The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

Introduction In 1801, Federalists in New York City established the Evening Post to espouse their cause, attack the Jefferson administration, and serve as the political mouthpiece of Alexander Hamilton. The first issue of this four-page daily newspaper included attacks on the Jeffersonians, essays on American politics and on the press, notices of an upcoming city charter election, accounts of foreign events, reports on shipping, and news about the Philadelphia theater.! One Jeffersonian referred to the Evening Post's editor, William Coleman, as "the Field Marshall of the Federal Editors." Many Americans saw "Hamilton's Gazette" as one of the nation's leading antiadministration papers.2 At century's end, the now 12-page paper still carried news about politics, but it was no longer a party organ. In 1897, in just one day's issue of the newspaper, the reader could find articles on sports, lectures , murder, road improvements, books, business, auctions, stocks, European money markets, theater, fashion, literature, crime, accidents , parks, and New York real estate, as well as accounts of various local happenings and a calendar of upcoming events.3 This change in the Evening Post exemplifies the transformation of American journalism in the nineteenth century. Early in the century, newspapers were usually small-circulation, four-page weeklies or dailies . Their content was dominated by politics and advocacy, reflecting their close ties to political parties and interest groups. By the 1890s, newspapers (particularly in the metropolitan areas) were large-circulation, 8- or 12-page dailies that usually eschewed close political affiliation. Newspapers still dealt with politics, but now they did so from a position of some autonomy. More important, they devoted much of their attention and space to other topics, providing a diverse mix of local, regional, and national news and features on dozens of topics-business, crime, accidents, fires, divorce, suicide, labor, education, religion, sports, inventions, disease, weather, books, theater, music, fashion, and recipes, to list a few. They even serialized fiction. Just how much newspapers had changed in one century is underscored by the fact that the content of the Evening Post, even after its 3 4 Introduction metamorphosis to a general-interest newspaper, was more restrained than that of its competitors in New York City. By 1900, sensational mass-circulation newspapers dominated in New York City, with their screaming headlines, lurid stories of illicit love, suicide, and graft, and jumble of puzzles, contests, comic strips, and fiction. When the Evening Post began publication in 1801, its competitors were other small-circulation newspapers that paid little heed to events beyond politics and business.4 In 1900, all those other newspapers were gone, and the Post was part of a substantially different newspaper market. What had happened that so changed the American newspaper? How had the vision or definition of the press in American society changed? The answer is a complex one, embracing far-reaching changes not only in the press but also in American society itself. Technological innovation, the rise of a market economy, the broad sweep of industrialization, greater leisure time and literacy, the rise of great cities, to name just a few factors, helped reshape the American newspaper. Within the newspaper industry itself, particularly after the Civil War, new ideas about the role of the press in society broadened the purview of the press and the content of newspapers.5 This book focuses on just one part of the changing newspaper in the nineteenth century by looking at the thrust toward commercialization of the news. In the early nineteenth century, editors defined news as a political instrument intended to promote party interests. By century's end, editors defined news within a business context to ensure or increase revenues. News had become commercialized. This book explores the commercialization of news. It traces changes in society and the press that gave rise to news values that exalted profit-making at the expense of older notions of news as political information or persuasion. In a broad sense, then, commercialization here refers to the process by which news values were redefined to include this concern for the bottom line and to the evolution of news as a commodity to be shaped and marketed with an eye for profit.6 The commercialization of news in the nineteenth century was the result of changes in three important areas of the newspaper: its finances , the vision of what the press could and should do, and the exigencies of day-to-day operations. The intimate connection between finances and content figures...