Francis Foster

In 1912, you get the Columbia School of Journalism, which later awards the Pulitzer Prize.

And they start to distinguish, this is the professional man who went to this law school for lawyers.

And by the way, there wasn't always before that.

There's the four ends of court in your country.

So just as they took the casualness of the training of lawyers and professionalized it in a German way, they did the same thing in journalism.

Now in law, that's a more arguable thing.

That probably makes sense.

With journalism, it definitely does not, because you get a very particular class and a very particular point of view instead of a newsroom full of competing classes.

And some are immigrants, and some people were born here before the revolution, and it's just a constant rolling debate and observation about society.

Newsrooms used to be really fun, wild places.

When I joined The Wall Street Journal back in 2000, one of the things the HR department made me sign was a document saying I would not keep a bottle of liquor in the office.

And that's probably because decades before, this was actually a problem in The Journal and in other newsrooms.

Okay, so they start to professionalize, they start to hand out awards, and then they realize what they really need is unions.

If they can control the means of production, they can control what is produced.

Problem is that journalists don't like unions.

And there is a battle between 1908

and 1933 to unionize.

And most of these people simply do not, just like school teachers in this period of time, rejected all attempts at unionization.

And in 19, I think it's 1908 or shortly thereafter, the LA Times is bombed by unions for refusing to unionize.

The building explodes.