NEWSPAPERS -

A HISTORY
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS
 As a medium and as an industry, newspapers are poised at the
edge of a significant change in their role and operation.
 The changing relationship between newspapers and readers is part

of this upheaval. Newspapers have faced similar challenges more

than once in the past and have survived.
 The Earliest Newspapers
 In Caesar’s time Rome had a newspaper. The Acta Diurna (actions

of the day), written on a tablet, was posted on a wall after each

meeting of the Senate. Its circulation was one, and there is no
reliable measure of its total readership. But it shows that people
have always wanted to know and that others have helped them to
do so.
 The Corantos provide the roots of what we know today as

newspapers. They existed in the 17th century Europe. They were

printed in English in Holland in 1620 and exported to England by
British booksellers who were eager to satisfy public demand for
news.
 Englishmen Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer and
Nicholas Baume eventually begun printing their own
occasional news sheets. The newssheets were called
Diurnals.
 Political power struggles in England at this time boosted

the fledging media with the monarchy and those on the

side of parliament publishing their own diurnals to
boost up their own positions. When the monarchy
prevailed it granted special rights to the oxford gazette
founded in 1665 and later renamed the London gazette.
 This journal used the formular of foreign news, official

information, royal proclamations and local news that

became the model for first colonial newspapers.
 Booksellers/printing shops became the focal point for

the exchange of news and information and now this led

to the beginning of colonial newspapers.
The Earliest Newspapers......cont..
 In 1690 Boston bookseller and printer (coffee house
owner) Benjamin Harris printed his own broadside called
Public Occurrences – Both Foreign and Domestic.
Intended for continuous publication, the first daily in the
country lasted only for one day. Harris had been critical
of local and European dig;;nitaries and he also failed to
obtain a licence.
 More successful was Boston post master John Campbell

whose 1704 Boston Newsletter survived until the

revolution (America’s independence from British was
1776). The paper featured foreign news, reprints of
articles from England, Govt announcements and
shipping news. It survived because of Government
subsidies and with its control. In 1721, Boston had three
newspapers.
The Earliest Newspapers......cont..
 James Franklin’s New England Courant was the only one
publishing without authority. The Courant was popular
and controversial. But when it criticised the
Massachusett’s Governor, Franklin was jailed for printing
scandalous libel. When he was released he went back to
his old ways and got banned. He passed it on to his
brother Benjamin Franklin who later moved to
Philadelphia letting The Courant to die.
 In Philadelphia, Ben took over a failing newspaper which

he revived and renamed Pennsylvania Gazette by

combining income from his business and books printing.
He ran the gazette with significant independence. Ben
Franklin demonstrated that financial independence could
lead to editorial independence. It was however not a
guarantee.
In 1734 New York Weekly Journal publisher John
Peter Zenger was jailed for criticising that Colony’s
royal governor. The charge was seditious libel, and
the verdict was based not on truth or falsehood of
the printed words but on whether they had been
printed. The criticism had been published, so
Zenger was clearly guilty. But his attorney, Andrew
Hamilton, argued to the jury, “For the words
themselves must be libellous, that is false,
scandalous and seditious, or else we are not guilty.”
 Otherwise how could anything other than

favourable material about government ever be

published? Moreover, he added, why should
colonialists be bound by a British law they had not,
themselves approved?
 To make his point Hamilton said, “Power
may justly be compared to a great river;
while kept within its due bounds, it is both
beautiful and useful.
 But when it overflows its banks, it is then

impetuous to be stemmed, it bears down all

before it, and brings destruction and
desolation wherever it comes.”
 The case of Zenger became a symbol of

colonial newspaper independence from the

Crown.
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN NEWSPAPER

 At the turn of the 19th century the following factors

combined to create an audience for a new kind of
paper known as the Penny press. The factors included:
 Urbanisation
 Growing industries (industrialisation)

 Movement of workers in cities (migration)

 Increasing Literacy
 This one cent newspaper was for everyone. Benjamin

Day’s September 3rd 1833 issue of the New York Sun

was the first of the Penny Papers. Day’s innovation
was to sell his papers so inexpensively so that it
attracts a large readership which could then be sold to
advertisers.
MODERN NEWSPAPER ..... Cont..
 Day succeeded because he anticipated a new kind of
reader. He filled the Sun with police and court reports,
crime stories, entertainment news, and human interest
stories because it lived up to its motto, “The Sun Shines
For All”. There was a little elite, political and business
information that had characterised the earlier
newspapers.
 Soon there was a penny paper in all major cities. Among

the most important was James Gordon Bennet the New

York Morning Herald. Although more sensationalistic than
the Sun, the Herald pioneered the correspondent system.
 Horace Greeley’s NewYork Tribune was important penny

paper as well. Its nonsensationalistic, issue oriented, and

humanitarian reporting established the mass newspaper
as a powerful medium of social action
The People’s Medium

 People typically excluded from the social, cultural and

political mainstream quickly saw the value of the mass
newspaper.
 The first African American newspaper was Freedom’s

Journal, published initially in 1827 by John B.

Russwaram and the Reverend Samuel Cornish.
 Forty others soon followed, but it was Frederick

Douglass who made best use of new mass circulation

style in his newspaper The Ram’s Horn, founded
expressly to challenge the editorial policies of
Benjamin Day’s SUN.
 Although this particular effort failed, Douglass had

established himself and the minority press as viable

voice for those otherwise silenced.
 The most influential African America newspaper after
the civil war, and the first Black paper to be a
commercial success (its predecessors typically
subsidised by political and church groups), was Chicago
Defender.
 First published on May 5, 1905, by Robert Sengstacke

Abbot, the Defender eventually earned a nationwide

circulation of more than 230,000.
 Especially after Abbot declared May 15, 1917, the start

of “the Great Nothern Drive,” the Defender’s central

editorial goal was to encourage southern Black people
to move North.
  “ I beg of you, my brothers, to leave that benighted

land. You are free men.... Get out of South,” Within 2

years of start of the great drive, more than 500,000
former slaves and their families moved North.
A news agency is an organization of journalists
THE
established FIRST
to supply newsWIRE
reportsSERVICES
to news organizations:
newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasters.
 Such an agency may also be referred to as a wire service,

newswire or news service.

 In 1848Six large New York papers including The Sun,

Herald, Tribune among others decided to pull efforts and

share expenses of collecting news from foreign ships
docking at the City’s harbours.
 After determining rules of membership and other

organisational issues, the newspapers established the first

news gathering and distribution organisation, the New York
Associated Press. Other domestic wire services followed –
the Associated Press in 1900, the United Press in 1907,
and the International News Service in 1909.
Implications for the first Wire services
 This innovation with its assignment of correspondents
to both foreign and domestic bureaus, had a number
of important implications:
i. It greatly expanded the breadth and scope of
coverage a newspaper could offer its readers. This
was a boon to dailies wanting to attract as many
readers as possible.
ii. The nature of reporting began to change. The
reporters could now produce stories by re-writing-
sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – the actual on-
the-spot of others.
iii. Newspapers were able to reduce expenses (and
increase profits) because they no longer needed to
have their own reporters in all locations.
Yellow Journalism
 In 1883 Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer
bought the troubled New York world. Adopting
a populist approach to the news, he brought a
crusading, activist style of coverage to
numerous turn-of-the century social
problems-
 Growing Slums
 Labour tensions
 Failing farms etc.
 The audience of his new journalism was the

common man
Origin of Yellow Journalism

 The term originated during the American Gilded Age of the

late nineteenth century with the circulation battles between
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph
Hearst’s New York Journal.
 The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical

usage often refers specifically to this period. Both papers

were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in
order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did
serious reporting as well.
 The term was coined by Erwin Wardman, the editor of the

New York Press. Wardman was the first to publish the term
but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow
journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were
already used by newsmen of that time. Wardman never
defined the term exactly.
Origin of Yellow Journalism continued
 . Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman
twisted “new journalism” into "nude journalism". Wardman had
also used the expression “yellow kid journalism” referring to the
then-popular comic strip which was published by both Pulitzer
and Hearst during a circulation war. In 1898 the paper simply
elaborated: "We called them Yellow because they are Yellow.
 Other scholars have it that it drew its name from the Yellow Kid,

a popular cartoon character of the time. Yellow journalism was a

study in excess –
 sensational sex,
 crime, and disaster news:
 giant headlines,
 heavy use of illustrations; and
 reliance on cartoons and colour.
 It was successful at first, and other papers around the country

adopted all or part of its style.

Yellow kid
 The Yellow Kid is an American comic strip character that
appeared from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer's New York
World, and later William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.
 Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault in the comic

strip Hogan's Alley (and later under other names as well), it was

one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American
newspaper, although its graphical layout had already been
thoroughly established in political and other, purely-for-
entertainment cartoons. 
 Outcault's use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the

basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper

comic strips and comic books.
 The Yellow Kid is also famous for its connection to the coining of

the term "yellow journalism.“

 The idea of "yellow journalism" referred to stories which were

sensationalized for the sake of selling papers, and was so named

after the "Yellow Kid" cartoons.
Organizing the News Process
 One consequence of the new financial and news
considerations was that newspapers became complex
organizations.
 The newspaper of the early 1800s tended to be created by a

single printer-publisher-editor-reporter, with apprentices who

were sometimes family members.
 That was possible when the work involved simply relaying

information. It would not do, however, when creating a

newspaper meant quickly finding and preparing material that
would entice huge numbers of readers on a daily basis.
 Newspaper companies soon became large organizations, with

different departments to take care of financing, creating,

printing, distributing, and marketing their product.
 In addition to becoming more complex internally, newspaper

companies began to interact with other organizations that

helped them to get news to their readers quickly and
efficiently.
 The Western Union telegraph company was
one such organization;
 it helped reporters relay news quickly.
 Another was the Associated Press. It was

established in 1849 by seven New York City

newspapers as a cooperative news-
gathering organization.
 Newspapers in other cities were invited to

join the service, which charged a

membership fee in return for sending its
stories to the paper over the telegraph
wires.
Organizing the News Process ..CONT
 Clearly, the newspaper business was evolving into an
industry.
 Publishers were using ever-faster printing presses and

other communication technologies to pursue larger and

larger audiences.
 The era of mass communication had begun. Still, it

would be wrong to get the idea that the major urban

newspapers of 1850 or 1860 could be mistaken for
those of today.
 One major difference was the absence of photographs in

the press of the mid-1800s; the technology for printing

photographs in newspapers hadn’t been invented yet.
 A bigger difference was the tone used by that era’s

major dailies compared to ours

 The notion of objectivity as it is used by today’s
journalists in hard news had not yet been developed.
 Today, once news workers have decided that

something is hard news, they must decide how to

present it. They use the word objectivity to
summarize the way in which news ought to be
researched, organized, and presented.
 It is possible, they believe, to recount a news event

based on the facts and without interpretation, so

that anyone else who witnessed the news event
would agree with the journalists’ recounting of it.
 The goal of a hard-news reporter, then, is to

summarize an event in an objective manner—that is,

to present a fair and impartial representation of what
happened.
Organizing the News Process ..CONT
 But this approach didn’t yet exist in the mid-1800s.
Publishers such as James Gordon Bennett (of the New
York Herald) and Horace Greeley (of the New York
Tribune) had no qualms about lacing their editions
with long articles that included spirited attacks on
political or philosophical rivals that would appear
strange in daily newspapers today.
 Greeley, in particular, used his paper as a forum for

wide ranging discussions of new schemes to improve

society.
 In the 1850s, for example, the Tribune devoted many

pages to explaining socialism, and Greeley himself

plunged into long debates with famous opponents of
socialism on the desirability of a socialist society.
 The Rise of the Tabloids

 The 1920s saw the rise of papers that were printed in

a tabloid form—that is, on a page that was about half
the size of a traditional newspaper page.
 They became popular because they included a number

of photographs, they were easy to handle on public

transportation, and they featured sensational coverage
of crimes and movie stars.
 The most popular of this sort of newspaper was the

New York Daily News, which dubbed itself “New York’s

Picture Newspaper.”
 Like its imitators, in its earliest years the Daily News

seemed to reflect the idea of a newspaper that had

been stripped of the real news that the new journalism
schools were trying to promote.
 What the reader got instead was large doses of
the entertainment part of the traditional paper:
gossip, comic strips, horoscopes, advice
columns, sports, and news about movie stars.
 Though there are still some echoes of this

“jazz journalism” in today’s Daily News, this

particularly sensationalist style doesn’t
characterize it anymore.
 You can see more of this type of journalism in

such weekly entertainment papers as the

National Enquirer and perhaps even in headline
mongering dailies such as the New York Post.
Headline Mongering
Headline Mongering
 Newspaper Industry Woes

 The high-flying years that newspaper firms

saw in the early 1900s ended with the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
 During that decade, unemployment, low

wages, and a more restrained society led

consumers to buy one traditional paper
instead of a traditional paper and a tabloid.
 Some people who had once purchased

several papers on a daily basis found that

they could not afford even one.
Declining Dailies
 Radio was the newspaper industry’s first
substantial daily competitor for advertising.
 In the late 1940s, television arrived, adding

to newspaper executives’ worries. Still, in the

years immediately following World War II their
circulation figures rose and profits were
strong.
 Yet by the year 2007, the number of dailies

had decreased, ownership concentration had

increased, and the number of cities with
competing dailies was reduced to a handful
Declining Readership
 Exacerbating all these changes was the fact
that the percentage of the U.S. population
reading daily papers declined between the
1930s and the 1990s.
 About 40 million copies were sold each day in

1930, when the population was 122 million; in

2000, when the population was about 250
million, only 60 million copies were sold.
 But the number of newspapers for each

household
 decreased from 1.32 in 1930 to 0.68 in 1990

and to 0.43 in 1994.

Competition from the Web
 At the end of the 1900s, newspaper companies
generally remained quite profitable, as local
advertisers still used them to reach large
numbers of people.
 But as the industry moved into the twenty-first

century, many newspapers began to suffer not

just larger annual losses in readership than in
earlier years, they began to see signs that their
growth in advertising money was also decreasing.
 As you might guess, a primary concern for those

in the industry is competition from the Web.

 In order to fully grasp the ways in which the
Web is changing newspapers’ production,
distribution, and exhibition activities, it is
important to understand the types of papers
that exist, the companies that run them, and
the support they receive from advertisers.
 This will also make it clear that the

newspaper industry today is quite varied, and

it is important to get a sense of that variety
before making generalizations about “the
newspaper’s” future.