Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans
368
Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans
368eBook
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Overview
At the turn of the twentieth century, ambitious publishers like Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert McCormick produced the most spectacular newspapers Americans had ever read. Alongside current events and classified ads, publishers began running comic strips, sports sections, women’s pages, and Sunday magazines. Newspapers’ lavish illustrations, colorful dialogue, and sensational stories seemed to reproduce city life on the page.
Yet as Julia Guarneri reveals, newspapers did not simply report on cities; they also helped to build them. Metropolitan sections and civic campaigns crafted cohesive identities for sprawling metropolises. Real estate sections boosted the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities’ roles as economic and information hubs. Advice columns and advertisements helped assimilate migrants and immigrants to a class-conscious, consumerist, and cosmopolitan urban culture.
Newsprint Metropolis offers a tour of American newspapers in their most creative and vital decades. It traces newspapers’ evolution into highly commercial, mass-produced media, and assesses what was gained and lost as national syndicates began providing more of Americans’ news. Case studies of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee illuminate the intertwined histories of newspapers and the cities they served. In an era when the American press is under attack, Newsprint Metropolis reminds us how papers once hosted public conversations and nurtured collective identities in cities across America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226341477 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2017 |
| Series: | Historical Studies of Urban America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A New Newspaper Model
"The American newspaper is distinctly ahead of its English contemporaries," announced William Thomas Stead, one of the most celebrated newspapermen in England, in 1901. "To begin with, there is more of it, more news, more advertisements, more paper, more print," he explained. "Hence the busiest people in the world, who have less time for deliberate reading than any race, buy regularly morning and evening more printed matter than would fill a New Testament, and on Sundays would consider themselves defrauded if they did not have a bale of printed matter delivered at their doors almost equal in bulk to a family Bible." The sheer quantity of news necessitated some sort of organizing system. Stead analyzed and praised one American solution, the large headline — or as he called it, the "scare-head." Scare-heads made reading more efficient, allowing people to glean information in only a few seconds and to choose the articles they wanted to read in full. But headlines also, thought Stead, made the news more appealing. "The scare-head is like the display in the show window in which the tradesman sets out his wares," he wrote. "Good journalism consists much more in the proper labelling and displaying of your goods than in the writing of leading articles. The intrinsic value of news is a quality which does not depend upon the editor, but the method of display."
Stead had encountered a new newspaper business model, in full flower in turn- of-the-century American cities. Faster presses suddenly made it possible to print Bible-sized papers, and revenue from advertising kept those papers affordable. For the first time, publishers could sell their product for next to nothing yet still reap healthy profits. Under this system, urban daily newspapers cut their prices, expanded their offerings, and grew their circulations. Stead was witnessing newspapers' transformations into true mass media whose influence reached across thousands or even millions of readers' lives.
To turn out such large newspapers, publishers had to grow their companies. They constructed new buildings, hired large corps of news workers, and purchased massive machines. Newspapers — as organizations as well as objects — became emblems of the modern era, whose profitability, efficiency, and sheer size garnered popular attention and outright awe. Stead noticed that, as newspapers grew, they provided more information than anyone could actually use; they made the "busiest people in the world" even busier. Newspapers contributed to urban information overload; they circulated pages full of clashing messages and eye-catching images and filled city streets with newsboys' loud pitches and reporters' hard-hitting questions.
Stead chose an apt metaphor, the shop window, for newspapers had indeed become more commercial products than ever before. Stead described the articles themselves as products to be consumed, each one vying to be chosen and read. Newspapers became shop windows more literally, when editors ran elaborate ads, crafted features that focused readers' attention on consumer topics, and persuaded local merchants to advertise. By the turn of the century, publishers regarded even their own audiences as products to be sold. Publishers boasted about the numbers, the wealth, and the spending habits of their readers and then sold the attention of those readers to advertisers.
The huge new papers of the turn of the century came in for both praise and criticism, as Stead's defense suggests. But they were unqualified successes. Fast, lucrative, efficient, and abundant, newspapers became beacons of a new era in urban America. They also entwined public dialogue with commerce so thoroughly that readers could not disentangle the two.
"More news, more advertisements, more paper, more print"
When a man or woman in 1880 paid two cents for the daily paper, he or she walked away with four pages absolutely crammed with information. Printers chose small type for the titles, smaller type for news, and minuscule type for the classified ads. Many printers dispensed with titles altogether, printing only the broadest of headings: "The Latest News" or "Local Affairs." Wherever extra space remained, printers tucked in one more tidbit — an anecdote, a statistic, or an advertisement.
These papers were products of nineteenth-century technology. Rags, the raw material for newsprint at the time, yielded sturdy and long-lasting paper but were relatively expensive and in constant short supply. Editors had to perpetually weigh whether information was worth the cost of the paper it would be printed on. The painstaking printing process also forced publishers to keep their papers to a modest size. "The circulation of a daily newspaper was imperatively limited by the number of pulls one pair of arms could give a Washington press," explained Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune. A large and successful paper might circulate only four hundred copies.
Nineteenth-century publishers relied on advertisements as well as subscriptions for revenue, and assumed ad printing to be part of their job. Indeed, papers in dozens of different cities took the name Commercial Advertiser and crowded their entire front pages with ads. Advertising, however, still carried with it a shady reputation. In a world where people made most of their purchases and sought most services from people they knew, readers treated items advertised in the paper with caution. Why would they buy something of unknown origin? Why would they take advice on what to buy from a stranger? Advertisers often did have something to conceal, whether touting the benefits of a "health tonic" or trying to sell an arid patch of farmland. So most urban daily newspapers kept advertisers to certain parameters, requiring that they use extremely small typeface, insisting that they keep their ad the width of a single column, and permitting them to illustrate only with a tiny symbol indicating the type of good or service offered. This formula minimized the space that each individual ad took up — important in the era of expensive newsprint — and kept advertisements from overshadowing the news. And crucially, it was the vertical lines between columns, when placed on the printing frame, that physically held the type together. Without the column marker wedged between, the letters simply fell out.
The newspapers that resulted from these conventions are almost impenetrable to the modern eye. They offer no pictures, large headlines, or boxed advertisements to break up the monotony of tiny text. To the nineteenth-century reader, though, it did not much matter what the paper looked like. If a man had an hour to spare and a paper in hand, he would likely start at the beginning and work his way through the whole issue. In the sea of text, he would discover spots of relevant, entertaining, or absorbing news. He might laugh at a prickly letter to the editor, note that a neighbor had been admitted to the hospital, and pay special attention to news from his parents' home country. Perhaps he balked in disagreement at some of the editorials — but more likely he nodded in approval as he read, for he knew which paper spoke for the city's Democrats or its Republicans, and he bought the opinion he wanted to hear.
Other readers might pick up a paper in a tavern after work. They, too, read through from start to finish, and then perhaps discussed the increase in railroad rates with an acquaintance at the bar. Still others brought the paper to work with them. Cigar rollers or seamstresses took turns reading aloud to one another or allotted the task to the best reader among them. The reader might stop at a description of a greedy landlord's trial and relay her own similar troubles, linger over an intriguing personal ad, or weigh out loud the reasons for and against immigration restrictions. Families, too, might take the news this way, in a post-supper circle around a father or daughter reading aloud. Each member could tune in and out, and sometimes comment, as they smoked, sewed, or washed the dishes.
This entire mode of reading the news would disappear when cheap newsprint rendered the four- or eight-page newspaper a thing of the past. Manufacturers gradually perfected a new process that used wood pulp rather than rags as raw material, and the newspaper business developed a voracious appetite for it — in 1897 the New York World went through a spruce forest four times the size of Central Park. Over the course of the 1890s, the annual per capita consumption of newsprint rose from six to sixteen pounds, as daily papers grew fatter and fatter. Abundant supplies of newsprint also gave publishers far more freedom to experiment. They could use large and artistic typefaces, print expansive illustrations, and still charge the same price that they had for the old-fashioned four-page paper.
With cheap newsprint, editors could afford to print large papers; with fast presses, they could churn out enough of those larger papers to meet demand. Richard Hoe introduced his rotary press (fig. 1.1) in the 1840s, which spun off seamless reams rather than individually stamping out sheets. Over the following decades, several more inventions sped things up. Printers learned to cast molds, called stereotype plates (fig. 1.2), from hand-set type and then fit the plates to rotary presses. The Mergenthaler Company perfected the linotype machine, which allowed workers to type out newspaper columns rather than hand set them (fig. 1.3). Autoplate machines, developed around 1895, prepared images for Hoe presses in record time. Rotary newspaper presses grew larger and larger, until many papers housed mammoth double-decker machines that worked at staggering speed and volume. In 1905, the New York World's presses could print 720,000 eight-page papers in a single hour. Only the largest and wealthiest newspaper offices purchased these giant presses at first. Once publishers had installed them, though, they often began to think more ambitiously about their readership, for a well-equipped printing room could meet any demand that advertising and circulation staff managed to drum up. And because Hoe presses could easily print, fold, and stack separate sections, they freed publishers to create sprawling, multipart papers.
Newspaper publishers and readers alike celebrated this new printing technology as a modern wonder. The New York Herald built glass panels into the lower level of its building on Thirty-Fourth Street in 1893, so that passersby could see the presses in action. The managing editor of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch reported to his boss, Joseph Pulitzer, after he opened the paper's new printing plant: "As I write, there are at least 75 people in the country room watching the presses work, while there are crowds about the front of the building admiring the presses in operation." When the Milwaukee Journal ordered eight linotype machines, a line of visitors shuffled through the composing room for two and a half hours to see how they worked. School children began to visit on field trips. When the New York World produced its first color supplement in 1898, it took the opportunity to show off the color press itself. An illustration showed visitors observing the press in action; the accompanying text described the machine's parts and abilities in detail (plate 1). When readers visited a press or viewed a linotype machine, they showed their interest in not only the product but also the process of news. They wanted to understand the astounding technology that produced their daily paper and that also seemed to herald a new age of mechanical precision and speed.
Income from advertisements — alongside cheap paper and fast presses — enabled publishers to dramatically expand their papers. By the turn of the century, advertisements had lost much of the stigma that had led so many editors to give them only minimal space and attention. In cramped apartments, migrants no longer had the space or supplies to mill their own soap, grind their own flour, or even sew their own clothing. And unlike those in small towns or rural communities, city dwellers did not always have the option of sourcing goods from familiar faces. Other urbanites wished to live as they imagined their richer or more "American" neighbors did, and their aspirations could not be satisfied in their neighborhoods' shops. Many urban Americans were ready to listen to anyone who could tell them what to buy and where to buy it.
In 1880, American companies spent thirty million dollars on advertising. By 1910, that number increased twentyfold to six hundred million dollars, a full 4 percent of the national income. New trade magazines like Printers' Ink and the Advertising World counseled salesmen. Advertising agencies sprouted up in major cities, first advising their clients on where to place advertisements and, later, helping them craft effective pitches. "Fill the advertisement so full of hooks that the glancer is likely to get caught," advised one expert in the field. Only this way would readers come across items that, until then, they perhaps had not known they needed.
Advertisers' new eye-catching images and flamboyant text could not be made to fit within the old newspaper model — though some tried (fig. 1.4). Gradually, editors conceded more of what advertisers wanted, allowing them to spread out over a half or a full page. Once stereotypes and autoplates made it easier to print unconventional images or unusual typefaces, editors permitted illustrated, attention-grabbing ads.
Newspaper publishers gained some of their advertising savvy by watching their peers and competitors: monthly magazines. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, a handful of entrepreneurs launched magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, McClure's, and the Ladies' Home Journal, that targeted a large and growing national middle class. These magazines offered highbrow literary fare, such as one might find in Harper's or the Atlantic, but wove in more personal, practical features such as household advice and etiquette columns and more fanciful material such as travel stories and romantic fiction. The whole package sold for ten cents, or a dollar a year. These new monthlies proved a runaway success; by 1905, enough magazines sold each month to put four on the coffee table of every American household.
Magazines demonstrated that advertisements, far from being unwanted distractions, could actually increase profits and attract readers. Instead of confining ads to a segregated space, magazine editors spread them over a whole issue. They offered advertisers prime space in the front pages, or gave them the full back cover, and charged them a correspondingly higher price. Magazines also helped merchants advertise by streamlining their ads' typeface or adding illustrations. So beautiful and imaginative were magazine ads that readers regularly tore out their favorite ads before tossing away the magazine; one writer quipped that articles had become mere "space-fillers" between the ads.
As newspaper publishers adopted these magazine strategies, they charged more for highly visible ad space and turned ads into part of newspapers' appeal. This slowly changed the look and purpose of newspapers. By 1900, ads often took up more than half of the pages in daily papers. "If bulk alone is considered," admitted circulation manager William Scott in 1915, "the title should be changed from 'news' paper to 'ad' paper." Ads also remade newspapers' operating budgets. Advertising revenue had provided 44 percent of periodicals' total income in 1879; by 1909 it provided 60 percent.
Relying so heavily on advertising money opened many new possibilities to newspaper publishers. Advertisements paid for larger papers, bigger presses, and more skilled staffs. But in relying on ad money, newspapers went from selling one product to selling two. They sold a newspaper to readers; they also sold their readers' attention to advertisers. And advertisers wanted the attention of as many readers as possible.
Readers Become Customers
During the nineteenth century, many newspaper editors had carved out niche audiences within urban reading populations and contentedly catered to those loyal readers. But by the turn of the century, that strategy no longer worked. Many editors felt compelled — by expenses or by competition — to drum up new readers to please advertisers. New York City's cutthroat newspaper business bred some of the era's most innovative selling strategies, but editors in San Francisco, Saint Louis, Chicago, and a host of smaller cities experimented too, aggressively marketing themselves to readers. They hired bigger corps of reporters to provide more thorough and timely news. They drew readers in with scandals and stunts and kept them reading by promising something even better in the next issue. Editors sought out sectors of the city's reading population that they had earlier ignored and created new content just for them. These new practices turned newspapers into a daily habit for all kinds of people and, for the first time, forged a truly mass audience.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction One: A New Newspaper Model Two: Making Metropolitans Three: Building Print Community Four: Connecting City, Suburb, and Region Five: Nationalizing the News EpilogueAcknowledgments
Appendix: Sources
Notes