The Ottawa Valley Journal and The Modern Countryside: A City-Country Newspaper and The New Journalism in Eastern Ontario, 1887 to 1925
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of the press as a modernizing agent in the first two decades of the twentieth century usually look at the mass media of the city dailies. I argue that the country edition of an Ottawa daily, the rural Journal, equally was a modernizing agent. It involved itself in the definition of expert knowledge at the agricultural fair, in demonstrating professional road-building to rural residents, and in mobilizing producers against the middlemen and "poor business practices" of the global cheese market. These stories give insight into how a city-run newspaper dressed itself in rural clothing while presenting a model of modernity.In 1899 the newspaper was renamed from the Ottawa Semi-Weekly Journal to the Ottawa Valley Journal as a statement that it was a newspaper for rural residents. In 1917, it became the Ottawa Farm Journal with the intent of being a regional farm paper. But what made the rural Journal special was activism in the style of the 1890s urban New Journalism. The first two editors made news and not just reported it, but with differing approaches. Herbert Cowan was a city man who relied on the authority of experts for his initiatives. Robert Faith was a farm boy come to the city who saw himself as the voice of the farmer, following his own conscience on what was right.The determination to be modern on their own terms led many of the readers to resist a hegemonic definition of modern based on technology and increased managerial government. They were interested in Cowan's spectacles of modernity but did not alter their behaviour. They responded to Faith's calls for mass protests as these expressed their ambivalence to "progress" and yet his "agitations" did not change rural conditions. Nonetheless, the rural Journal campaigns told readers that farm issues were important and affirmed readers' aspiration to be modern as well as their unease over the resulting sense of disruption. In doing so, the newspaper helped keep alive a radical spirit in the countryside but it was a spirit which did not challenge the capitalist structures in which producers were enmeshed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".