Newspaper industry

Definition Enterprises that market, print, and distribute, as well as produce or secure content and advertisements for, daily or weekly news publications

Early newspapers fostered the growth of democracy and promoted citizen participation in national, state, and local governments. Over time, they continued to create interest in society’s concerns, and their use of advertising not only furthered their own financial profits but also affected the profits of other businesses.

Newspapers are daily and weekly publications sold to the public that convey information about current events. Their avowed reason for being is to impart news. However, they have also become important sources of information about products and services, thanks to the relatively large amount of advertising they contain.

Newspapers in the American Colonies

A Boston printer named Benjamin Harris published the first American newspaper in 1690. A single-page newssheet called Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, it reported on American Indian raids, fever and flu outbreaks, and a scandal about France’s Louis XIV. Harris’s first issue, however, was also his last, as two ministers, Increase Mather and Cotton Mather, suppressed the paper’s publication because Harris had failed to obtain a publishing license.

Three other American newspapers were publishing by 1730: The Boston Newsletter, begun in 1704, and for fifteen years the only paper in the colonies; The Boston Gazette, started in 1719; and The New England Courant, started in 1721 by Benjamin Franklin’s half brother. These papers carried mostly news about arrival and departure times for ships traveling the Atlantic, three-month-old news from England, and simple advertisements for lost, found, or for-sale items. Each copy, bought mainly through subscription by the more prosperous colonists, was read by as many as twenty people, passed from person to person eager to receive European and colonial news or read aloud in a coffee shop or on someone’s porch. Printing these newspapers involved a slow, laborious process, as each issue was produced with a manually operated hand press, using hand-inked, hand-set type on flat sheets of paper.

When the colonies’ rebellion started, the newspapers carried opinions about revolution and letters to the editors with reactions to those views. By the 1730s, some newspapers had been openly or covertly subsidized by political officials desiring a way to present their “official” versions of public affairs. The papers, often atrociously printed with old-fashioned type, contained hearsay items; short obituaries of upper-class colonists or foreign royalty; notices of rewards for runaway apprentices, servants, and slaves; and even excerpts from books or European periodicals as space fillers. The actual reporting of news along the model of modern journalism was unheard of. The printer of the newspaper was the editor, publisher, and writer.

When the colonies became the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution established freedom of the press in 1791, guaranteeing the press the right to print information and opinions without prior government restraint. A trial in 1735 against John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, confirmed that critical comments published in a newspaper are not libelous if they are true.

Nineteenth-Century Progress

Newspaper circulation increased to a few thousand readers during the nineteenth century as a result of faster printing presses and mechanical typesetting. The Hoe cylinder press, patented in 1847, revolutionized the printing process. Where earlier printing involved manually pressing hand-inked, hand-set type on flat single sheets, the Hoe press used a revolving cylinder to hold the type, which could roll rapidly over the paper and produce eight thousand one-sided copies per hour. A later, improved model, called the Hoe web perfecting press, could print on both sides of the sheet and produce eighteen thousand sheets per hour.

The telegraph and the telephone made it possible to compile far-ranging news in a more timely manner; more and fresher news increased circulation. Costs for publishing newspapers fell as circulation increased. Circulation increased as the newspaper publishers printed more news of interest to “lower stratum” readers, who bought papers to read courtroom news, stories advocating social reform, or crime or human interest stories. This growing interest in news led to the use of newsboys and newsgirls hawking one-cent-a-copy papers on city streets for readers on their way to work or shopping.

Whereas early newspapers were available mostly by subscription, newspapers such as The New York Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley in 1841; The New York Sun, Benjamin Davis’s paper founded in 1833; and The New York Morning Herald, later The Herald, founded by George Gordon Bennett in 1835, were among the 715 American newspapers being sold to a wider readership, on the streets as well as by subscription. The West Coast was able to receive East Coast and European news much faster. Before the telegraph was invented, it took three months for news to travel by ship around Cape Horn to the West Coast; the new technology brought it in a matter of days.

New Technologies and Methods

As the US Civil War approached, the new technologies and the increased desire of readers to follow current events caused the newspaper business to develop new ways to engage its readerships. Illustrations were more widely used in papers such as New York’s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly. These newspapers printed the news of the day, exposés, sports news, and even fiction—illustrated by accomplished artists such as Thomas Nast, best known for his political cartoons, and Winslow Homer. Matthew Brady was taking extraordinary photographs of the war at the time, but news presses could not yet reproduce photographs.

The cost of the new technologies could not be recovered by subscriptions and street sales alone. The newer presses, paper, and workers’ wages required a constant outlay of money that cut into profits. Consequently, advertisements were sought from any feasible source, with little regard to the quality of the product or service being advertised. Soon, anyone who could afford it was buying space in newspapers, whose circulation numbers almost guaranteed wide exposure for advertisers. Because greedy newspapers allowed practically anyone to advertise, for a time brothels, individual prostitutes, vendors of quack medicines and treatments, and other questionable sellers bought ads. This period was not an admirable one, but the revenues generated from such ads helped the industry progress.

Another innovation during this era was the use of correspondents who did on-the-spot reporting. As far back as 1849, newspapers had relied on a news-gathering agency, the Associated Press, to supply reports of what was happening around the nation and the world. When the Civil War began, many newspapers realized they could send their own reporters to battle sites for firsthand stories. The Confederate States’ newspapers, however, did not have sufficient individual reporters, so they started the Press Association of the Confederate States of America, an agency that gathered war news for dissemination among the Confederate newspapers. The Confederate States’ papers also had another problem: Nearly all American paper mills were located in the North, so there was a severe shortage of newsprint. The shortage became so severe that many of the southern newspapers had to cease publication altogether, while those remaining in operation used any paper they could find, including wrapping paper and even wallpaper.

By the end of the nineteenth century, innovative machines brought newspaper publishing to a new zenith. Aside from the machine that mechanically folded the papers, there was the Linotype machine, developed by Ottmar Mergenthaler. Its typewriter-type keyboard decreased typesetting time to one-third the time it took by hand, producing whole lines of type on metal slugs. It had more than ten thousand moving parts, and its operators needed more than four years of training and experience to learn to operate the machine correctly. The web-perfecting press, meanwhile, could print on both sides of a sheet of paper, which by this time was mounted on huge rolls instead of flat sheets. A half-tone engraving technique gave a three-dimensional shading effect to illustrations for greater realism. Cheaper paper was available, made of wood pulp instead of the previously used, more expensive rag paper. Typographical errors were reduced with the use of the newly invented, more efficient typewriter.

Era of Great American Newspapers

In 1870, there were 5,091 newspapers operating in the United States. The Washington Post was started in 1877, with a circulation of ten thousand and a cost of 3 cents per copy. Other great American newspapers were established before the end of the century. Joseph Pulitzer started the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and then New York City’s The World, which was said by some to be the “greatest of all newspapers.” William Randolph Hearst started the New York Journal and helped start the trend of “yellow journalism” (named for the rival World’s comic strip character the Yellow Kid, after the Journal and the World began a feud). Hearst also published a tabloid, The Daily Mirror, that reported on tragedies, murders, disasters, and scandals of the rich and famous. His papers and Pulitzer’s are believed to have helped instigate American participation in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

The New York Times, started by Adolph Ochs in 1895, set a different standard from its raucous contemporaries, saying its aim was to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” referring to its goal of limiting itself to serious news coverage. The Kansas City Evening Star and The Chicago Tribune also began publishing between 1880 and 1900. Edward W. Scripps, publisher of the Cleveland Press, set up the Scripps-McRae League in 1895, the first newspaper chain in the United States. With the publications of Scripps, Pulitzer, and Hearst, the great American newspaper empires of the twentieth century had begun.

Modern Controversies

After World War II, even faster machines and potentially damaging labor concerns stirred up the newspaper business as never before. Photocomposition machines again changed the printing process, setting type six times faster than earlier machines and using 25 percent less ink than before. The highly trained, unionized Linotype operators believed, rightfully, that the new technology would eliminate their jobs, because the new machines could be operated by anyone with decent motor skills. To resolve their concerns and forestall damaging labor strikes, newspaper publishers, seeking ways to reduce costs and increase profits, and the workers, seeking mainly to hold on to their jobs, negotiated until a satisfactory agreement was reached and progress continued. The newspapers improved: More color pictures and photographs were used, and more copies were printed faster—the new presses could print eighty-five thousand copies of a sixty-four-page paper in about an hour.

Many Americans headed for the suburbs during the 1940s and 1950s, and readership of daily papers dropped. However, more Sunday papers were read, and during the 1980s, an innovative national daily, USA Today, featuring a mix of national news and other items of interest, soon became the second-most-read daily in the country, after The New York Times. Radio and television began cutting into newspaper advertising revenues, however. Serious decreases began in the twenty-first century, although certain factors in 1990 already predicted a slide in revenue. These included a weakening national economy, changes in the industry, and slumps in the markets that purchased advertising. Some newspapers, such as The San Francisco Chronicle, suffered serious financial losses of as much as $1 million per week. Advertising revenue records showed a 10 percent drop between 2006 and 2007. Circulation revenue, newspapers’ second-largest source of revenue after advertising, grew some 5.5 times between 1975 and 2005. During this time, circulation revenue reached 31 cents to every dollar of advertising revenue. By 2005, it had dropped to 24 cents. The Newspaper Association of America stopped releasing revenue data in 2014; the final statistics, for the year 2013, showed $23.6 billion in ad revenue to $10.9 billion in circulation revenue. Though print newspaper circulation experienced some growth between 2010 and 2014, it declined sharply over the following two years, and most newspaper publishers have had limited success in monetizing their online editions, which readers expect to be able to access for free and are reluctant to pay for.

In spite of the industry’s problems, about 51 million people continued to buy newspapers during the early twenty-first century; at least 124 million read them. The industry, acutely aware of a decrease in interest in its print versions, sought new ways to keep its customers and attract new ones. They began to experiment with different revenue models based on online journalism, an extremely popular source of information for millions of Americans, but one that users expected to be free.

While some larger newspapers did experience slight growth in their numbers of digital subscribers, overall, weekday circulation for US daily newspapers had decreased by 8 percent in 2016, according to data from the Pew Research Center. By that time, research had shown that people were turning more and more to social media sites as quick, real-time news sources regardless of their reputation for inaccuracies. To make up for significant losses in print advertising revenue, newspapers have put more resources into securing digital advertising, which companies favor for their direct marketing capabilities. After acquiring the Washington Post in 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos helped to improve the paper's technological capabilities, increasing readership.

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