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Description:
Believe it or not, writers like London and Dickens got their starts in journalism. Apparently brevity wasn't always part of the news.
Transcript
- 00:01
No When you hear the names charles dickens and jack
- 00:05
london you probably think novelist rather than journalist Or maybe
- 00:10
you think motorcyclist Yes well you know But while it
- 00:14
might be hard to imagine any of the author's eight
- 00:16
hundred page monsters being published in broadsheet their careers can
Full Transcript
- 00:21
definitely help us when it comes to understanding the development
- 00:24
of journalism over the nineteenth century What we now know
- 00:27
as modern journalism started to take shape cities were growing
- 00:31
and literacy rates were rising so editors were racking their
- 00:34
brains trying to come up with ways to reach a
- 00:36
broader cross section of this suddenly more literate society Well
- 00:41
since chocolate newspapers never really took off editors ended up
- 00:44
going with sensationalism that its stories about scandals and crimes
- 00:49
that appealed to readers as a sort of guilty pleasure
- 00:52
down familiar Yeah good news is no news in the
- 00:56
us Cheap newspapers called penny presses were founded and they
- 01:00
covered the sensationalist stories that more established news outlets wouldn't
- 01:04
touch with a ten foot pole The british weren't left
- 01:07
out of this sensationalist craze On the other side of
- 01:09
the pond people like william thomas stead covered such lurid
- 01:14
subjects as child prostitution well it's important to keep in
- 01:17
mind that even though the subject matter was sensational wasn't
- 01:20
necessarily bad journalism although there were certainly some sicko is
- 01:24
reading steady work tio lap up holographic details that was
- 01:28
pioneering investigative journalism deeply investigating single topics bringing them to
- 01:33
a wider public understanding Well the fact that these articles
- 01:37
were published under sensational headlines like the violation of virgins
- 01:41
and a child of thirteen bought for five pounds didn't
- 01:45
make it any less serious Dawn of investigative journalism where
- 01:49
people like dickens in london come in they too were
- 01:51
interested in exposing social ills through deep investigations so they
- 01:56
fit right into this emerging journalistic scene you know like
- 02:00
hand in glove anyway so maybe dickins would have put
- 02:03
it more eloquently anyway Diggins in london elevated writing styles
- 02:07
that wouldn't fly in contemporary newsrooms although narrating in first
- 02:11
person with ornate complex language was par for the course
- 02:15
among nineteenth century journalist contemporary journalists drive for objectivity and
- 02:20
prefer to go light on all those adjectives and adverbs
- 02:23
that novelists and like oh so very much not sure
- 02:26
dickens in london might be literary luminaries but hey style 00:02:30.21 --> [endTime] Guides or start guys You know what guys
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