Making the Institute of Journalists
The RSVP Digital Events team is pleased to welcome Stephan Pigeon to our Speaker’s Forum for our second installment of the 2025 digital events season! Join us Friday, February 28 at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. EST / 4 p.m. UK / 5 p.m. CET to hear more about Stephan’s research on “journalism from below” in a talk entitled, “To clear the black sheep out of journalism”: Making the Institute of Journalists, 1884-1902.”
Should Victorian journalists be organized as a trade union or a professional society? The sub-editors and penny-a-liners who joined the National Association of Journalists (NAJ) in 1884 thought in labour terms, but their colleagues who occupied journalism’s upper branches envisioned something less confrontational. By 1889, the NAJ had been transformed into the Institute of Journalists, a new organization strong in rhetoric but weak in action.
This talk examines the labour challenges that inspired the NAJ, the forces that steered the association away from trade unionism, and a membership scandal that caused working journalists to withdraw their support from the Institute.
About Our Speaker
Stephan Pigeon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History (on a limited term contract) at St. Francis Xavier University. He has written about the trans-Atlantic circulation of didactic fiction in the Journal of Victorian Culture (2017), newspaper censorship in Publishing History (2019), and the courtesy of acknowledgement in periodical press in Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press (2022). He is also preparing a chapter about scissors-and-paste journalism for the upcoming Handbook of Transnational Periodical Research (expected 2025). His book project, Journalism from Below: Sub-Editors and the British Press System, is under advance contract with the University of Toronto Press.
