the information that citizens needed to know. It was in this moment that Willard Bleyer, at the University of Wisconsin, emerged as a voice advocating for the role of journalism and newspapers for alleviating the problems of society and improving public life.

Again, he was born into a prominent newspaper family in Milwaukee who had ties to a number of newspapers in the city, including the Sentinel. He attended the University of Wisconsin in the 1890s in the middle of an ongoing debate or sort of the beginning of that ongoing debate about the need for journalism education, and he was active in a variety of publications on this campus. He helped form the Daily Cardinal and the University Press Club. He also participated in the Literary magazine as well as the yearbook. When he graduated, he took a job teaching high school and tried to incorporate journalism into his lesson plans with little success. He had hoped to instill in his high school students the same love of journalism that he had, but they were less interested in writing articles than they were at antagonizing Bleyer. If you look at a lot of anecdotes about Bleyer, there’s one that stands out, and apparently he was quite fond of wearing galoshes to school, and his students would hide them from him so he wouldn’t be able to get home. So those were the ins and outs of Willard Bleyer’s life as a high school teacher. So he leaves after two years, comes back to the university, and earns his PhD in English.

He joins the faculty in 1900, and it’s clear from his materials that he immediately began thinking of ways to get journalism into the curriculum. He saw journalism as a social science, not as an extension of vocational training. And in 1905, the first journalism course appeared in the English department. His approach to journalism was a little bit different than journalism education at the time because he saw journalists as experts. These would be people who could interpret information for the greater public similar to Charles Van Hise’s vision of the scholar as an adviser to government and business. He believed that newspapers had an obligation to publicize the problems of the world and empower citizens with reliable information so they could make informed decisions. So the first place where we see this play out is the University of Wisconsin Press Service. Now, the University of Wisconsin Press Service had existed before Bleyer headed it in 1904, but it had really suffered from a lack of direction. Drawing on the core of the Wisconsin Idea, he believed that by publishing information on research, newspapers could make citizens feel connected to the university.

Newspapers would keep residents of the state and beyond informed of the discoveries made on campus and their real-world applications. He also believed that delivering the right information about research directly to journalists would alleviate the problem of inaccurate reporting. So it’d result in more accurate, more thorough reporting about the discoveries and breakthroughs made on campus. Bleyer oversaw at first the steady output of press releases to state and national newspapers and then, in 1909, introduced a weekly press bulletin, which brought short stories about the university to newspapers and magazines nationwide. He wanted to sell the university to the world as more than just the site of athletic contests and fraternity parties. Although, he would devote some space in the press bulletin to both of those activities. His goals were to inform the public about the latest research at the university, tell potential students about the opportunities for study in important fields, and keep the state’s citizens updated on decisions made by university leaders. In each issue, he emphasized communicating scientific information in a way that the general public would understand and also advocated for ways to connect researchers with their readers. With many articles on applied research that was useful to farmers and others, the bulletin represented an institutionalization of the Wisconsin Idea, this idea that the university should serve all of the state’s citizens.

So these are some examples of what the press bulletin looked like from 1909. From 1909 to 1915 is when Bleyer was most active in the production of these materials. It was typically one page and contained brief summaries of ongoing research. A substantial part was devoted to agriculture, but Bleyer also included information on advances in other fields, such as engineering, astronomy, political science, and history. He also, maybe a little bit self-servingly, contained numerous reports on the success of the university’s fledgling journalism program, which appears quite often if you take a look at these old press bulletins. Throughout 1909, for example, the topics covered included courses for farmers that were offered at the university, stories related to dairy, home economics, horse breeding, tobacco, soil, feeds, student health, fraternities, potatoes, fruit growing, city government. In the city government section, he would work to publicize the way in which university studies were being used to pass policy. So not so much the way that people were running for office but how was university research influencing what was happening in cities and towns across the state in some of those political decisions. The university’s athletic programs did find a way into the press bulletin too.

There are numerous announcements about coaching hires, coaching fires, the building of new buildings around campus. Often these pieces tried to, again, deliver information to readers that took scientific advances and made them understandable to the general population. A lot of these focus on what is the university doing for you, the reader. So we see stories that, for example, tout the economic benefits of machine milking. There’s stories that warn readers about invasive crops or invasive species and threats to crops. There’s also a lot of stories that explain the results of experimental work done on campus and what this might mean for you next planting season or beyond. These pieces also, again, addressed specific questions from readers. So you’ll often see readers write to the press bulletin and be published in it, asking questions about the moisture content of butter, for example, or whether or not you should give fresh or reheated skim milk for calves. So, again, it’s just this example of learning how to engage with citizens in the state of Wisconsin and communicate with them effectively.

Eventually, the press bulletin starts carrying these special supplements. And these supplements were designed to be lifted directly from the bulletin and reprinted in newspapers. So I have an example of cheese because that seemed appropriate. And often these included between five to seven articles that again were ready for newspaper publication. They were designed to inform readers and intended to be printed directly from the press bulletin. And the topics varied widely but they all related back to campus or they all related back to the state of Wisconsin as a whole. So these articles on cheese talk about the cheesemaking process. They also talked about marketing of cheese. There’s supplements about recommendations for grocery shopping that featured Wisconsin produce.

And during World War I quite a few supplements are produced about how to support the war effort, either via household efficiency or farm management. A final reoccurring feature of the press bulletin in these early years was a column called Fillers for Makeup, and that was just the short one-liners. I like to think about them as fun facts about the university, that were pitched to newspapers that were looking for content to fill. And often newspapers during this time period had some short white space where they’d throw in one line or two. It would be quotes, it would be fun facts about the world. So in 1914, one of these examples was the fact that there were more than 350 correspondence courses offered by the university. In 1915, five mallard ducklings were born on campus. So that was another thing that newspapers could run. And in 1915, they also contained the item that upland soils, which are acidic, could be made more productive by the proper application of lime.

So just real quick one-liners about the university that a newspaper could run directly. This press bulletin is essentially a public relations operation, and it was a pretty successful one at that. It publicized the work done on campus throughout the state, country, and the world, and it helped solidify Wisconsin’s reputation as a leading global research university. Before these press bulletins were issued, the relationship between the newspapers and the university was rather cool or skeptical. Bleyer’s kind of patient propagandizing, if we want to think of it that way, help soften that relationship in a relatively short period of time. By 1913, he was mailing regular press releases to 100 daily newspapers, 325 weeklies, and 150 magazines and agriculture publications. The press bulletin was also publicizing positive feedback that it received about the University of Wisconsin. So, for example, a quote from The Nation issue in 1912 that talked about the unique feature of Wisconsin politics and administration is the part which the university plays. “It is the state research laboratory in which questions are investigated, policies formulated, and bills drafted. With one hand, it reaches the Capitol and with the other the most distant farmer. It has won the admiration of the most hard-headed agriculturalist so that farmers are now following their sons to Madison, for a few weeks at least, in the university’s lecture rooms and stock pavilion.”

One year later it publishes another excerpt that says: “The University of Wisconsin is considered in Europe as the most representative among western intuitions of learning. Whatever can be dealt with, developed, or improved through the use of scientific instruments and methods is included in the work at the university, whether it relates to agriculture, engineering, commerce, or lawmaking. Thus, every useful activity of this state is sure of the services of the university in rendering available whatever guidance and assistance science has to offer.” So these were also very regular features that appeared as part of the press bulletin. But even though this served a much more strategic communication function, it fit within Bleyer’s view of how a newspaper should function in society. At its heart, the press bulletin was evident of a faith in communication to bring the world new knowledge and an order to improve the social environment. Bleyer really subscribed to this idea of sunlight journalism. This idea that it was important for newspapers to go beyond muckraking, beyond merely exposing the underside of society. Sunlight journalism instead promoted journalism as a means of uplift.

These were crusades in the name of community rather than just exposure of society’s evils. So journalism would preserve democracy by bettering society rather than just telling us everything that’s wrong with it. The press bulletin was essentially about drawing on expertise to fix the problems of society, whether those were agricultural, cultural, political, or economic and elevating the voices of experts and researchers to the point where they were not only heard but understood by the general public. Later Bleyer would write that the lack of popularizing science served a great– the task of popularizing science served a great public good, as it helped educate an otherwise ignorant public. He wrote a small handbook about feature articles, kind of how to write these articles, and science articles were a part of that. He said that rich treasure lay hidden in the pile of scientific monographs that piled up at a university and the journalist might as well exchange a muckrake for a pickax in order to get through it all. But the best way to accelerate progress was to reduce the time between discovery and the application to the needs of mankind, and the press bulletin was really an easy way to do that. Bleyer and the press bulletin weren’t the only effort at this point in time to publicize the work of science. EW Scripps, who I mentioned earlier as the founder of the Detroit News and eventually the founder of the Scripps-McRae Syndicate, launched his scientific news service in 1921.

Despite living in an age of science, the average newspaper inadequately reflected the important part science played in the modern world according to his justification for starting the service. One of his reporters expressed concern to him that the average person knew more about astrology than they knew about astronomy, which is probably the case of still a fair number of people today. But if there was more reporting, if there was better reporting, that could be flipped. This was, again, one of the problems that the press bulletin set out to address. The other way that Bleyer tried to tackle this problem was by establishing a journalism education program that encouraged its students to take courses in physics, to take courses in geology that would allow them to write about these fields in a meaningful way. So as Bleyer started to think about this course program more particularly, again he had some concerns. He has a lot of concerns. At this point, it was based on the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemingly faced a number of potentially lethal challenges. The war’s goal was to make the world safe for democracy, but it seemed to make the survival of democracy even more perilous.

World War I increased doubts about the existence of a rational public, an idea that formed the basis of modern democratic theory. The popular work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung rejected the idea that humans were rational. This was read widely, so this contributed to it. Edward Bernays, a leader in advertising, took some of these ideas and applied that to the world of advertising, so this further advances the idea that people are irrational. And finally, sort of the propaganda and general hysteria generated by the war through posters like these and through a variety of other tactics led many others to conclude that irrational motivations drove human interaction. So when Bleyer was reading all of this, he saw that journalism could really step in and try to fix some of these problems. Journalism would provide the professional social analysis necessary for maintenance of a stable, informed electorate. And journalism would provide a solution to the problems that plagued the American public, but, in practice, the institution, as I’d mentioned, was kind of deeply flawed. The first major problem with the practice of journalism, again, was that newspapers had undergone a tremendous amount of change in the 19th century.

What had begun as small four- to eight-page papers had turned into these huge enterprises and what was something that relied on subscription, now relied on advertising. So now a disproportionate amount of influence is granted to advertisers rather than to readers and subscribers. The large scale, mass production distribution and standardization of news characterized these changes, as did an emphasis on speed. So competition, the rush to get things out early, really starts to appear again in the early 20th century. Remember, not only were newspapers changing but other communication technologies were changing as well, and these all kind of culminate in three main concerns that Bleyer identified when he tried to develop an educational program that would fix these problems. The first was this idea of commercialization. Business concerns overshadowed news and editorial departments and newspapers were increasingly reliant on advertising revenue. The sheer space devoted to advertisements increased, and often advertisers had gained sufficient leverage to color the presentation of news. Bleyer wasn’t hostile to advertising, we had reached a point in the newspapers industry which to be hostile to advertising was to effectively kill your newspaper, but he didn’t want advertising to influence news content.

He was also concerned about sensationalism. Sensationalism had deep roots in American journalism dating back to the 1830s, and Bleyer was particularly concerned about the ready embrace of this type of reporting by new immigrants. He objected to sensationalized reporting on the grounds it eroded accuracy, which topped his list of journalistic virtues. He was appalled by the frequency with which papers falsified news and photographs and believed schools of journalism needed to emphasize this virtue and newspapers established their own bureaus of accuracy. He also then saw poorly-trained reporters. And, again, this was the weakest link on the chain of democratic government. Journalists were often too unprofessional, they lacked rigor, and they lacked insight. In 1924, Bleyer wrote that “uneducated or half-educated boys and girls in almost every city are serving as purveyors of the food of opinion for hundreds of thousands of citizens and voters.” The problem was that reporters were being trained with no knowledge of history, psychology, economics, or any other field and were consequently unprepared for their work of translating the complexities of this world into accurate pieces that people could understand. So the solution here would the better training of reporters.

And this leads us to Bleyer’s kind of approach to journalism education and the start of the journalism school on campus. Bleyer viewed journalism as a form of scientific discourse, an ordered way of presenting useful knowledge to the public. Journalism could help accomplish progressive goals, and the shared information in newspapers could tie citizens to one another, maintaining social stability and moral cohesiveness in an urban industrial mass society. The journalist was an expert who interpreted information and guided the public, and newspapers would improve public life by disseminating information about research and connecting individuals to the university. Bleyer wrote in 1920 that “the problem of journalism education, therefore, is to show aspiring writers how to present discoveries, inventions, new methods, and every significant advance in knowledge in an accurate and attractive form.” The university was obligated to train men and women for this task. Bleyer built his case for the journalism school on the idea that no other profession has a more vital role to play in the welfare of society or to the success of democratic government than journalism. He once noted that the incompetent lawyer may lose money for his client, or maybe the client’s freedom in the worst case. The incompetent doctor might kill roughly 100 people in his lifetime, but the journalist who is incompetent, who reported inaccurate information, the journalist killed democracy. And for him, as hyperbolic as that was, that was the truth.

The stakes were high. An incompetent journalist who gave day after day inaccurate information or information influenced by propaganda, poisoned public information toward, poisoned public opinion, and created false impressions. So the educated journalist would be well-equipped to deal with all of these challenges. And the first journalism course was introduced on campus in 1906 to an enrollment of 40 students. For about five years, Bleyer was the only individual teaching journalism classes that were growing in popularity and number until another individual joined him in 1910. Other journalism programs that had been started at this point in time focused on an apprenticeship model. A strong emphasis on skills courses with little to no liberal arts course requirement. Bleyer snarkily remarked that the apprenticeship model was how lawyers were trained hundreds of years ago, but that they needed to– journalists needed to find a more modern way of educating as these fields become more advanced. Reporters need a broad liberal arts-based education.

Courses in the sciences, history, economics, political science, and others were just as important as hands-on skills-based classes. Indeed, these courses were critical again to giving journalists a foundation of knowledge that they could draw on when they were reporting stories. And I’ll say today, the journalism program on campus still requires and is based in this strong liberal arts tradition where students are required to take from a sample of classes on campus with the idea that if they take an economics class or a statistics course, they can more competently engage with that information when they encounter it in their reporting. At the core of Bleyer’s plan was the cultivation of an informed and critical intellect infused with a sense of social responsibility. His news writing class, for example, combined the skills of news work with the intensive study of news and its significance. A course in copy editing, which involved learning how to find typos and write headlines, had a larger purpose of teaching students how to evaluate news from a variety of sources. The 20th century journalist, and indeed the 21st century journalist, needed to be able to separate the truly newsworthy information from the truly trivial information. Bleyer encouraged his students to seek out news in seemingly non-traditional sources. He wrote extensively about the value of reading scientific journals and proceedings from scientific organizations in terms of finding new story ideas.

He said that the most radical ideas of the day were not found in newspapers but they were found in technical journals and scientific proceedings. And true to the Wisconsin Idea, Bleyer also promoted a link between research and professional journalism. Learning the methods of advanced research would enhance the quality of reporting and would improve the ability of journalists to translate university research to the general public. So when Bleyer passed away unexpectedly in 1935, it was hard to miss the legacy that he had left behind. His colleagues commented that for at least 20 years straight, every year he introduced some sort of new innovation that was rapidly picked up by others in journalism. During his tenure, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin had grown into a leader in journalism education nationwide, and, for a person known as Daddy Bleyer to his students, the branches of his family tree stretched far and wide across the country. His influence also extended beyond campus. He helped form the first organization of journalism teachers and led the push for accreditation among university programs, taking a cue from schools of medicine and law. He founded the Central Interscholastic Press Association, an organization for high school magazines, newspapers, and yearbooks.

He also wrote several of the fields first textbooks, including the handbook that I mentioned on how to write special articles, including science features for magazines. In this book, he developed a set of instructions as well as tips on how to find and evaluate a good story idea. He also finally did original historic research for a volume on the main themes in journalism history. And he spent much of the 1920s or the latter half of that decade traveling and promoting that book. He authored a column on journalism history targeting high schoolers and spoke at length about the lessons learned from history to newspaper executives and editors. He did this in order to understand the present-day problems facing American newspapers. He argued that in order to actually make a path forward, we had to look back somewhat in order to understand the influences that were playing out. But he also was pretty adamant and often said in interviews that history was no profit. Well, we can learn from looking back; we can’t necessarily predict the future, but we can be inspired, we can create, and we can innovate based on the past in order to address the information needs of today.

So with that, I will conclude my talk and open up the floor to questions. Thank you so much for your time and attention. [applause]