First Internationals: IUPA and PCW (1894–1936)

Abstract

In the fall of 1898, a French and an American journalist took stock of the changing nature of the press of the world.¹ ‘With the perfection of the printing press’, they wrote, ‘with the telegraph and the telephone, with the transformation of the public spirit, more and more eager to be informed, a metamorphosis is taking place: polemics has been relegated to second place, and news has ascended to first’.² As a result of this revolution, stressed Albert Bataille and Paul Œker, journalism had become a profession and a career, ‘the job of thousands of brave people who lay no claim to genius but make a living from work that is honourable, regular, often painful, sometimes dangerous’. It was time, they thought, for journalists to correct the public impression that they were recruited among ‘the rootless, those who had failed in other professions, the ne’er-do-wells’.³