When researching a historic topic, newspapers are a great source of information because at the time they were written, they served the purpose of giving a contemporary snapshot of the topic it’s covering. Unlike a magazine feature or a piece of fiction, newspapers are objectively reporting facts. Using newspapers in research is hardly a novel concept; Foner cites the New York Times dozens of times in his book, and Berger, who works for the Times, surely used its expansive archives when researching his. I think that taking a hard look at the newspapers of New York City, either the heavily circulated or ethnically specific ones (or both), would help us discern exactly what life was like in whatever time period we are examining, even if that time period is now. I think that covering the newspapers in New York could be done in two ways, so I hope it’s ok that I split my proposal into two.
Proposal 1: Examining Contemporary Ethnic Newspapers
If executed correctly, this could be a really interesting way of furthering the type of ethnic analysis we did during our neighborhood visits. According to Wikipedia (the best source I could find) there are twenty-five daily and dozens of weekly ethnic newspapers printed in New York. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of every newspaper printed in New York, many of which are totally free. We could look at the list and choose 19 different small newspapers to monitor. For anyone fluent in other languages (which I’m sure many people in this class are), there are a ton newspapers printed in other languages. We could try and visit the newspapers headquarters, summarize the articles printed and most importantly monitor who reads the paper. There are plenty of ways to incorporate videos and images, and I’m sure most of these papers have a strong online presence. I think this topic is really great because we could learn a lot about New Yorkers by surveying the newspapers they read. Here is the link to the Wikipedia page that has the full list of newspapers in New York:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines#Ethnic_press
Proposal 2: Examining A Wave of Immigration Through the Scope of the “Big Four” Newspapers
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News and The New York Post have been around for well over 150 years. If we could gain access to their archives, we could exhaustively cover one (or many) waves of immigration as it was reported in the newspapers. If we wanted to cover the Irish and Jewish wave of immigration, we would comb through the archives of these papers and read interesting articles about events related to these waves. For example, if we decided that we wanted to focus on Irish immigrants, we would look for articles related to Ellis Island, the Five Points and the 1902 riots. This would be a really cool way to learn the on goings of an immigrant group in New York City the way any American outside of New York would have had to during the waves of immigration.
