Newspaper industry

“ Protectionists, for example, are a mere band, Free Traders are a mere band; on all these details we are in chaos. And these modern newspapers simply endeavour to sustain a large circulation and so merit advertisements by being as miscellaneously and vividly interesting as possible, by firing where the crowd seems thickest, by seeking perpetually and without any attempt at consistency, the greatest excitement of the greatest number. It is upon the cultivation and rapid succession of inflammatory topics that the modern newspaper expends its capital and trusts to recover its reward. ”

“ At all events, without this powerful source of revenue our newspapers could be neither so cheap nor so liberally conducted as they are; and all the economies of the new age will probably be insufficient to enable newspaper proprietors to dispense with them. The better and the more generously-conducted newspapers are, the more money they spend in the careful collection, editing, printing and illustrating of public information, the more dependent they will become on the revenue from advertising, which is the sinew of journalism ”

“ As personal ownership of newspapers has been superseded by corporate ownership, the place of the editor becomes more and more conventional; as the personal owner continues to be the editor, he tends to consider more than formerly the commercial interests of his paper. These changes seem to create the impression, even among newspaper men themselves, that the editorial is declining in importance. "A newspaper is divided into three parts," says a recent novel dealing with the press. "News is the merchandise which it has to sell. Advertising is the by-product that pays the bills. ”

“ It is only fair to the would-be reporter, therefore, to tell him that at times in his journalistic career he may be permitted to see snow only through a motorist's yellow goggles. The modern newspaper is a business organization run for the profit or power of the owners, with the additional motive in the background of possible social uplift,—social uplift as the owners see it. ”

“ The newspaper was then a means of supplying information upon which men could depend in the guidance of these affairs, but the conditions have entirely changed and it too has changed with them. In our day a newspaper, generally owned by a corporation, is organized for the purpose of making money for the stockholders by the sale of news. ”

“ In large cities the amount of capital required to establish and maintain a daily newspaper is so great that the publisher-owner must be a man of considerable wealth. Stock in newspaper companies, however, is not held exclusively by those directly connected with the paper. ”

“ The great nineteenth-century newspaper was a capitalistic enterprise as purely commercial in its principle as a woolen factory, and the editors were no more allowed to write their own opinions than the weavers to choose the patterns they wove. ”

“ It has absorbed monthly magazines or forced publishers to resort to illustrations—to a sort of picture-book literature for grown-up children. It has driven the lumbering quarterlies into smaller fields and diminished their relative importance. The average citizen craves the news from a journal having the very dew of the morning and of the evening upon it. It must come to him damp and limp, bringing whatever is best at the smallest possible cost. The newspaper is the herald of the new era. ”

“ Within the lifetime of these two great editor-publishers newspaper making had become a big business enterprise.
Newspapers Require Large Capital. During the last quarter of a century the amount of capital required for success in newspaper publishing has been further increased by the need for huge presses, expensive linotypes and other type-casting machines, and more elaborate stereotyping apparatus, as well as for better news service, new special features, and more numerous illustrations. ”

“ The stronger a newspaper grows because of the size and the character of its circulation, and because of the money value of the good will thus acquired, the more independent it becomes of the external influences that may seek to modify its news and editorial policy. Unless such papers are maintained to represent special business or political interests, well-established papers with adequate capital behind them are not likely to be affected by the demands of advertisers or other outside forces. ”

“ The true newspaper, that earns its support in a legitimate way, whose business is conducted for its own sake alone, that never hires itself out to anybody for any purpose, accepts no subsidies, gratuities or bribes, but holds fast at all times to the principles and practices of honorable journalism, can alone command confidence. ”

“ For the recognition has become general that the average newspaper is owned and operated as a commercial property. As Mr. Brooke Fisher, in a recent number of the Atlantic, writes, the days when the editor hired the publisher are gone; it is now the publisher who hires the editor, and the counting-room determines the policy. Advertising is the material mainstay, and the merchants and magnates who have largesse to distribute must be humored. ”

“ The display of a representative selection of newspapers and the cost of maintaining the department would occupy a large space, and the funds would be spent to a considerable extent in providing one of the least healthy forms of literature. But perhaps the real reason for the American indifference to the newsroom is the sensational and vulgar tone of a considerable portion of the newspaper press. ”

“ It is out of the same commodity, supplied under different conditions for purposes of business, that the newspaper acquires the magnificent revenues from which it can defray the enormous expenses required by a modern fully-equipped organization for the collection and presentation of news.
Advertising is the newspaper’s backbone. The world is only beginning to realize how vitally necessary it is to business. Probably from £40,000,000 to £50,000,000 a year is spent on advertising with various journals and periodicals in this country alone. ”

“ The Bill will receive the Royal Assent this day, and on Monday, the Price of the Morning Post, in common with that of other Newspapers, will be Sixpence Halfpenny.”
Then, as now, the backbone of a Newspaper was its advertisements, and then also, did each Newspaper laud itself as being the best advertising medium, owing to its superior circulation. ”

“ The newspaper which outlives the rest does so because it was best fitted to—it had to earn the confidence of its readers—and keep it. It had to be a better newspaper than any other and better newspapers go to the homes of better buyers. Every bit of its circulation has the element of quality and staying power. And it is the respectable, home-loving element of every community—not the touts and the gamblers—toward which the merchant must look for his business vertebrae—he cannot find buyers unless he uses the newspaper that enters their homes. ”

“ The modern newspaper is a product of city life; it is no longer merely an organ of propaganda and opinion, but a form of popular literature. The journal of opinion was largely a business man's newspaper. The so-called independent press added to its public the so-called artisan class. The yellow press was created mainly to capture immigrants, and women.
It was this increase of circulation that made the newspaper—formerly a subsidized organ of the parties an independent business enterprise, an envelope and carrier for advertising. ”

“ This is the right ideal of journalism whenever it is considered as more than a form of commercialism. No newspaper attains its ideal in completeness. If it steadfastly works toward attainment, it gives proof of its right to be. The advancing newspaper, going on from good to better in the substance of its character and the ability of its endeavor, is the type of journalism which affords hope for the future. ”

“ The commodity in which the publishers of daily newspapers deal is news, i.e. information respecting recent events in which the public take an interest, or in which an interest can be excited.
Newspapers, therefore, rank according to their excellence as newspapers; and no other kind of excellence can make up for any deficiency in the one thing for which they exist.
Consequently, the art of editorship consists in forming, handling, and inspiring a corps of reporters; for inevitably that newspaper becomes the chief and favorite journal which has the best corps of reporters, and uses them best. ”

“ A modern newspaper is an enormously expensive institution. The day is past when a country printer could set up a hand-press and print news about the wedding of the village blacksmith’s daughter and the lawn-party of the Christian Endeavor Society, and so make his way as a journalist. ”

“ With this came, in the first quarter of the last century, the extension of private announcements, which have now attained, through the so-called advertising bureaus, some such organization as political news-collecting possesses in the correspondence bureaus.
The modern newspaper is a capitalistic enterprise, a sort of news-factory in which a great number of people (correspondents, editors, typesetters, correctors, machine-tenders, collectors of advertisements, office clerks, messengers, etc.) are employed on wage, under a single administration, at very specialized work. ”

“ How can a newspaper develop if it confines itself to its own narrow quarters in order not to offend its home advertisers? If a newspaper would be a real force in its community it must be prosperous and in order to be prosperous it should enjoy the same right and privilege enjoyed by any other business enterprise. ”

“ People had, therefore, plenty of leisure for careful perusal of the magazines, and these, by giving in many cases a summary of the news, decreased the necessity for the newspaper. For advertisements and business announcements the gazettes and advertisers were the main source, but for general information and current literature persons did not have to devote so much attention to the newspaper. ”

“ From being a comparatively simple undertaking, newspaper publishing has become a big, complex, highly organized enterprise. In 1835 it was possible for one man, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., to start the New York Herald with a cash capital of $500, and to perform the greater part of the work connected with its publication, for the owner-editor’s duties ranged from editorial writing to keeping books, from gathering police news to making out bills, and from commenting on conditions in Wall Street to writing advertisements. ”

“ The manner of growth of the great newspaper’s well-defined and continuous character, distinguishing it from all the rest of the offspring of the printing press, a development sometimes not radically affected by changes of personnel, of ownership, of exterior conditions and fashions set by the popular taste, is a subject over which journalistic metaphysics might easily exert itself to the verge of boredom. ”

“ The business organization, as its name implies, has charge of the commercial side of newspaper publishing. From the financial point of view the purpose of the newspaper is to make enough money to maintain the paper and to pay dividends to the stockholders. The object of the business department is to sell as much advertising space and as many copies of each issue as it possibly can ”

“ I TAKE it that the person who assigned this subject to me had in mind advertising that would come in direct competition with the business men of the community where the newspaper is published, and does not apply to foreign advertising, legal advertising, or specialty advertising, or the advertising of the lines of business not represented in home community. As a rule the proprietor of a newspaper is in business for what he can get out of it in a financial way, although some editors claim to be in business for the uplift of humanity and for the betterment of mankind. ”

“ The stock arguments in favour of newspapers are reasonable, and have a strong element of truth in them. They attract a class of reader who would not otherwise come to the library at all, and satisfy the literary aspirations of some ratepayers who might receive otherwise no direct return for their rates. The presence of literary, technical and commercial periodicals in the newsroom is also said to attract a large number of interested readers, and no doubt it does; but this result might be achieved independently of the newspaper element. Newspaper readers are often a class apart ”

“ With the increasing expenses of modern newspapers under the stress of competition the necessity of swelling the advertising revenue of a paper becomes of paramount importance. So the courting of prominent advertisers is every day more and more the preoccupation of a newspaper manager and he is apt to listen too favourably to any representations made by strong monied interests and himself to exercise a corresponding pressure on the editorial side of the enterprise. ”

“ Sometimes the victory falls to the newspaper proprietor, more often to the advertiser--never to the public.
So far, we see the growth of the Press marked by these characteristics. (1) It falls into the hands of a very few rich men, and nearly always of men of base origin and capacities. (2) It is, in their hands, a mere commercial enterprise. (3) It is economically supported by advertisers who can in part control it, but these are of the same Capitalist kind, in motive and manner, with the owners of the papers. ”