["I scrubs," Little Katie told 19th-century photojournalist Jacob Riis]
I started my first career in 1985 at a small southeast Arkansas newspaper that had entered the era of cold type long before my arrival. The Pine Bluff Commercial even had a computer-based messaging system, so we could tell the city desk when a story was ready. Then and now, it was tempting to believe that much of journalism's big technology advances came in recent time.
But now comes a new book about pioneering photojournalist Jacob Riis. In 1889, Riis documented squalid living conditions in New York City with his seminal How the Other Half Lives. In the new Rediscovering Jacob Riis (cover, inset), the authors note that Riis leveraged then-new technology to produce groundbreaking photography, The New York Times says in a new review: "Making use of newly invented magnesium flash powder, he brought the brilliant light of a new medium to bear on a netherworld that had never been photographically recorded.''What technologies have had the biggest impact on your career? Leave a note in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, use this link from a non-work computer; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.
Among the first disruptors to journalism were people like James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley.
ReplyDeleteTheir penny papers put many six-penny papers out of business.
They created a new form of journalism to take advantage of their ability to produce more papers more often and sell them more cheaply to an audience the six-penny publishers didn't value -- the working class and the merchant class.
What made their innovations possible? Steam-driven rotary presses, a technological marvel of 1835.
Until the mid-part of the 20th Century, entrepreneurial publishers drove the content of their papers. Then the professional class of journalist took over newsrooms.
Readership has been declining ever since.