- 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]