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Introduction The current round of handwringing over the future of news journalism is new, perhaps, only in iteration, not in spirit. It continues a long-standing tradition in the media industry that can be traced back to at least the moral wars of the 1840s, the critiques of the scandal sheets of the 1870s, the yellow press debates of the 1890s, the tabloid frenzy of the 1920s, the fears over consolidation, the threat posed by radio, television, and the Internet—and may have more in common with these crises than is normally appreciated. Which is another way of saying that print journalism, and the mass media more generally, have from their inception been in a state of crisis, and to the extent that at a given point in history people come to believe there is a dire threat facing the media as an industry, we learn about this problem via the media. Most often, such crises are worries of the industry itself rather than any grassroots or citizen-led fear over an apparent loss.This perpetual state of crisis in the media industry has also provided justification for actions that might otherwise have seemed unpalatable. Every generation of media has experienced and responded to a threat of some kind that is articulated in terms loftier than a simple loss of profit and has sought techniques for its amelioration. Strategies of consolidation and concentration, cutbacks and cash outlay, competing plans for reform, appeals for regulation and deregulation, tax incentives and breaks, have all been constitutive of how this threat is manifest to the public. Less documented among these strategies , as I argue here, is architecture, which has served in no small capacity to shore up legitimacy in moments of doubt. In nineteenth-century New York, the Fourth Estate used the tall building to eclipse the old First Estate—the church spires that until then had ruled the skyline of America’s most powerful city. Building as much for each other as for the public, newspaper rivalry manifested itself in increasingly tall and bold purpose-built structures, and new additions on top of existing buildings. Publishers chose the most important architects of their day to design large, classical structures with towers, domes, columns, and pilasters based on Italian Renaissance campaniles, French Second Empire chateaus, Wallace_Media text.indd 1 8/24/12 2:49 PM 2 / Introduction and Gothic churches. By evoking the classical past of architecture, publishers intended to convey permanence, authority, and stability to their readers , and to lend much needed credibility to their enterprises. Hoping that highbrow, aspirational architecture could be used to elevate and mask their more base and commercial motives, the news business adopted architectural forms from the Old World—architecture to inspire the awe of church design and the authority of the altar, even as it evoked the magnificent castles of Medici princes.The new towers adopted these classical styles, the New York Times wrote, “like a self made man going in for culture late in life.”1 The appropriation of these forms helped to situate early publishers as community leaders, public servants, statesmen, aristocrats, and patrons of culture that they hoped to be, all the while establishing a new platform on which media was to be judged. When the Tribune Tower first overtook the Trinity Church spire on the skyline, it was a gesture intended to show the momentum of progress and the dominance of mass communication as the more authoritative source of information.As if in reaction to Victor Hugo’s pronouncement “this will kill that,” that the printing press would ultimately overtake the architecture of the church, museums, and monuments as the dominant mode of information dissemination, the New-York Tribune employed architecture as its rejoinder. It would challenge the church in both message and architecture. Newspapers were, of course, operating within a dramatic era of social transformation of which they were cause and result, and the battle for late-Victorian morality was fought in their pages. Their authority to socialize city people into bewildering new circumstances was maintained by their ambitions toward comprehensive news coverage,and these ambitions were bolstered by equally majestic and self-important architecture. Newspapers sought to enhance their position relative to religion—ideologically by setting new standards of morality and discourse in the paper, and by setting new standards of height superiority on the skyline. Height became a euphemism for supremacy, placing the buildings and their occupants on a higher plane. The repeated entreaties to God, the use of...

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