THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS Lecture 1 The Beginnings of American Journalism Colonial Newspapers The first newspaper produced

in North America was Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, published on September 25, 1690, by Boston printer Benjamin Harris. The colonial government objected to Harriss negative tone regarding British rule, so the newspaper was banned after one issue. In 1704, the first regularly published newspaper appeared in the American colonies- the Boston News-Letter, published by John Campbell. It reported events that had taken place in Europe months earlier. Because European news took weeks or months to travel by ship, these early colonial papers were not very timely. In 1721, also in Boston, James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin, started the New England Courant. This paper established a tradition of writing stories that interested ordinary readers rather than printing articles about business and colonial affairs. In 1729, Benjamin Franklin took over the Pennsylvania Gazette, which historians rate among the best of the colonial papers. The paper also made money by advertising products. Having a few thousand readers it had the highest circulation of the time. Another important colonial paper was the New York Weekly Journal, which appeared in 1733. John Peter Zenger had been installed as the printer of the Journal by the Popular party, a political group that opposed British rule and ran articles that criticized the royal governor of New York. After a Popular party judge was dismissed from office, the Journal launched its attack on the governor. In 1734 Zenger was arrested for seditious libel- defaming a public officials character in print. He was defended by famed Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who persuaded the jury that his client was innocent. The reason he stated, was that Nature and Laws of our country have given us a Right the Liberty both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power by speaking and writing Truth. The jury ruled that the newspapers had the right to criticize the government leaders as long as the reports were true. After the Zenger case, the British never prosecuted another colonial printer. The Zenger decision will later provide the foundation for the First Amendment to the constitution the right of a democratic press to criticize public officials. By 1765, about thirty newspapers operated in the American colonies. The first daily paper began in 1784. These papers were of two general types: political or commercial. The rise of political parties and the spread of commerce played a significant role in the development of these early papers. Although the political and commercial papers carried both party news and business news, they had different agendas. The political or partisan press generally argued one point of view or pushed the plan of the particular party that subsidized the paper. The more commercial press served the leaders of commerce, who were interested in economic issues such as ship cargoes from Europe. From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, even the largest of these papers rarely reached a circulation of fifteen hundred. Readership was confined primarily to educated or wealthy men who controlled local politics and commerce. During this time a few pioneering women operated newspapers, including Elizabeth Timothy, the first American woman publisher. After her husband died in 1738, she took over the South Carolina Gazette, established in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin and the eight children of Timothy family. Also during this period, Anna Maul Zenger ran the New York Journal throughout her husbands trial and after his death. The concern by printers and intellectuals that they be able to argue publicly with the government continued after the Revolutionary War. By 1787 the constitutions of nine of the original

thirteen states had sections protecting the press from government interference. There was a lot of debate between two political groups that had evolved by that time the Federalists who supported a strong federal government and commercial interests) and the Antifederalists (who felt that the states should be stronger than a federal government). The Federalists claimed that a bill of rights was unnecessary because so many states had placed them in their constitution and no piece of paper could really guarantee such rights. The Antifederalists wanted to ensure that federal power did not step on the power of the individual. The framers of the Constitution limited voting to literate white males. Illiterates, blacks, and women were not allowed to formally participate in the section of government. Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment said in part that Congress shall make no lawabridging the freedom of speech or of the press. The amendment does not say that the speech and the press ought to be free in some grand, abstract sense. It deals rather specifically with Congress that is, with federal lawmakers. The issue of private control over the communication media, by advertisers and huge media corporations, was not an issue of the day and is not a concern of the First Amendment. The point of the First Amendment was to make sure that the adversary relationship between the press and the authorities would continue. Congress allowed ruled that restrained the press but didnt impede adversarial relationship. It enacted laws that regulated copyright, slander, libel, and indecent language. Newspapers assumed dominant social and political positions over books and magazines in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. Many of the papers were allied with political parties. Some newspapers were even supported by party officials, who helped arrange valuable government printing contracts for editor. Readers knew that the Minerva, edited by Noah Webster, was a Federalist newspaper, and they understood that the National Intelligencer stood up for Thomas Jefferson and his Antifederalist philosophy. In 1820, the United States was home to 512 newspapers, 24 of them published daily, 66 twice or three times a week, and 422 once a week. Purchasing a newspaper was often prohibitive. The printing process was totally a handicraft operation. Papers were handmade of rag by the printer or shipped from England. Two expert crafts people and an apprentice were lucky if they could turn out two hundred impressions (pages printed on one side) an hour. Lecture 2 The Penny Press Era By the 1830s, developments in society and in technology came together to encourage a new approach to the newspaper. On the cutting edge of technology was the steam powered cylinder press which could produce four thousand double impressions on paper in one hour. The speed of the press and the low cost of paper meant that for the first time it was technologically possible to create huge numbers of newspapers for about a penny a copy, a price low enough that even working people could afford it. In 1833, printer Benjamin Day started the New York Sun and sold it for a penny. The slogan of the Sun: It shines for all reflects Days desire to entice great number of people, not just the propertied class, to read its material. Within six months the papers circulation reached around eight thousand, nearly twice that of its nearest rival. In the tradition of todays tabloids, the Sun fabricated stories. It highlighted local events, scandals, and police reports. It also ran serial stories, making legends of frontiersmen Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone and blazing the trial for the medias twentieth century enthusiasm for celebrity news. The Suns success initiated a wave of penny papers that favored human interest stories: news accounts that focus on the trials and tribulations of the human condition, often featuring ordinary individuals facing extraordinary challenges. These kinds of stories show journalisms ties to

literary traditions (which can now be found in the horror or gangster news story genres of urban drug and crime coverage). James Gordon Bennetts New York Morning Herald, founded in 1835 was also enrolled in the penny press era trend. Bennett wanted to free his newspaper from political parties. The Herald concentrated on crime reports, human interest, moral reflections, political scandals, fashion notes, and colloquial tales and jokes. By 1860, it reached nearly eighty thousand readers, making it the worlds largest daily paper at the time. The penny papers were innovative. They were the first to assign reporters to cover crime. In New York, where the penny press competition was fierce, readers enthusiastically embraced the reporting of local news and crime. Although the Herald carried political essays and business stories, it also included a letter section, religious news, play reviews, society news, sports stories, and later, reports from dozens of corespondents sent to cover the Civil War. The penny press started printing advertisements. Many penny papers regarded ads as a kind of consumer news. The rise in ad revenues and circulation accelerated the growth of the newspaper industry. In 1830, 650 weekly and 65 daily papers operated in the United States, reaching eighty thousand readers. By 1840, a total of 1,140 weeklies and 140 dailies attracted three hundred thousand readers. The Age of Yellow Journalism The late of 1800s called the era of yellow journalism emphasized profitable papers that carried exciting human interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy. This period is generally regarded as the age of sensationalism anticipating todays tabloid papers and TV shows. The era of yellow journalism featured two major characteristics. First were the stories about crimes, disasters, scandals, and intrigue. The second legacy is that the yellow press provided the roots for investigative journalism: news reports that hunted out and exposed corruption, particularly in business and government. During this period, William Randolph Hearsts New York Journal started a newspaper circulation war against Joseph Pulitzers New York World. The cause of the war was the first popular cartoon strip, The Yellow Kid, created by artist Richard Felton Outcault in 1895. The phrase yellow journalism has since become associated with the cartoon strip, which shuttled between Hearst and Pulitzer papers during their furious battle for readers in the mid-1890s. LECTURE 3 The Age of Yellow Journalism In 1893, Pulitzer bought the New York World for $346, 000. He encouraged plain writing and the inclusion of maps and illustrations to help immigrant and working-class readers. In addition to running sensational stories on crime, sex and cannibalism, Pulitzer instituted advice column and womens pages. Pulitzer treated advertising as a kind of news that displayed consumer products for readers. Department stores became a major advertising source contributed directly to the expansion of consumer culture and indirectly to the acknowledgement of women as newspaper readers and their eventual employment as reporters. The New York World reflected the contradictory spirit of the yellow press. It fought to improve urban housing, better conditions for women, and equitable labor laws. Pulitzers paper manufactured news events and staged stunts, such as sending star reporter Nellie Bly around the world in seventy-two days to beat the fictional record in the popular 1893 Jules Verne novel, Around the World in Eighty Days.

By 1887, the Worlds Sunday circulation had soared to more than 250,000, the largest in the world. Eight years later, however, the paper faced its fiercest competition when William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal (a penny paper founded by Pulitzers brother Albert). Hearst focused on sensational stories and appealed to immigrant readers by using large headlines and bold layout design. To boost circulation, the Journal invented interviews, faked pictures and encouraged conflicts that might result in a story. It describes tales about two-headed virgins and prehistoric creatures roaming the plains of Wyoming. In promoting journalism as story telling, Hearst said: the modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection of facts if they are also novel. But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty. In 1896, the Journals daily circulation reached 430,000 and by 1897, the Sunday edition of the Journal rivaled the 600,000 circulation of the World. By the 1930s, Hearsts holdings included more than forty daily and Sunday papers, thirteen magazines (including Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan), eight radio stations, and two film companies. The ideal of an impartial or informational news model was reinvented by Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896. Through wise hiring, Ochss staff of editors rebuilt the paper around substantial news coverage and provocative editorial pages. To distance themselves from the yellow press, the editors also downplayed entertainment news and sensational features, favoring the documentation of major events or issues. Ochs offered a distinct contrast to the more sensational newspapers: an informational paper that offered stock and real-estate reports to business, court reports to legal professionals, treaty summaries to political leaders, and theatre reviews to intellectuals. Ochs lowered the papers price to a penny. His thinking was that people bought the World and Journal primarily because they were cheap, not because of their storytelling. As a result, the Times began attracting more middle-class readers who gravitated to the paper as a status marker for the educated and well informed. Between 1898 and 1899, its circulation rose from 25,000 to 75,000. By 1921, the New York Times had a daily circulation of 330,000 and 500,000 on Sunday. The Twentieth Century Press What was lacking in New York and many other cities was a newspaper that was objective in its coverage of the news. Seeing an opportunity to improve the state of journalism in New York, Adolph Ochs purchased the near bankrupt New York Times in 1896 and set out to make it the newspaper of record. He introduced the slogan that still appears on the papers front page today: All the news thats fit to print. Ochs guided the Times for 40 years and turned it into a paper respected worldwide for its comprehensive, accurate and balanced news coverage. As Ochs hoped, the Times became the newspaper of record. The standards set by it also became respected by readers and journalists alike and soon other papers followed its lead. The second trend at work at the beginning of the twentieth century was an emphasis on the social responsibility of newspaper and journalists. Schools and departments of journalism were established in colleges and universities, and attempts were made to teach high standards. The graduate School of Journalism, established at Columbia University in 1912 by a legacy from Joseph Pulitzer, took the lead in this field. Various professional newspaper organizations drew up codes of ethics during this period. Although newspaper content was more responsible and objective during this period, sensationalism did not disappear. Hearst publications continued to use bold headlines, sensationalized photography and stunts to sell papers. There was another wave of sensationalism during the Roaring 20s. This was called jazz journalism, and it reflected the Jazz Age of the time. Joseph Medill Patterson, co-publisher of the Chicago Tribune, introduced a tabloid newspaper, New York Illustrated Daily News. It featured large photographs (sometimes one covered

the entire front page), crime, violence, and sex stories, and sensational headlines. There was a still huge market for this type of journalism, and the New York Daily News (Illustrated was later dropped) soon became the nations largest selling daily newspaper, with a circulation that exceeded 2 million copies for many years. In 1980, Wall Street Journal took the first place. Not all successful newspapers are delivered to the home or sold on newsstands. Some are strategically marketed at supermarket checkout counters. The leader of these supermarket journals is the National Enquirer, bought by Generoso Pope in 1952. He immediately began filling the newspaper with stories about sex and violence. In the 1960s Pope expanded it into a national publication and began selling it in supermarkets. He focused on stories about celebrity gossip, government waste, haunted houses, ghosts, honest people who find and return money, successful people who never went to college, heroic activities, fat people who learned to lose weight, ideas on saving money and medical advice. Through the years the National Enquirer has become one of the most successful and controversial newspapers in America. It has been sued by numerous celebrities and has reached outof-court settlements with many of them. National Enquirer reporters are among the highest paid in the nation, and the papers covers major news events with teams of journalists and photographers. The Enquirer often rushes journalists to the scene of news events to sign up eyewitnesses to exclusive stories Although highly criticized for its approach and style, the National Enquirer seems to be giving many people what they want: sensational stories concerning events that enquiring what minds want to know. LECTURE 4 The Electronic Press The most significant change in the way people got the news was the introduction of electronic journalism first radio and then television news. In the following discussion, we use the term press to include both print and electronic newsgathering. Interpretative Reporting Although interpretative reporting was first introduced in 1930s, there has been a marked increase in this type of reporting during the past decade or so. These articles, often labeled news analysis, appear alongside straight news stories and try to explain the implications and possible consequences of certain events. They have become an important part of modern journalism. For example, after George Bush and Michael Dukakis had sewed up the nominations of their parties for president in May 1988, the New York Times carried an article on its front page about possible running mates. Written by the Times leading political reporter, R. W. Apple Jr., the article explained how the process of picking vice presidential nominees had worked in the past and speculated on who might be the best choices this time. Investigate Reporting Investigate reporting has a longer history; it dates back to the turn of the century, when muckraking reporters began exposing the corruption and abuses of the new industrial society. Classic examples of investigative reporting are Seymour Hershs revelations about the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernsteins uncovering of the Watergate scandal in 1972-74. In 1969 Hersh discovered that American soldiers had killed over 300 Vietnamese civilian at the village of My Lai the previous year. His reports led to congressional hearings and the

indictment of military personnel involved in the episode. The incident shattered the myth that American soldiers were always the good guys who protected the innocent in times of war. The Watergate story started with a police report about a burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters in a Washington, D.C. office and apartment complex called Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein, investigative reporters for the Washington Post, tried to find out what was behind the break-in. With the help of an anonymous source within the government, called Deep Throat, they began discovering a series of illegal activities that they traced to the White House. When President Richard Nixon himself was implicated in a cover-up, he resigned from office. This event shook the foundation of our American culture because it ran counter to the myth that we could trust our presidents to respect the laws of the land. In both of these investigative news events, many Americans blamed the press for revealing the information. Nevertheless, in a free society the role of the press is to keep the people informed and reflect all of the culture, including its unpleasant secrets. Advocacy, Subjective or New Journalism Not all journalists subscribe to the standard of strict objectivity. In the 1960s some reporters began to practice what they called advocacy journalism, subjective journalism or even new journalism. Believing that they should report the truth as they see it, these reporters became personally and emotionally involved in the events they covered. This type of reporting has not been welcomed by the Establishment press, but it has found a home in certain specialized publications. One of the more successful subjective journalists is Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 1972 for the magazine Rolling Stone. Although new journalism has had many meanings over the years, today the terms refer to a twentieth-century writing style that applies literary techniques to journalism. The result is a semiobjective, journalistic view of reality written from a subjective, first-person viewpoint. Some writers who have used this style are Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese. LECTURE 5 Gonzo Journalism Is a style which is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story in a first person narrative. It disregards the polished edited product favored by news media and strives for originality and . Limited Specialization As our popular culture continues to fragment, American journalism is changing only slowly. Although newspapers do specialize in the sense that they serve a specific community or region, they generally attempt to appeal to almost everyone in that area. Thus they trail the other media in moving into the final stage of the EPS cycle. However, there are some newspapers that do cater to specialized audiences, particularly ethnic groups. The first African-American newspaper, Freedoms Journal, was founded in 1827 by John B. Russwurm and the Reverend Samuel Cornish. The most important African-American pre-Civil War newspaper was Frederick Douglasss weekly, North Star. By the mid-1970s there were more than 325 African-American newspapers in the United States, with a total circulation of more than 7 million. Most African-American papers represent the middle of the road African-American Establishment position. However, two-Muhammad Speaks and Black Panther took a more militant position.

Other ethnic newspapers in this country include the more than 50 Hispanic newspapers started since 1960 and the foreign-language newspapers originally founded to serve the wave of European immigrants at the turn of the century. Despite the number of minority publications, figures released in 1988 by the American Newspaper Publishers Association indicated that only about 7 percent of American newsroom employees are minorities. Another type of newspaper specialization flourished in the 1960s to serve the alienated youth and political radicals of the period. Many people wanted an alternative source of news and information, and the underground press was born. Although thousands of underground newspapers were established, few were successful. Some of the better-known ones included the Village Voice and the East Village Other in New York, the Los Angeles Free Press, Chicagos Seed, Bostons Avatar and Phoenix, the Berkeley Barb and San Franciscos Rolling Stone. This latter publication is now an Establishment rock music magazine. Newspapers as Business Newspapers generate the largest revenue of all mass media: $34.7 billion in 1991. The price of a newspaper does not begin to pay for the cost of producing it; the major source of newspaper revenue, 79 percent, is advertising. The more circulation a newspaper has, the more it can charge for its advertising. The competitive nature of newspapers as business is causing changes in American newspaper publishing some of them less desirable than others. For example, when Americans started moving out of the cities to the suburbia in the mid - twentieth century, the number of newspapers serving many metropolitan areas started a steady decline. Cities that once boasted many newspapers had only one. In 1989, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner ended 118 years of service to the community by closing. In the beginning of the 1990s, newspapers were suffering from very slow growth. Daily and Sunday circulations were stagnant. Only weekly circulations were rising. Some large national and metropolitan newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Times, were reporting decreases in circulation. Due to increased competitions from television in recent years, some evening newspapers have been changing to morning publications, which tend to have higher circulations. However, there are still more evening newspapers than morning: 1,150 evening, 525 morning. The newspapers are dailies which appear at least five times a week, semiweeklies appear twice a week and weeklies. Although daily newspapers circulations are larger, weekly newspapers far out-number dailies: about 8,400weekly, 1,611 daily. The majority of weeklies are distributed free. In 1996 total circulation of weeklies- that is the number of the papers bought- reached about 81 million. Four coverage stand out. There are geographic coverage of neighborhoods within cities, of suburbs, and of rural areas. The fourth type of coverage topic centers on certain types of people- particular ethnic, racial, occupational, or interest communities. The geographic niches have been growing strongly, in tune with the growth of non metropolitan areas, along with concerns about crime and pollution, has kept people in suburbs, encouraged others to move to them, and also encouraged people to move to rural areas. Rural areas have been popular for retirees. Daily newspaper circulation has raised around 60 million for the last 25 years. Breaking down papers further by suburban/urban, the most startling circulation drops have been among the big-city daily newspapers. The New York Daily News provides the most dramatic example. Between 1950 and 1990 the Daily News fell from being the most popular to being seventh circulation. The Daily News lost almost 3 million Sunday readers and a bit over 1million daily readers at a time when its areas population was increasing.

National and suburban dailies, by contrast, increased in number and circulation during the past few decades. Although most of the three thousand plus suburban papers are weekly, a couple of hundred appear at least five days a week. The most lucrative areas for this form of newspapering have been around New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and parts of the Florida. Newsday, a Long Island daily, has long been an example of a suburban daily that thrived despite its closeness to the urban dailies of New York City. The prestigious Wall Street Journal and New York Times, once limited to the New York area, have found it lucrative to sell their product nationally. They are the two of the four national daily newspapers in the United States. The others are the Christian Science Monitor and USA Today. Daily newspapers tend not to have opposition from other dailies. In 1996 competition existed only in thirty six cities. In seventeen of these was propped up by a joint-operating agreement (JOA). In JOA the U.S. Justice Department allows two competing newspapers in a city to help one another because otherwise one would stop publishing. The federal government allowed such anti-competitive business behavior specifically in the case of newspapers because of a belief that more than one daily newspaper in an area is useful to maintain competition in the realm of ideas. Advertising In 1996 daily and weekly newspapers together brought in about $43 billion in advertising. But the term of advertising in newspapers really refers to four areas: advertising from local companies, classified ads, national ads, and inserts. Advertising from local companies ( ads from the stores, hospitals, car dealership, restaurants ) is the most important of the four. It makes up about 50 percent of the total in daily papers and even higher percentage in weeklies. The second most lucrative type of newspaper advertisement is the classified ads, which makes up about 40 percent of the revenue. A classified ad is a short announcement for a product or service that is typically grouped with other products or services of its kind. National ads are placed by companies that create products or services. Airline and cruise line ads often represent national purchases. Sometimes, though, what appears to be national can come from local advertisers. The reason is that national marketers often provide co-op advertising money to retailers that carry their products. A soup manufacturer, for example, might provide a local supermarket chain with an allowance to purchase ads that highlight the soups. The money may be used to buy time on local radio and TV, as well as in local newspapers. Inserts, often called free-standing inserts (FSI), are preprinted sheets that advertise particular products, services, or retailers. Typically, an FSI is sent to the newspaper firm, which charges the advertiser for placing it into the newspaper and distributing it. FSIs are most numerous in Sunday papers and can be devoted to one or multiple advertisers. Both types carry discount coupons, which provide incentives for people to buy a product by giving them a certain amount off the retail price. Supermarkets, hardware chains, and other large retailers often create their own FSIs. Some FSIs are entire booklets that describe products and announce sales. The FSIs that carry more than one advertiser typically are created by an FSI company; News America Marketing is a major firm involved in this work. The insert company makes deals with advertisers to carry their messages in FSIs in specific areas around the country at specific times. The advertisers pay the FSI firm; that firm generates the sheets, pay the newspapers to carry the sheets, and pockets the profits. Although national ads and FSIs together make up only about 10 percent of revenues, newspaper executives nevertheless consider them important. FSIs are a relatively inexpensive way for newspapers to gain revenue, since they involve only folding them into the issue, not producing articles for them. As for money from national advertisers, daily newspaper executives, especially, see that as a potential growth area, since the current amount is so relatively small. But the newspapers need to overcome two obstacles. First, they need to convince national advertisers that have placed few or no ads in newspapers to do so. Second, the newspapers need to draw on advanced technology

and cooperation among newspaper firms to make it easy for advertisers to quickly and efficiently send the same ad to many papers around the country. Through the Newspaper Association of America and other groups, the newspaper industry has been trying to address these challenges. Evidence from companies that report their financial results publicly (representing about 45 percent of all newspaper revenues) suggests that in the mid- and late 1990s classified advertising often has been healthier than national and local retail advertising. Retail advertising has been slowed because buyouts and bankruptcies of major department store chains have meant loss of a portion of the dollars spent by those retailers on newspapers ads. Automobile dealers, not stores, have become the major local sponsors. It must be said, however, that results have varied by areas of the country. For example, newspapers in the southern and Gulf Coast regions have generated large increases in local advertising boosted by new casino operations. In the North-east and mid-Atlantic region, though, local newspaper advertising has not been strong. When advertisers buy space in newspapers, a major way they evaluate it is by looking at the coast per thousand readers. Coast per thousand is often abbreviated CPM, for cost per mil. It is the basic measurement of advertising efficiently in all media. If a full page ad in a particular newspaper that reaches one thousand people costs ten thousand dollars, the CPM is ten dollars. Because advertisers often compare media in terms of CPM, even firms that have the only daily newspapers in their cities worry about coming up with ad Prices that can compete with radio, TV, or even local ads inserted into national magazines.