‘Essentially an American Institution Planted on Foreign Soil’: The American Library in Paris, the Paris Herald, the Paris Tribune and Ex Libris

In 1920, the American Library in Paris (ALP) was incorporated, with the desire to ‘be a somewhat adequate representation of American life and thought’ in the city. This paper will argue that the ALP - an institution established for overseas soldiers in 1918, which became its own entity in 1920 and celebrated a century of service in 2020 - would do more than represent America in the interwar period: it would play a role in shaping American identity as well. Through archival materials, this paper explores the ALP’s representation in the three periodicals most imbricated with its interwar existence: the Paris editions of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald, and the little magazine, Ex Libris. I argue that the ALP - in both its physical and psychic forms - was an important site for the formation of transnational American identity in the interwar period, and that it strived to weigh in on conversations about emerging literary movements, including modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. American identity, as the Library represented it, combined national exceptionalism with a true desire for transnational cooperation. It was firmly at home on international soil, and well-versed in the era’s literary debates.

Censorship at Sea

In the first months of 1942, the navy exerted tight control over its war correspondents. While allowing them access to ships, it placed so many restrictions on what they could write about that a group of them, led by Robert Casey of the Chicago Daily News, began to complain vociferously. Stanley Johnston of the Chicago Tribune ultimately became the biggest troublemaker. After escaping from the USS Lexington before it sank during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Johnston used the slow journey home not only to write about this experience but also to learn that the navy had received advanced knowledge of the Japanese attack on Midway. His stories on both battles created a major sensation. With the navy convinced that the Tribune had divulged its secret codebreaking operation, the Roosevelt administration even made a failed bid to prosecute it under the Espionage Act.

The War Beat, Pacific

From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of highly courageous correspondents covered America’s war against Japan. Based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, War Beat, Pacific provides the first comprehensive account of what these reporters witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front’s perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative, the book takes us from MacArthur’s doomed defense on the Philippines and the navy’s overly strict censorship policy at the time of Midway through the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte and Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, detailing the cooperation, as well as conflict, between the media and the military as they grappled with the enduring problem of limiting a free press during a period of extreme crisis. At the heart of this book are the brave, sometimes tragic stories of reporters like Clark Lee and Vern Haugland of the Associated Press, Byron Darnton and Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Stanley Johnston and Al Noderer of the Chicago Tribune, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Times, and Robert Sherrod of Time magazine. Twenty-three correspondents died while reporting on the Pacific War. Many more sustained serious wounds. War Beat, Pacific shows how both the casualties and the survivors deserve to be remembered as America’s golden generation of journalists.

Journalism’s Imagined Audiences

This chapter offers an overview of the primary differences in imagined audiences between production-oriented audience engagement news organizations like Hearken and City Bureau and more traditional news organizations like the Chicago Tribune. Because City Bureau and the Tribune both focus on Chicago, each organization’s conceptualization of its specific audience demonstrates how profound differences can unfold even when audiences overlap. Hearken, however, does not publish news. Instead, it provides tools and services to newsrooms to help them improve their relationships with their audiences. Hearken’s imagined news audience is, therefore, a general one. The author concludes that, despite the fact that the journalists diverge dramatically when it comes to news audience composition and expectations, they see eye to eye on one important thing: Their imagined audiences emphasize the audience’s relationship with news above all else.

The Promise of Audience Engagement

Though there is widespread agreement surrounding the problems journalism faces, there also is a growing rift among journalism professionals and researchers about how best to solve them. A growing number of journalism stakeholders argue that the news should focus more on “audience engagement,” a loosely defined term that generally involves journalists’ incorporating more audience input in news production to more accurately reflect their lived experiences. Those at City Bureau and Hearken believe this more collaborative form of news production will increase the audience’s trust in news as well as the amount of value they derive from it. Others, including many at the Chicago Tribune, disagree. In addition to offering a comprehensive definition of audience engagement, this chapter also traces the disagreement surrounding it to enduring differences in how journalists perceive the public.

First Imagined, Then Pursued

This chapter draws on Hearken’s efforts to challenge journalism’s audience perceptions—as well as the audience pursuits unfolding within City Bureau and the Chicago Tribune—to explore the connection between the way journalists imagine their audiences and the steps they take to reach them. This chapter also explores another dispute unfolding throughout the news industry: the lens through which journalists conceptualize their own expertise. Traditional journalists tend to take for granted the assumption that their professional training and skills make them significantly better equipped to report the news than the people they hope to reach. This is different from those advocating for more audience engagement, who see their audiences as being more valuable as news collaborators than they are typically given credit for and also view journalists themselves as being in need of exactly this sort of collaboration.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s overarching questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences? Who gets included in these conceptualizations, and who is left out? Perhaps most important, how aligned are journalism’s “imagined” audiences with the real ones? It also introduces the book’s ethnographic data, collected from three news organizations: the Chicago Tribune, City Bureau, and Hearken. Both the Tribune and City Bureau publish news, while Hearken offers tools and services to newsrooms interested in improving their relationship with their audiences. Each has its own distinct take on what people expect from news, which leads all three to chart remarkably different paths in their shared quest to make high-quality, valuable, and publicly appreciated journalism. Taken together, these data reveal how journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences.

Representations of Wrigley Field Redevelopment(s) in the Chicago Tribune: Neoliberal Discourse and Urban Politics

Since the concept of redeveloping Wrigley Field became prevalent, the Chicago Tribune has notably constructed a variety of narrative strands on related urban dynamics. Through a framework that connected post-Gramsci insights of hegemony, discourse, and critics of spatial and economic neoliberalism, this study examined how the newspaper strategically assembled discourses in mediatizing urban politics surrounding the Wrigley renovation. First, the newspaper fostered hegemonic consent that endorsed the redevelopment(s) by promoting old tropes of economic development and market growth despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Second, it also produced a parallel discourse that expressed moderate recognition and sympathy to the interest and experience of the community. Without fundamentally challenging neoliberal power, however, such discursive construction was a strategic and instrumental intervention that reinforced the contingencies and boundaries of neoliberal hegemony. Through such investigations, this study shed light on the ongoing rearticulation(s) of the media regime that strategically produced neoliberal rationalities, subjectivities, and discursive antagonism as it assisted to shape urban imageries and political economies of sporting spaces.