A note to newcomers, including journalism students visiting for spring or summer 2024 classes.

My most recent work on this site is within various “subtopic” pages and older program-episode posts, such as the Soldiers of the Press and Rogers of the Gazette pages, which needed updated internal links. Most pages on this site includ streaming-audio players that access hundreds of programs stored at the Internet Archive and maintained by a variety of organizations and individuals. Sometimes file names or addresses change and my links must be edited.

About this site: There are 10 major topics to this discussion of the portrayal of newspaper journalists in old time radio shows; There are 75 subtopics, and hundreds of blog posts about individual episodes, programs or plots. When I was teaching a course on the “Portrayal of Journalists in Popular Culture” those posts were more frequent. Now that I’m retired, I still add an “episode” blog post now and then, months may pass between them. For that reason, Scrolling down to the most recent individual blog posts may not be the most interesting way to explore the site. Using the “search” field, categories, or topic menus may be more satisfying.

Seeing the bigger picture depends on your screen…

These two screen snapshots may help you understand what’s going on… The full-screen browser and smartphone versions are different:

This site is done with WordPress software, which automatically provides a mobile phone version. That can be very handy, but also overemphasizes the most recent item posted, revealing WordPress’s roots as blogging software.

The 10-item main menu is horizontal at the top of the screen on a standard computer display, but it is just indicated by a small three horizontal line icon in the top left of the smartphone version of a web browser. Clicking that item sends the other 75 subtopics cascading down in a long list. On the big screen version, some of the subtopic lists are only one or two pages, while the “Real life” menu is substantial.