— Summer 2011 • 7 American Journalism, 28:3, 7–27 Copyright © 2011, American Journalism Historians Association Does Journalism History Matter? By John Nerone J ournalism historians worry that their work doesn’t matter. They lament that their work does not ind a broader audi- ence among historians. 1 After all, historians of every na- tion, period, and specialization spend an awful lot of time thinking about the media these days. Because we were there irst, we ought to have plenty to say to them. Oddly, though, journalism historians rarely worry that their work doesn’t matter to communication schol- ars. Perhaps they assume that, because most of them are located in schools of journalism and communication, their importance to that ield is secure. But I think the relationship is more complicated and the opportunities richer than is usually recognized. History is not about the past but about the relationship between the past and the present. 2 For journalism historians, this bit of com- mon sense suggests that their work should be about the relationship between past journalism and present journalism. And certainly there has been a lot of that: a lot of looking for the precursors of present journalism, and a lot of deploying the standards of modern journalism in judgment of the practices of the past. The presentist use of history is deeply embedded in the history of journalism his- tory. There has been less of the sort of research that brings the past to bear on the problems of journalism in the present—what one would call a critical history of journalism. But it is certainly not fair to say that journalism history hasn’t been critical. I argue that, in recent years, the critical mode has been the dominant one. This is especially true when the object of study is race or gender. The same cannot be said of critical histories of the news system, particularly if one measures those histories by their engagement with the scholarship of critical scholars of today’s news system. That is not the arena we have sought. The reasons why go back a few decades. Journalism history has a built-in identity crisis. It is one of the