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Chapter 1 The Influence Model Once when William Allen White visited Boston, two young reporters , Louis Lyons of The Boston Globe and Charles Morton of the Transcript, sought him out for an interview. The sage of Emporia put his arms around the two men and said, “We all have the same face. It is not an acquisitive face.”1 Later, when he was curator of the Nieman Foundation (1939– 1964), Lyons recalled that moment and advised young journalists to work for organizations that put service to society above the values of “a banker or an industrialist.” Today, he might say above the values of “a hedge fund or a mortgager broker.” But it’s the same idea. The glory of the newspaper business in the United States used to be its ability to match its success as a business with self-conscious attention to its social service mission. Both functions are threatened today. Measured by household penetration (average daily circulation as a percent of households), this mature industry peaked early in the 1920s at 130.2 By 2007, newspaper household penetration was down to 44 percent.3 But while household penetration declined, newspaper influence and profitability remained robust for most of the twentieth century. Now both are in peril. 1. Louis M. Lyons, Reporting the News (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 255. 2. Donald L. Shaw, “The Rise and Fall of Mass Media,” Roy W. Howard Public Lecture, School of Journalism, Indiana University, April 4, 1991. 3. This number is derived from circulation reported by the Newspaper  10 The Vanishing Newspaper The decay of newspaper journalism creates problems not just for the business but for society. One problem is basic: to make democracy work, citizens need information. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” warned James Madison, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”4 Democracy was more manageable when mass media and its associated advertising for mass-produced goods tended to mold us into one culture. But that started to change after World War II. For some time now, historians have seen the world in three stages: a pre-industrial period, when social life was local and small in scale; the industrial period, which made both mass communication and mass production possible; and the third or post-industrial stage, which shifted economic activity from manufacturing to services. Journalism professors John Merrill and Ralph Lowenstein described the effect of these changes on our media system in 1971.5 The mass media were already starting to break up the audience into smaller and smaller segments, promoting what sociologist Richard Maisel called “cultural differentiation.” If we’re all attending to different messages, our capacity to understand one another is diminished. Even in the 1960s when Maisel started working on this issue, he could see decreasing support for educational institutions as one consequence of the differentiated culture . That trend has continued. It might take a different kind of journalism, backed by a different kind of financial support, to keep us together. For our social and political health, we need to understand enough about the business of journalism to try to preserve it in new platforms. The literature of business administration has a theoretical framework that provides a good place to start. Theodore Levitt popularized the term “disruptive technology” and captured the imagination of a generation of executives when he wrote “Marketing Myopia” for Harvard Business Review in 1960.6 One of his examples came from the experience of the railroads. Their managers clung stubbornly to the narrow definition of their enterprise: they were in the railroad business. If only they had seen that they were in the transportation business, they might have been prepared when people and cargo began moving ——— Association of America at http://www.naa.org/ and household projections reported by the U.S. Census. Average daily circulation is counted by the formula (6*D + S)/7 where D = average weekday circulation and S = average Sunday circulation. 4. James Madison, Letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822, in Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Madison (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co., 1953). 5. Merrill and Lowenstein, Media, Message, and Man (New York: David McKay, 1971). 6. Republished in Edward C. Bursk and John F . Chapman, eds., Modern Marketing Strategy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). Levitt’s retrospective commentary appeared in Harvard Business Review 53 (September–October 1975). Available at http://bold. coba.unr.edu/769...

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