Joseph Pulitzer and the Large Mass Communication Class: From Street Sales to Lecture Halls

Abstract

Ironically, the newest members of a college faculty often are assigned what may well be the most difficult course to teach in the journalism repertoire--the large lecture classes in introduction to mass communication.The size of these classes and the dizzying array of subjects to be covered make them notoriously hard to teach. Senior professors typically pass the course to their younger and less experienced colleagues at the first opportunity, anxious to be relieved of an assignment that has come to be as welcomed as the queen of Spades in the game of Old Maid.I eventually came to see two steps an essential to teaching a large mass communication class. One, you have to take advantage of the drama and excitement that bigness produces. You need to stage a performance, or let someone else do it, preferably the students. Two, you have to do something quite opposite. You have to counteract the bigness in order to establish an intimacy in the class. You need to build a genuine relationship between yourself and the students, which is a tall order because there's only one of you and at least a hundred of them.For this kind of teaching, journalism professors have a ready model, if they would only recognize it, in the mass circulation dailies earlier in this century, which faced similar problems with their readers. And for a teacher who wants to reach more than the 20 good students who show up in any large lecture class, there is no better mentor than Joseph Pulitzer, who in one of his most famous statements said, want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee.THE LESSONS OF PULITZERThe inheritor of the hijinks and homeyness of the Penny Press, Joseph Pulitzer evolved a formula that woke up the sleepers in his audience with newspapers that were at once gaudy and serious. The variety in The New York World showed how multifaceted sensationalism can be at its best. Pulitzer had big headlines, color and cartoons, an intellectual editorial page, great investigative articles, and enough stunts to choke a circus.He said, yes, when Bly proposed going into Blackwell's Insane Asylum as a patient in order to expose conditions there. No one had ever gone undercover in a mental hospital before, much less a woman. Mental hospitals weren't even considered fit subjects for journalism, although Pulitzer's readers formed the poverty population from which its patients were drawn.Pulitzer faced some of the same problems that any professor does entering a big lecture hall jammed with a cross-section of a state's college population. Most of the people in his audience were immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were poorly educated and used to receiving information by the spoken word. They were not fundamentally print-oriented. They did not see their lives reflected in many of the existing publications in New York before Pulitzer's arrival. They were not interested in the prestige topic of the day, i.e. politics.Our students come from school systems: weaker than we would like them to be. They are often the first generation to go to college, or the children of the first generation. In a class of 100, at least one student will not know what era or purposefully means in an exam question and will be brave enough to ask. Some of them do not know why the Nazis killed the Jews, or even that they did. Most are television-oriented, not print-oriented. Many of their interests are not discussed in their classrooms.STREET SALES AND ACADEMIAJournalism professors rarely have a kind word to say about sensationalism, but Bly's undercover story of Blackwell's Insane Asylum has electrified every college class I have tried it on. It has the drama that a mass circulation audience demands--our gal Nellie in the clutches of truly evil nurses, who drive the delicate Miss Tillie Mayard insane with their cruelty. Most of the investigative stories that Pulitzer ran in The World were about problems that his readers faced themselves. …