The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor

1. The Industry: Gannett and Knight-Ridder

25 Chapter 1 The Industry: Gannett and Knight-Ridder Few industries have been as romanticized in American popular culture as the newspaper business. Hollywood versions have ranged from classic films like Citizen Kane, The Front Page, and All the President’s Men to fictional thrillers like The Pelican Brief and State of Play, the biographical drama The Soloist, and the Disney musical Newsies. The strength of the popular myth is well grounded: in 1991 media scholar Michael Schudson wrote that the American newspaper was “the most representative carrier and construer and creator of modern public consciousness.”1 For much of their history, local newspapers have served as a vital medium of civic communication and urban community, with the names of their home cities inscribed on their mastheads and their relations with local economic, political, and social actors more direct and intimate than any other mass media can claim. Today, however, as newspapers face challenges to their very survival, it has become clear that their contribution to a democratic society rests on a contingent historical juncture of forces and ideas. As media scholar C. Edwin Baker writes: “Meaningful presentation [of the news] often requires intelligent decision making by skillful, independent, and financially backed media professionals—a difficult to find combination.”2 Over time, the industry has seen periodic transformations in the structure of its market , in the labor of newspaper workers, and in the relationship of the papers to their audience and community. In Detroit these historic changes formed the economic and cultural backdrop for the events leading to the 1995 strike. The American newspaper business took off in the nineteenth century, giving rise to the major actors and forms of organization that defined its identity. By the twentieth century, the industry had entered a phase of economic consolidation, on the one hand, and journalistic professionaliza- 26 The Broken Table tion, on the other. Toward the end of the century, however, the uneasy truce between these two trends was breaking down, a tension symbolized by the two largest newspaper chains of the time, Gannett and KnightRidder . In the 1980s, these two corporate giants would come together in the joint operating agreement (JOA) between the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS: INVENTING THE MARKET Newspaper markets are not born but made. As historian Paul Starr has shown, politics and public policy have always been central to the development ofAmerican news media, beyond the protections of the FirstAmendment .3 The 1792 Post Office Act gave newspapers special subsidies and privileges and reduced the cost of obtaining and distributing news across long distances, making it possible to reach subscribers deep in the country ’s interior. Publishers were freed from licenses, stamp duties, and taxes on paper, ink, and type, while government printing contracts, fees for legal notices, partisan sponsorship, and other patronage directly supported the nascent industry. More broadly, the extension of the franchise and the rise of the common school helped create an interested, literate reading public and a mass market for news.4 With the rise of Andrew Jackson and the Second Party System, newspapers emerged as zealous advocates of competing political parties and leading promoters of a vigorous public sphere. The early Federalist republic of letters, historian Mary Ryan writes, quickly became a democracy of print.5 Nationally, the number of newspapers grew from 376 in 1810 to around 900 by 1832. A prime example was the Detroit Free Press: founded as a weekly in 1831, within four years the Free Press became the first daily paper published in the Michigan Territory. With only a few hundred subscribers and almost no paid advertising, the Free Press initially relied on party support, income from the publication of official notices, and printing contracts from city, territorial, and state governments . Fiercely Democratic, the Free Press backed Jackson for president , championed local movements for statehood, and railed against Republicans and abolitionists in the antebellum era.6 Across the nation, urbanization and reductions in the cost of printing and paper made possible another kind of journalism by the 1830s, the “penny press.” The penny papers actively pursued commercial success and mass readership, using higher circulation rates to attract independent revenues from advertisers. Costing a fraction of traditional papers and hawked by newsboys on city streets, the penny press appealed to the The Industry 27 growing market of urban, white working-class men. The content of news shifted to attract the...