A history of the press (and journalism): wondering through research paths¹

Abstract

This paper is a methodological reflection about historical research applied to the Communication field. It does not only focus on the historiographical perspective that has grown in the Communication field, but mainly on the inclusion of new approaches. For that purpose, this paper presents an analysis of doctoral thesis and master’s dissertations produced in the Communication field from 1990 to 2016 that have the history of the press/journalism as a central theme. The results indicate a shift of the paradigm in these analyses through the last decade. We notice a plural and dense approach and a different perspective towards history, as a flow between times, which is essential for a better understanding of the communicational processes. This paper also aims at presenting some methodological scenarios, which can be applied to studies that have the historical issue as its reflexive core.

Keyworks
History of journalism; History of the press; Methodology; Communication; History

Resumo

O artigo faz uma reflexão metodológica sobre a pesquisa histórica na área da Comunicação, evidenciando não apenas o crescimento da perspectiva historiográfica, mas sobretudo a inclusão de novas abordagens. Para isso, analisa teses e dissertações produzidas na área da Comunicação de 1990 a 2016 que têm a história da imprensa/do jornalismo como temática central. Observa-se a mudança de paradigma dessas análises na última década, com a adoção de um olhar denso e plural e a percepção da história como trânsito entre tempos, fundamental para a compreensão dos processos comunicacionais. Objetiva-se apresentar, também, alguns cenários metodológicos que podem ser adotados em estudos cujo centro reflexivo é a questão histórica.

Palavras-chave
História do jornalismo; História da imprensa; Metodologia; Comunicação; História

Resumen

El artículo hace una reflexión metodológica sobre la investigación histórica en el área de la Comunicación, evidenciando no sólo el crecimiento de la perspectiva historiográfica, sino sobre todo la inclusión de nuevos enfoques. Para esto, este artículo analiza más detenidamente tesis y disertaciones producidas en el área de la Comunicación, de 1990 a 2016, que tiene la historia de la prensa/del periodismo como temática central. Se observa un cambio de paradigma de esos análisis en la última década, con la adopción de una mirada densa y plural y la percepción de la historia como tránsito entre tiempos, fundamental para la comprensión de los procesos comunicacionales. Se pretende presentar, también, algunos escenarios metodológicos que pueden ser adoptados en estudios que tienen la cuestión histórica como centro reflexivo.

Palabras clave
Historia del periodismo; Historia de la prensa; Metodología; Comunicación; Historia

Introduction

The historical view over the communicational processes and practices obliges us initially to a reflection on how we must consider the media in each particular temporality and in which way that society related itself with the public communicational expression.

Secondly, considering that the methodological option relates not only to how we consider scientific knowledge, but from which historic place we are talking, it is necessary that before choosing research procedures – methodology as a methodical action – one defines the notion of history we are starting from.

Thirdly, one has to specify the context of analysis, since the historical research obliges us to contextualization, without which we don’t establish references and interpretative presumptions in relation to the world that is being analyzed.

Building the history of the means of communication is to consider first what we could define as the existing media scene at a given time and place. What mechanisms were used so the communicational discourse could multiply itself in public spaces? How was produced the articulation between producers and recipients of textualities? How did the public relate with the media, considering the immersion in reproductive and message-multiplying technologies? What was the realization path of the processes of the press and how did they configure themselves as a media context?

The attempt to access the past, however, is made through the interpretation and analysis of documents, understood here in their broadest sense, in which they arrive in the present in the form of traces. This flawed interpretation of the researcher’s subjectivity has the mark of the era in which it was produced and is permanently subject to new interpretations, reviews, reformulations. It is from this permanent suspension and provisional aspect that scientific knowledge can move forward.

Another important issue concerns the intent of the document. No documental production is neutral and its durability also indicates a certain propensity to having already been produced aiming at a future possibility. When one considers media production itself as a document of a certain time, it’s also necessary to realize that it had a special relationship with its historical present.

When talking about themselves and, thus, constituting themselves as sources for their own history, the media, on the other hand, produce a memorable discourse in which the past is presented as a bearer of significances that relate much more to an assumed ideal of what must be fixed in the future. But it is from these guts that we must extract meanings about that world.

Communication and history: confluences

The Communication as a theoretical place of reflection about communicational processes and practices favors researches that concern to the absolute present in which we live. There is a preference for the reflection on processes that are still in progress and even an unmeasured attention to themes that are emblematically built around empirical materials that occupy a privileged place in the everyday life of contemporary communication practices. Therefore, when Orkut was the ultimate technological cry in respect to social networks, this theme was extensively referred to (but not always theoretically reflected) by many researches. When Twitter threatened to become a fever of message-transmitting mechanisms, it started almost naturally to occupy the stage of privileged empirical objects in communication researches. Now we are watching the emergence of memes.

What is the reason for this preference for ultra-contemporary processes, for empirical objects that sometimes crumble in the course of the analyses geared to an exacerbated “presentism”?

If on the one hand we can offer an attempt of interpretation from the very definition of what is the theme of analysis of Communication – not necessarily the means and media production, but the bindings that are created daily in the world of life in contemporary processes mediated by communication (the media bios, as defined by Sodré²), which makes the explanation and the most complete interpretation about the ongoing processes to be, necessarily, a reflection around what is communicational – on the other we must consider the way in which one lives the temporality, with us being immersed in a movement of the contemporary experience in which the articulation between past, present and future seems to have been shattered.

In the current regime of historicity, as Hartog (2013) emphasizes, the production of historical time seems to be suspended, what causes the contemporary experience to be marked by a perpetual present, “inaccessible and almost unmovable that searches, in spite of everything, to produce for itself its own historical time” (HARTOG, 2013, p.39 – Our translation). It is as if there were nothing more than the present. And it is exactly this moment and the corresponding contemporary experience of time that the historian designates as “presentism”.

Thus, the studies that have a historical dimension are meaningless in the face of contemporary production in existing graduate programs today in Brazil (45 master’s degrees and 23 doctorates)³. Analyzing the theses and dissertations, one notes that, even though there have been changes with regard to the concept of history adopted, with considerable advance in relation to the diagnosis that we produced almost a decade ago (BARBOSA, 2010b) on the historical studies of Communication, in which we observed the supremacy of an utilitarian vision of history, with the perspective, most often, of “illuminating” processes observed in the present, there are still many works (researches) that consider the discourse characteristics of vehicles without addressing the actual historicity of the press/journalism. Also, a particularistic vision stands out from the themes and issues, favoring one periodical publication, a process or a specific period. There are few studies of synthesis and there are still many that adopt a conception of history based on the linearity of the processes.

After a thorough analysis of the theses and dissertations that have as its theme the history of the press or the history of journalism⁴ we arrived at the total scope of 47 theses and dissertations which were located from the entry “history of journalism” and 170 from the choice of reference “history of the press”, totaling 217 researches conducted since the 1990’s until 2016, in all areas of knowledge.

If we quantify by area, we can notice that there is the supremacy of the studies conducted in graduate programs in Communication, followed by graduate programs in History⁵. Studies in Literature/Linguistics, education and interdisciplinary areas also appear as the following chart indicates (Chart 1). In the category “Others” we computed one work, respectively, in Law, Music, Information Science, International Relations, Philology, Physical Education and Architecture.

Chart 1
Theses and dissertations about the history of press/journalism in all areas of knowledge

Communication and historical view

As we have already emphasized, despite little adherence of the past as a reflective possibility for the Communication area, one perceives that, in the last few years, the historical researches about the press came to be dominant in Communication studies, if they are compared to those carried out in other areas of knowledge (Chart 1).

This finding indicates that Communication can offer the theoretical and methodological references to deal with the historical knowledge about the press in a particular way and media processes in general. One can even assess that by conducting its “presentist” studies for over 50 years Communication would also be producing a history of time as it passes (BARBOSA, 2016).

But what are the characteristics of these works? What conception of history has prevalence? Do the limitations identified by Ribeiro (2008) still appear on these analysis?⁶ What are the theoretical and methodological advances found in the researches?

Analyzing the 91 theses and dissertations produced in the area of Communication from 1990 to 2016, we observed that throughout these 26 years there has been a substantial increase of the ones that adopted a premise of historical nature in Communication studies and a pulverization of the productions among several educational institutions, reflecting the expansion of graduate programs observed, mainly, from the 2000’s and with more intensity in the first decade of the 21^st century (Chart 2).

Chart 2
Communication theses and dissertations on the history of the press/journalism in Brazilian Universities⁷

In the nine works from the 1990’s there was the predominance of the conception of history as the personalistic action of some names elevated to the position of journalism icons, alongside descriptive researches that used the analysis of texts as a means of understanding an aspect that had nothing to do with the history of the press, as, for example, the analysis of the media discourse on the development and the meanings of democracy. There was also a predominance of researches that focused only on one periodical newspaper.

But the 44 works of the following decade (Chart 3) indicate a considerable progress: there is the amplification of the analysis towards historical syntheses, the increase of researches of regions unconsidered until then (Maranhão, Amazonas, Roraima, Santa Catarina, Paraná) and the amplification of studies that focus, in fact, on journalistic processes (11), truly constituting themselves as works on the history of the media.

Chart 3
The works’ approach: 2000 – 2009⁸

Nevertheless, there is still the existence of works that owe a lot to the idea of history based on great achievements or particularizing the actions of characters in a perspective based on memories. It’s also noted the large number of researches (16) dedicated to analyzing one or at most two periodical publications. It still prevails the view that when referring to discourses from newspapers or magazines of the past, one would be automatically producing studies of historical nature.

In the decade of 2000 – 2009, six works can be considered of historical synthesis (RIBEIRO, 2000; FRANCISCATO, 2003; GENTILLI, 2003; MENDES, 2007; COSTA, 2007; MESSAGI JR., 2009). All of them offer considerable contribution to the research, by their complex conceptual approach, by the proposal of new theoretical and methodological options and by the adoption of an innovative perspective in relation to the analysis of some processes on the Brazilian press (the issue of the newspapers’ modernization, for example). There is also the emergence of researches on the construction of the identity of the Brazilian journalist (SILVA, 2007; LOPES, 2007), which propose the interpretation of professionalism from parameters of historical nature.

With regard to the researches in the following decade (2010 – 2016), 34 theses and dissertations were produced, having as their reflective center the history of the press/journalism. There is the expansion of the geographical area of the researches, with the inclusion of reflections on journalistic processes from the Northern, Northeastern and Southern regions. The press of the countryside was also contemplated in some researches (the countryside of Bahia and São Paulo, for example).

One observes the clear decline in historical perspective as ephemeris and based on actions of individual actors (4). One notes the emergence of new perspectives by considering individuals as emblems of a historical period, in which the particularism of the actions of these characters is considered for the reflection and analysis of broader communication scenarios under a new theoretical and methodological view (SANTOS, 2016; BERTOL, 2016).

Chart 4
The works’ approach: 2010 – 2016⁹

There is a considerable decline of the perception that when referring to discourses (speeches) produced in the past, one would be constructing historical studies. And although there is a domain of researches that focus on one periodical publication (which can also be explained by the greater number of master’s dissertations), there is the expansion of innovative studies in theoretical and methodological terms (MATHEUS, 2010; CASTILHO, 2010; LOPES, 2012; MELO, 2014; REIMBERG, 2015; SANTOS, 2016; BERTOL, 2016; JÁCOME, 2017 ¹⁰; MOREIRA, 2015).

Methodological scenarios

The analysis of the press in a historical perspective can adopt as methodological setting the perception of a complex system of communication, in which the internal and external dimensions of the phenomena should be considered. Periodical publications are part of a communication system with its own temporalities and territorialities. Thus, the journalistic processes and practices of social actors (journalists, the public etc.) must be fetched and interpreted in light of specific problematics.

Using these assumptions, we produced some historical syntheses works to understand the media processes of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in Brazil (BARBOSA, 2007; 2010a; 2013), including in our approach other important dimensions: the conception that the textualities produced – even the fictional ones – refer to an ideal and symbolically-existing world, but which leave loopholes for noticing scenarios of the world as representation (fundamental consideration for the use of literature as a historical source); the use of newspapers themselves as sources for their history having as a starting point the traces in their narrative weavings, taking into account self-referencing strategies (RIBEIRO, 2006) and the memory works produced in relation to the past and with a presumption of future; the replacement of the periods’ linearity by the axiality (RICOEUR, 1997) of the research’s problems, realizing the historical ruptures and continuities.

If these are some fundamental methodological assumptions, in recent years there have been researches indicating other paths. For this paper we will briefly examine the methodological possibilities offered by six doctoral theses defended between 2010 and 2016, having as reference the history of the press/journalism (MATHEUS, 2010; LOPES, 2012; MOREIRA, 2015; REIMBERG, 2015; SANTOS, 2016; JÁCOME, 2017).

The reasons for this choice relate to the methodological perspectives adopted: five were considered works of synthesis, for concerning to processes that are more holistic involving the history of the press (MATHEUS, 2010; LOPES, 2012; MOREIRA, 2015; REIMBERG, 2015; JÁCOME, 2017), and one for promoting a methodological rupture in the analyses that focus on significant characters, showing biografism under a new regard (SANTOS, 2016).

Regarding the works under a macro perspective, we observe that three refer to a history of journalists and not of journalism (LOPES, 2012; REIMBERG, 2015; SANTOS, 2016); three relate to historical processes of the press in a more extensive way (MOREIRA, 2015; LOPES, 2012; JÁCOME, 2017); other three focus on the construction of modernities in Brazilian journalism (MATHEUS, 2010; SANTOS, 2016; JÁCOME, 2017); and one seeks to interpret what defines as structural changes in political media organization throughout the 20^th century (MOREIRA, 2015).

The sensitive point of the processes of modernization of the Brazilian press, be it in reference to the early 20^th century or to its emblematic moment, the 1950’s, is the referential object of Santos’ (2016) thesis and the central object of two others (MATHEUS, 2010; JÁCOME, 2017) that take as a starting point the logics of the temporalities, as human action in time, to provide new explanations for the processes of transformation of the press in two moments. With a dense thesis, Jácome (2017) builds his argument around the modernization of the press in the 1950’s, seeking to show whether, in fact, there was a modernization (and what concept of modern was contained in the argument) and how journalism’s own actions sedimented that speech. Thus, it faces a canon of the historical explanations around the processes of the press in Brazil, advancing knowledge by offering a new interpretation.

Another more general consideration which can be done about these works is the way the authors transit through temporalities: in all cases the past does not serve only to illuminate the present and nor does it exist in essence. The researches transit from the past to the present and from the present back to the past establishing a stream of continuities — which presupposes ruptures that are also fundamental – in a peculiar history in which what is contemporary figures explicitly in the scene. There is no demarcation of time or, when it appears, is defined as the time of durations: the century and the hiatuses of modernity (MATHEUS, 2010), the long-lived experience of journalists in the world of labor (REIMBERG, 2015), the historical trajectory in the construction of a specific professional identity (LOPES, 2012) or the long duration of structural constitution of the Brazilian media empires (MOREIRA, 2015). Even those researches that focus more clearly in a period, the 1950’s (JÁCOME, 2017), or following the “communicational crossings” of a forgotten typographer from the countryside of Bahia (SANTOS, 2016), establish a transit between the “times already passed” and the contemporary times reflecting on the construction of rhetorics of modernity around moments or figures that were not emblematic, but that can become synthesis-characters of a broader movement.

With regard to the methodological paths there are several intriguing propositions. Moreira’s research (2015) is the less innovative in terms of theoretical and methodological proposals and also has the limitation of drawing on, mainly, historical studies already developed, non-original historical studies. Although it specifies that it will adopt a vision of history that considers the subjectivity of the researcher, without consisting, therefore, in a true recovery of the past, and that making use of history as method is dealing “with singular human acts, inserted in a given context and marked by a specific temporality” (MOREIRA, 2015, p.20 – Our translation), strictly speaking, the work owes a lot to a vision of history that intends to recuperate the path of the press, from the past to the present. The scarce use of unpublished sources and the prevalence of reinterpretations of various authors, fully accepting their theses, also weakens the work from the theoretical and methodological point of view.

Drawing on the construction of “ideal types”, as designed by Weber (1999), to the characterization of the media processes throughout the 20^th century, the author underlines that there is a break in the “paradigms of journalism” from the opinion towards the information, a key movement, in the author’s thesis, for the constitution of media conglomerates, starting in the 1920’s (MOREIRA, 2015). However, one should consider that Moreira (2015) advances on the proposal of a model of media analysis starting from conceptual reductions capable of building parameters for the characterization of the press throughout the 20^th century, on the assumption that there are moments of prevalence of certain journalistic practices and processes.

The three thesis that perceive the journalist and not journalism as historicity offer important methodological pathways. The first (REIMBERG, 2015) uses the interview as a tool in part of its research, looking to find in the memories and experiences of journalists (21 professionals, that were between 25 to 82 years-old) the relations of pleasure and pain that they establish with the professional practices. The research also includes what the author calls historical context, producing a relation between issues concerning labor’s organization and the worker’s health, and the history of journalism’s organizational practices.

But the work’s innovation resides in the traffic that it offers regarding the processes of production and labor relations in journalism among many decades. Showing the inflections of the 1980’s, 1990’s, 2000’s and the period of the thesis’ production (2015), it uses several historiography assumptions, by proposing an interpretation of the meanings and affections involving the journalist’s work using the interviews as tooling. Subjectively including herself in the research – she is also a journalist –, she authenticates the production of her interviews in the theoretical postulates of memory (REIMBERG, 2015), especially in terms of the positioned place’s perspective from which the journalists and the memory frameworks speak (POLLAK, 1989).

To carry out the interviews, Reimberg (2015) seeks to relate these moments of listening to the other with the dynamics of history, that is to say, contextualizing the various times and considering the historicity of the groups studied and of the processes involved, and the spaces of analysis as places of consensus and conflict, of subordination and resistance. Thus, the actors-journalists who appear as producers of a memorable praxis are also authors and product of their historical time (REIMBERG, 2015, p.35-36). In her interpretative praxis, the author notices the other’s discourse as a knowledge that is both shared and marked by tradition, by culture and by scenarios. There is no essentialist truth in the meanings that are expressed in textual and memorable articulations.

The second thesis that deals with understanding the historical processes of construction of journalism as a professional practice and the formation of the so-called journalistic identities was developed by Lopes (2012). The work, a rather denser continuation of the researches that the author had been developing since her master’s (LOPES, 2007), aims to investigate the journalist’s identity in contemporary times, which forces us to reflect on issues that concern the “actions, values and powers of journalism” (LOPES, 2012, p.20 – Our translation). To do that, she proposes a rhetoric analysis of the voices inserted in these multiple debates, highlighting the symbolic capital acquired by the group over time. In other words, the author considers the adoption of a historical view over the journalist’s formation to be fundamental, purposefully choosing the chronological dimension of the problem, but electing a few moments as axial in the construction of the professional scenario of journalism – the 1950’s and 1960’s; the years of the military dictatorship in Brazil and of the country’s re-democratization (LOPES, 2012). In this process, the transformations of the journalistic practices in contemporary times deserve a detailed analysis, showing the instabilities, conflicts and tensions of the identity’s construction.

With regard to the historical propositions, Lopes (2012) proposes, in an innovative manner, a rhetorical analysis to analyze voices of the past (or of the present that became past). In this sense, the procedural vision in a long duration is fundamental for the perception of journalistic identities as a product of the historical construction.

Finally, with respect to the methodological option as practical proposition, the thesis of Lopes (2012), among all, is the one that adopts the largest number of procedures, from the exhaustive documentary analysis to the conduction of interviews, passing by the application of directed questionnaires and non-participant observation. This tour around several empirical materials and the way the author works the various documentary threads constitute the high point of the research, developing a real dispersed and, at the same time, interconnected map on a multiplicity of documents (LOPES, 2012), which is a formula profusely adopted in researches conducted in history, but little used in the area of Communication.

Finally, we will refer to three theses that have the so-called modernization of Brazilian journalism as a theoretical anchorage for the development of multiple methodological scenarios (MATHEUS, 2010; SANTOS, 2016; JÁCOME, 2017). These are three diametrically opposed approaches: while Matheus (2010), by studying the semantization of time produced by journalism, expanding the reflections produced by Franciscato (2003) in the previous decade, draws on the narrative question to analyze the discursive construction of journalism, always in the perspective of the relation among past, present and future; Santos (2016) seeks to show how the construction of journalism’s modernity in the 1950’s offered a temporal transit between distinct cultural places (the capitals and the countryside) which guided opposing processes, but also the search for utopias for journalism. In the case of Jácome (2017), he seeks to show the scenarios of modernity that were being built and in what way they were being built, with the arguments of the press men from the early 1950’s themselves.

From the methodological standpoint, Santos (2016) has also produced a groundbreaking work, using as methodological tooling the postulates of microhistory, in order to, from the construction of the trajectory of an unknown typographer journalist from Bahia’s countryside, analyze the contradictions, limits, reconfigurations, wishes and utopias that are sedimented and erected around the transformations of Brazilian journalism from the second half of the 20^th century. Having as its starting point the assumption that history is human action in time, being a product of the researcher’s interpretation that, sometimes, the author produces a bricolage of “nows” to access the past, the author understands the past also as a noise to be interpreted. So, she seeks to visualize the existing communication circuits in the countryside, from the communicational crossings of a character, retrieving the trajectory of an ordinary man, and the transits between the oral world and the world of the literati, in a complex dynamic of interpretation of a life as history.

In the case of Matheus (2010), from the methodological standpoint, she assumes the temporality as an axial demarcation of history, perceives the narrative as history’s fundamental transit and adopts the perspective that the chosen vision of history must be viewed in relation to the specificity of the context that it examines, in the case of the thesis, the temporal context of journalistic constructions. She produces an analysis in which the procedural view is essential, even if in her empirical research she elects axial temporal moments, from the significances built in history and by history (including the narrative endorsement of journalism itself). From the empirical standpoint, she produces a thorough analysis of the commemorative editions of three centenarian newspapers (Jornal do Brasil, Jornal do Commercio and O Fluminense), in addition to interpreting the reordering of representations of some of journalism’s symbolic events.

Jácome’s thesis (2017) is a finished example of how we can and should interpret historical processes in the light of arguments from the world of communication. The thesis is not a historical thesis about journalism, but it is much more: it is a reflection covered by the postulates of historiography in order to think about the construction of a dialogue between a strong present (as the author himself qualifies it) and a past that is also the result of several traditions.

For him, the issue is not arguing with a canonical interpretation of Brazilian journalism (its modernization) but realizing what kind of relationship journalism “establishes with the historical reality” (or historical realities, as he suggests) (JÁCOME, 2017, p.47), and its ways of knowing the world. The advance of the thesis, just as the previous ones, is to build a reflection about journalism/the press from the point of view of a communicational perspective but using historical postulates as a point of inflection. Thus, it’s indispensable to analyze journalism as a complex social-historical phenomenon (JÁCOME, 2017), interpreting not the past of journalistic phenomena, but the historicity of its processes.

When constructing the methodical part of his research, going to the archives and documents to uncover the multiple journalisms produced in a long period of time, Jácome (2017) starts from the interpretative premise and observes the documents, what was kept and is again referred to as “a living and communicative experience, which we are also part of” (JÁCOME, 2017, p.19). This way, the author looks to “follow the discourse of modernization, seeking to destabilize its linear and circular conception of history”, (JÁCOME, 2017, p.19) having new questions as its starting point.

Final remarks

In short, in this brief diagnosis, we can evaluate three important aspects in the construction of the historic field in Communication studies. First, we observed the predominance of the historical interpretations of the press/journalism in Communication, which indicates that the theoretical and methodological parameters developed in the area have been given prevalence. This movement seems to indicate the recognition of the speech place of Communication as a privileged locus to reflect on historical processes of the media in a general way.

Secondly, we observe the emergence, especially in the last decade, of what we could call a historiographical view in the area of Communication, even in researches that do not have the intention of recovering the past. These researches moving in multiple temporalities, which go from the present to the past and back from the past to the present, are concerned more with historical processes than with a history of the press/journalism in a strict sense (strictly speaking).

It also calls our attention the displacement of perspective from a history of the processes to a history that puts the social actors in prominence, sharing an epistemological vision of methodological transit towards the world of life. It is the human actions, senses, experiences, feelings, emotions that produce a history full of meaning.

At the end of reading these theses, we have the feeling that the whole crusade we undertook (alongside several other researchers) to build a historiographical field for a history of the press/journalism in Brazil was not in vain. We found ourselves in front of studies that innovate both in theoretical and methodological terms, presenting proposals and analytical frameworks that configure a historiographical field of communication processes seen in all their complexity.

• 1
  This article, with modifications and additions, was initially presented at the XV Congreso de la Asociación de Historiadores de la Comunicación (15th Congress of the Association of Communication Historians), on September 15, 2017, at the University of Porto, Portugal.
• 2
  On the subject, check Sodré (2002, 2014).
• 3
  The figures presented in the Document of the Communication Area from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes), refer to programs created until 2015. Check Brasil (2016).
• 4
  To reach this number, in addition to the entries in the Bank of Theses of Capes for the subject of history of the press/journalism, we have also conducted an analysis from the names of the researchers/guiding teachers cited in the area. For the purposes of this paper the 91 theses and dissertations developed in the area of Communication were analyzed in more detail.
• 5
  For an analysis of the theses on history of the press/journalism produced in the area of History, check Barbosa (2017).
• 6
  Ribeiro (2008) identifies among the main theoretical and methodological dilemmas of the researches on history of Communication and media in Brazil the following ones: predominance of regional and local studies; the absence of comparative research; few works of synthesis; Southeast as a mirror of the country; a memorialistic approach; centrality in individual action; privilege in the rupture and linear temporality; descriptive character; predominance of political history; disregard for the external context; disregard for the internal dimension.
• 7
  USP: Universidade de São Paulo; UFRJ: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; PUC-SP: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo; PUC-RS: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Umesp: Universidade Metodista de São Paulo; UFF: Universidade Federal Fluminense; UnB: Universidade de Brasília; UFBA: Universidade Federal da Bahia; UFPE: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco; UFMG: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFSC: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina; Unesp: Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”; Unisinos: Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos; Unimar: Universidade de Marília; Facasper: Faculdade Cásper Líbero; Unip: Universidade Paulista; UFJF: Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora; UFPA: Universidade Federal do Pará.
• 8
  Note: The sum reaches 48 works since some were classified into more than one category.
• 9
  Note: All 34 works were considered, with our choice being to categorize the dominant option.
• 10
  Although the thesis by Jácome (UFMG) was defended in early 2017, we consider it as being a production accomplished in 2016, for general computing purposes of the period’s production.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2018

History

• Received
  21 Sept 2017
• Accepted
  02 Apr 2018