News Media History Collections endowment

American journalism is at a crossroads. Culturally, technologically, and economically, traditional print and television reporting has been systematically undermined. Alternative facts and talk of fake news abound. Now more than ever, the nature, history, and value of American journalism needs to be understood, explained, and celebrated. Though distinct, the history of America and the history of the First Amendment are forever tangled with one another.

The Briscoe Center’s news media holdings are nationally renowned—one of the most comprehensive collections of history’s “first draft” that exists. The center prides itself on how these resources are made available to students, scholars, and members of the public—not just as archival resources available in the center’s reading room, but also through the center’s exhibitions, publications, and digital projects. The Briscoe Center preserves the past in order to protect the future.

The importance of news media history

For over three centuries, news publications have documented the development of communities across America as well as provided a vital forum for the exchange of ideas. It’s a story of change and adaption; from the first printed periodicals and broadsides to the emergence of the modern newspaper and magazine industries. Radio, photojournalism, and television news represented major shifts in the delivery of the news in the twentieth century. The advent of social media signifies another seismic shift. Regardless of the form it takes, news reporting has always played a vital role in American society; a role and a freedom enshrined in the Constitution.

Researchers have always relied upon the materials produced by journalists—history’s “first responders”—to help them make sense of the past. News media resources are a gateway to the past for students, teachers, and scholars of all disciplines: from advertising to psychology, politics to photography. Archival materials—documents, photographs, recordings, correspondence, and other objects that form the raw material of history—allow us to engage more directly with the past. These resources lend texture, color, context, and sound to almost every avenue of inquiry. The Briscoe Center is home to one of the nation’s most comprehensive news media history holdings—nearly three miles of archival materials across hundreds of separate collections.

Those collections include the personal papers of historically important media industry pioneers and leaders, clipping and research morgues, oral histories, over 5,000 newspaper titles, thousands more audio and video recordings, and over 4 million photographs. Highlights include the papers of Walter Cronkite, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney, Jules Witcover, Jack Newfield, and Robert Trout, as well as one of the largest archives of American photojournalism in existence, which includes the collections of Pulitzer Prize-winners Eddie Adams, David Hume Kennerly, and Lucian Perkins. Newspaper collections include the frontier newspapers of Stephen F. Austin’s Texas colony, the Texas Gazette (1829), and the African American newspaper The Free Man’s Press (1868). The center also boasts major runs of the Houston Post (1932–1995), The Texas Observer (1952–2004), and the research archives of the New York Times (ca. 1910–ca. 1989) and Newsweek (1933–1996). Nationally renowned columnists such as Walter Winchell, Molly Ivins, and Liz Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ben Sargent, Vanity Fair writer and television commentator Dominick Dunne, and famed writer and magazine editor Terry McDonell have all donated their papers to the center. Finally, the center is the home of the records of WRR of Dallas, the first radio station to broadcast in Texas.

The collection continues to grow. Recent acquisitions include the research archive of Wayne Barrett, a Village Voice reporter, who amassed the most comprehensive investigative reporting archive about Donald Trump from the 1980s to inauguration known to exist; the archive of Robert Moskin, senior and foreign editor for Look magazine for nearly 20 years; the photographic archive of Stephen Shames, most well known as the photographer to the Black Panther Party between 1967 and 1973; and four more producers from the acclaimed 60 Minutes newsmagazine, including Marion Goldin and Susan Zirinsky, among numerous other additions to the collection. Together, these collections enhance our understanding of events of the past, the role of the news media, and its impact on all segments of American society.

Learn more about resources held in the news media history collections.