L’unité de l’enquête et le pipeline de la connaissance

Alliances entre journalistes et universitaires au prisme de la comparaison historique

Resumo

This paper proposes to compare two ways of exploring the worlds of journalism and academia: the Thought News project, designed by American journalists and academics in the late nineteenth century, and today’s The Conversation, a rapidly expanding global network of news sites and university researchers. In the perspective of Marc Bloch’s “far-reaching” historical comparison (1928) and James Carey’s criticism of Whig history (1974), the analysis places Thought News and The Conver- sation in their specific historical contexts by exploring the transformations of journalism and academic research they are related to. To that end, our analysis focuses specifically on programmatic texts that describe the respective editorial projects of these organizations that critique journalism and academia, most notably through the metaphors of the pipeline and the social body. This comparison adds a nuance to the “novelty” of The Conversation, but also explores, through the Thought News project, an alternative conception of the relationships between the worlds of journalism and academia, and of the social and political functions of journalism, which in some respects are still relevant today. From a methodological and analytical perspective, our approach highlights the heuristic impact of comparison “at its broadest” in the field of media and journalism history, and allows us to glimpse the discontinuous and contingent nature of this history as well as the constitutive role of the historiographic process.