They reported wars, outraged monarchs and promoted the case for their country's freedom. The pages of Irish Journalism Before Independence: More a Disease than a Profession are filled with the remarkable stories of reporters, proprietors and propagandists. Sixteen leading writers celebrate the emergence of Irish Journalism in this original and engaging volume. These leading media academics, historians and scholars join in what is a festschrift travelling the long Irish nineteenth century to 1922.

Their stories, narratives and histories illustrate the emergence of Irish journalism chronicling the evolution and development of the profession, and the various challenges confronted by the first generation of modern journalists.

The profession's past is framed by reference to its practitioners and their practice. Readers are treated to studies of foreign correspondents, editorial writers, provincial newspaper owners, sports journalists and the challenges of minority language journalism.

The volume goes beyond Ireland to explore the work of Irish journalists abroad and shows how the great political debates about Ireland's place in the United Kingdom served as a backdrop to newspaper publication in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In his preface Professor James Curran concludes that the volume "advances by leaps and bounds the history of the Irish press".

The collection makes valuable and important contribution to our knowledge of Irish journalism - and like all good reportage it offers its readers a very good read.

About the Author
Kevin Rafter is head of the department of film and media at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire.

Reviews

"Rafter's 'Irish Journalism Before Independence'... is in a sense a map of a territory that remains only partly explored; and, like all such maps, it provides us with tantalising glimpses of why this might be so, and what remains to be done to fill in more of the outlines."

"As an agenda-setting volume, 'Irish Journalism Before Independence' is timely..."

"Overall, the volume is an important, and useful, contribution to a burgeoning historiography of journalism."

"each chapter is well researched and written, drawing our attention to a wide variety of individuals and incidences which history may well have forgotten if it weren't for the work of the contributors....Students of history, media studies and journalism will find this book a useful resource in their studies, showing them the importance, albeit historical, of print media in the development of an independent Irish state."

(Patricia Neville, University College Cork, Irish Journal of Sociology, 2014)

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Book Information
ISBN 9780719084522
Author Kevin Rafter
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Manchester University Press
Publisher Manchester University Press
Weight(grams) 367g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 14mm