Media Literacy Challenge #11: Define "journalism"

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Media Literacy Challenge #11: Define “journalism”

Nate Noorlander
June 26, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

“Journalism” is not some universal and unchanging ideal, sometimes reverently called “the 4th estate” because it theoretically sits outside the three branches of government in order to hold them accountable.

But in fact there are many “journalisms,” and “the media” in which they work has come to us through many historically contingent iterations that could be described as byproducts of the technology, business, and politics of their time, and but for a few accidents of timing could look totally different than they do today.

So take a look at the linked quiz featuring entries from a timeline of the history of the media we cover in our Media Literacy course, and entries from the course media literacy glossary.

Can you match the entries with their descriptions, and then articulate how we got to the present? More importantly: is any of this understanding necessary, or is it optional? Academic? Irrelevant?

Interrogate your intuitions; see if you can find any assumptions that deserve a little more scrutiny. Enjoy.

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #11: Define “journalism”

Definitions

Revolution-era political media (the late 1700s–1840s):

At the points of starkest contrast, papers in the early 1800s celebrated partisanship rather than neutrality. This is more-or-less the opposite of what we consider to be good, old-fashioned, and rigorous journalism today, and it raises different kinds of questions about what we mean by a “free press,” and what that implies about the separation of journalism from politics. In the Revolution era, and for the next fifty years or so, many newspapers were openly, knowingly, and unashamedly edited by, subsidized by, or otherwise in league with particular candidates and parties, and their funding, reporting, and editorial stance could even be subservient to that candidate or party. Indeed, another historian of the media has suggested that some papers were little more than the “secretaries” of the parties they served, and this was known and expected.

19th-century commercial media the (1830s–1920s):

When papers like James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald began selling one-penny dailies in 1835, they immediately shifted from being a medium for and about politics peddled to a select local audience, to being a medium designed with typical business motives in mind, motives like reach and profit. They stopped relying on the combination of yearly subscription fees and political patronage of their usual base of political and commercial supporters, and gave much more attention to advertising. This shifted the nature of the product being sold: “[W]ith the penny press a newspaper sold a product to a general readership and sold the readership to advertisers.” (Schudson 25)

20th-century professional media (the 1920s–the 1990s):

The 20th century started with some news organizations already moving away from the commercial sensationalism of the “yellow press,” toward a more toned-down informational approach. This move was accelerated and cemented into place when WWI dramatically exposed the way the media could be used to manipulate public opinion. Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda machine, the first of its kind, spent significant resources to convince people to support American participation in the war, and discredit everyone who disagreed. After the war, “objectivity,” a term rarely used in American journalism before the 1920s, became a guiding star for a new class of professional reporters.

fragmentation of the media:

the proliferation of sources we can go to for information, from legacy institutions, to independent journalists, to unverified reports spreading on social media; our media environment has so many sources and they publish so much content that we’re not always hearing or seeing the same things as the people around us, so this term connotes certain harms supposed to result from this environment, including the dissolution of social cohesion and trust

Downloadables:

7 Responses

Wanda W says:

June 29, 2026 at 6:40 pm

When one journals one is recording events and their thoughts, feelings about, and impacts of said events. “Ism” as a suffix comes from Greek and denotes a belief, practice, or habit. So a definition of Journalism could be the regular practice of recording events and the impact of said events. That is fine. I think a problem is when feelings about, or interpretation of, events are reported as, or interpreted as factual.

For centuries things occurred at the speed of walking or riding a horse. It could be days, weeks, or months between the declaration of war and the initial attack. Today it can be minutes. The report of it can also occur within minutes. Additionally, due to advances in mechanization more products can be transported to more places more rapidly than ever before, leading to a globally interconnected economy. Events in one place can impact even distant locations and millions of people.

These are some of the reasons that reports of what has and is occurring has changed over time. In the movie Everafter Cinderella is reading a book and her stepmother belittles her by saying, “Some people read because they can not think for themselves.” It is known that what a person is exposed to, what they see and hear, and read, impacts what they think, believe, do, and want. So advertising and manipulating what people see and hear becomes important to many. Not everyone involved in the process is honest. Results are all that matter to them. These are some factors that impact what is reported as news.
Does it matter how we get our news or if we are aware of the biases of our news source? For many people, no. If it doesn’t impact them directly, they don’t care.

Regarding insurance debates, I have heard people say they have veteran’s benefits or Medicare, so they have insurance, so any details that impact millions are unimportant to them, they have coverage. Sadly, many people don’t really care about things that do not directly and immediately impact them, so they pay little attention to the news.

Many people just go with whatever “their group” does, because fitting in and belonging is of maximum importance to them. To be fair, survival depended upon that for centuries.

However, there is the group of people who are more independent thinkers, who are okay with sometimes having a different opinion, who may be more educated or more advantaged for whom news, its sources, its biases, it’s agendas, even it’s funding sources are important. For these people, whether the source is legacy media, opinion journalism, context free, independent media, or some other iteration of receiving either facts or regurgitated bologna, yes knowing what one consumes is important.

Reply
Brenna says:

July 1, 2026 at 10:52 am

I think it is important for people to be aware of what they are consuming. In this regard, we are better off as a society if people are educated and cognizant of how people are learning and interpreting their information. The

Reply
Emily D. says:

July 3, 2026 at 9:40 am

Hopefully I am not going off on a tangent too bad. What it got me thinking about is a video I watched of the NIH’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, given at Hillsdale College.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqR00vX0V-E)
In part of his presentation he pointed out that science once was a process of someone making observations of something and someone else studying the same thing. When multiple observers come together, compare notes and are observing the same thing then that is new science. But he said today a credentialed individual is observing something and they write a paper about it and get it published and that on its own is called new science and cited as fact. Doesn’t that sound like social media on every topic under the sun? Isn’t that the problem we are talking about avoiding by verifying sources, being wary of stories that hit emotionally etc. I had to look it up, but I thought there was a Bible verse about by two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15 and similarly in 2 Corinthians 13:1) Words to live by. In past times it seems like there was a lot more public discourse, but as technology advances we are more and more alone consuming with less back and forth between intelligent people debating/discussing without hating.
Understanding how the news was provided and how it is now provided is absolutely necessary. How are they incentivized- not because they are all evil to want to make profit, but just to understand how that might tint the provided information.

Reply
1. Nate Noorlander says:
  
  July 6, 2026 at 10:59 am
  
  Your last sentence contains a crucial nuance that students tend to overlook in my experience—they think in all or nothing terms, so if profit is involved, the whole thing is worthless. Which obviously misses the point—like you say, its not that it’s worthless, it’s just that it’s useful in one way and not another; we’re reading in an informed way instead of taking things at face value. Great point.
  
  Reply
Hyrum Petersen says:

July 4, 2026 at 6:12 pm

I think it would be awesome if journalism was more like a 4th estate, but nowadays a lot of media is full of lies, misleading statements, and so much more. I wonder how we could change that?

Reply
1. Nate Noorlander says:
  
  July 6, 2026 at 11:03 am
  
  I’m not sure the “nowadays” qualifier is always justified. Sometimes we think what we’re seeing is new, when it’s very far from new. Perhaps the scope and scale have changed, or the particular incentives have changed based on a new historical context, new technologies, and new business models, but if you mean to imply that in days before “nowadays” the media wasn’t full of partisanship, misleading information, information that was clearly skewed to its own incentives, lies, sensationalism, etc., I think you’ll be surprised at how consistently problematic public information is and has been, even from the time of Gutenberg.
  
  Reply
Kelly Hutton says:

July 7, 2026 at 7:47 am

The quiz was very difficult! I have never in my life been exposed to any of the quality information you have been putting out in these media literacy challenges. This is all very new to me, and I’m in my mid-forties!

Journalism being the “fourth estate” I think would have been very necessary before the information age. The media being able to inform the people of what was going on in the government and news from outside their small geographic circle would have been crucial for them to have any idea what was happening. I believe that it is still important now for us to have some kind of impartial media that accurately reports what is going on in the government. I think this should be easily accessible, and known and respected as non-biased and accurate. Then we can go to all the other media outlets and news sources to get the differing points of view, interpretations, opinions, etc. I think it is very important to learn how we got here. To learn what media/journalism was originally for, who it was for, how it has changed, why, etc.. Now I think so much of it is just another form of entertainment and monetization.

Reply

Number of seats	Discount	Purchase per seat
1	—	$249
2–4	–25%	$186.75
5–9	–30%	$174.30
10–19	–35%	$161.85
20+	–40%	$149.40

Number of seats	Discount	Subscription per seat
1	—	$30 / month
2–4	–25%	$22.50 / month
5–9	–30%	$21 / month
10–19	–35%	$19.50 / month
20+	–40%	$18 / month