Abstract
Kevin Barnhurst died on June 2, 2016, at the age of 64 of an apparent heart attack. Those who were not close to Kevin were surprised to learn that he had a history of heart trouble; he seemed fit, and even youthful. His death marked the end of a remarkable academic career, the impact of which will continue to unfold. His superb book, Mister Pulitzer and the Spider, was just being printed when he died.
Barnhurst entered the field of journalism studies almost accidentally (Barnhurst, 2011). An undergraduate degree in Latin American studies from Brigham Young University (BYU) had led to internships with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the United Nations (UN) but no job; an initial attempt at a master’s degree in economics at the University of Maryland had petered out, and instead he earned a master’s in communication from BYU. This degree had involved a couple of skills-based courses, which proved to be the ticket to freelance work in design and editing. This is turn led to teaching design and editing, first at Westminster College, a liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, then at Keene State University. While at Keene State he published essays, including one in the American Scholar (Barnhurst, 1982) that caught the eye of James Carey, who nudged the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois to recruit him to the faculty. This is where I met Kevin: We were assistant professors together in what was then called the College of Communications, now the College of Media.
At Illinois, Barnhurst learned to be an academic by emulation. He read broadly, and began sitting in on doctoral seminars. I was a fellow traveler in those days. I’d been hired a short while before Kevin. My background was in history, and I had never taken a course in journalism or communication before being assigned to teach them. Part of my introduction to the field was sitting in, with Kevin, on a seminar in audience studies co-taught by our colleagues Ellen Wartella and Larry Grossberg.
Meanwhile, his colleagues in the Journalism department began to signal that he would have trouble getting tenure, and reacted with displeasure when he won a Fulbright to Peru and a coveted Gannett Center fellowship in New York, where he wrote his first book, Seeing the Newspaper (Barnhurst, 1994). Barnhurst responded by moving to Syracuse University. There his book earned him tenure. Shortly after having a massive heart attack, he began a PhD program at the University of Amsterdam. He defended at the end of a year spent writing his dissertation while on sabbatical in Tenerife, then teaching in Syracuse’s study abroad program in Madrid. With PhD in hand, he moved to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. There he finished another book (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), took on administrative duties as director of graduate studies and department head, took the major part in founding a doctoral program, and continued the series of studies that would eventually produce Mr. Pulitzer. In 2013, he moved to the University of Leeds, and in 2015, he retired. In addition to the fellowships in Peru and New York, he did a Fulbright in Italy, a sabbatical in Copenhagen, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard.
These curriculum vitae (CV) data points give a correct impression of Barnhurst’s restless ambition, but fail to demonstrate the great personal warmth and intellectual passion that rounded him out. People who worked with him may carry different impressions. His students will remember his remarkable generosity and also his demanding preciseness. His coauthors—we are legion—will remember his ruthless editing and relentless rewriting. His department heads will remember his dogged and infuriating insistence on correct procedure. All will acknowledge the importance of his scholarly work.
Kevin Barnhurst will be remembered as a major figure in the development of critical journalism studies. His trajectory began with his professional work in design, and his early work, up to and including Seeing the Newspaper, fit comfortably within the orbit of work in visual communication. But he continued to push into other fields, often through collaborations with colleagues. One line of research began with a conversation with Susan Middlestadt, a social psychologist, about how different layouts might give readers different perceptions of the significance of news stories (Middlestadt & Barnhurst, 1999). Their study found that readers understand vertical stories as hard news, and horizontal stories as soft news. Kevin and I had a conversation about this study, and he decided it might be a good idea to look at how front pages had changed in the past 10 years—this was in 1987, the decade of the introduction of USA Today, which was widely considered to have sparked a design revolution. “Ten years is too short,” I told him. “Let’s do a hundred.” The resulting content analysis questioned the notion of a USA Today revolution (Barnhurst & Nerone, 1991) and pointed instead to the rise of modernism in the years between the world wars. Another half dozen studies eventually produced our book, The Form of News: A History (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001).
In the course of these and other collaborations, Barnhurst’s interests expanded to embrace social history and political communication. His position became more explicitly critical as well. His instinct to take to the margins of scholarly formations complemented his increasingly activist queer identity, which led him in the 1980s to do graphic work for ACT UP, and later to the collection he edited, Media/Queered (Barnhurst, 2007).
The connection between Kevin’s contrarian instinct and his queer identity strengthened in the climate of journalism scholarship in the 1990s. This was the decade of Habermas and the public sphere, of Robert Putnam and bowling alone, of civic or public journalism and communitarianism. Having undergone his academic adolescence, so to speak, in James Carey’s shop, Kevin found himself continually saying “Yes, but.” He remained mindful of how communities excluded while they included, and viewed the invocation of lost social capital with suspicion.
One particular community whose collective memory he challenged was the community of professional journalists. His work on the new long journalism, which began of course with a collaboration (Barnhurst & Mutz, 1997) and moved through a cascade of empirical studies of various periods and news media forms, wrestled with the common sense among journalists that economic pressures and bottom-line-oriented management forced the news to become increasingly terse and episodic. Barnhurst’s studies consistently showed that individual news accounts were becoming instead increasingly long and interpretive. This finding seemed to contradict Dan Hallin’s finding that, as reported in a 1992 article in the Journal of Communication, sound bites were getting shorter. But Barnhurst pointed out that, on a deeper level, both findings pointed to the increasing importance of the role of journalists as professional observers and explainers.
He also points out, there and in Mister Pulitzer (Barnhurst, 2016), that the rise of modern professional journalism has costs. News loses much of its affective power when it loses its grounding in concrete events, places, and people, and begins to speak like a sociologist. Barnhurst agreed with journalists on a key point that news was losing its appeal for ordinary people, especially young people. (Barnhurst & Wartella, 1991). Unlike the conventional wisdom, however, he looked for the causes in the news, rather than in the youth, or in the larger media environment. What he found was a culture of journalism that was losing its engagement with the popular while cultivating legitimacy with the powerful, and news professionals who assumed an ideology that leads them to continually misrecognize their real situation. Of course Barnhurst’s relationship with actually existing journalism was complicated—not purely critical, but also knowingly affectionate, informed by his relaxed conversations with fellows at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, many of whom are featured in Mister Pulitzer. His counter-intuitive finding in the book is that although the popular understanding is that a “spidery” network of mobile online media has supposedly changed news organizations, the standards of contemporary journalism date back to the realist demands of the Pulitzer era, such that news stories got longer, and became less about individuals but more about organizations, more about trends and issues but less about events. Moreover, people in stories are more likely to be authorities and institutional spokespeople, and journalists have become experts.
One wonders where Kevin’s work would have taken him. I’m a historian—I do the past, not the future, and certainly not the counterfactual future. But I think he would have lived to produce other masterpieces, tackling bigger issues. Who knows? Certainly not Kevin himself, who was as bad at predicting the future as I am. In his 1983 essay for Commentary, “Living Without Health,” he dwelt on the example of Barney Clarke, the first recipient of an artificial heart; Kevin predicted that “My children will see the Jarvik 7 as my father’s generation saw the Model T.” If Kevin had been right about that, he’d still be with us.