Technology and the Trade Press

with the increasing availability of the media industries trade press on various digital platforms, we wanted to devote some space in our issue to discussions of technology in historical trade journals. We invited contributors who use the trade press in their own work to consider this important set of documents critically, then write an essay according to one of two models. They could write about an individual magazine, paying attention to its advertising and editorial concerns and coverage, as well as considering some research questions that the journal might help to answer. Alternatively, they could compose a more thematic piece on some more general aspect of the technical trade press either as an institution or as a source of historical evidence.

Their responses explore a number of intriguing topics, including the relationship between labor and technology and the status of the media trade press in the wider context of industrial journalism. We would like to thank all the contributors for their participation. Special thanks go to Andrea Comiskey, Eric Dienstfrey, and Heather Heckman for their help in coordinating this dossier.

• Exhibitors, Technology, and Industrial Journalism in The 1910s and 1920s
• Eric Hoyt (bio)

As the US film industry rapidly grew and transformed during the 1910s and 1920s, the field known as “industrial journalism” was engaging in its own period of expansion and redefinition. “The basic purpose of Industrial Journalism is to assist in the production and distribution of commodities,” wrote Horace M. Swetland in his 1923 textbook on the topic.¹ Through lectures, books, and organizational activities, Swetland and the nation’s other leading business publishers sought to legitimize their profession and argue for its importance to American industry. Swetland and his colleagues generally distinguished between three types of industrial periodicals: technical, class, and trade.² In this essay, I offer a brief overview of these three publication types as they apply to the motion picture industry. However, I focus on one area of overlap: technical sections that were embedded within or spun off from exhibitor-oriented trade papers. Most of the publications discussed below are digitally available at the Media History Digital Library (MHDL, http://mediahistoryproject.org).

Technical journals, according to Swetland, were “those serving production.”³ The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, American Cinematographer, and International Photographer offer three examples of technical journals that centered upon motion picture production. These journals emerged from craft and technical organizations that formed within the film industry. Publishing a journal was a means of disseminating technical knowledge, legitimizing the organization, and policing the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.⁴ For this reason, technical journals can tell us as much about the film industry as a community as they can about technological innovations.

Class publications were a somewhat amorphous category, but they generally spoke to a profession at large. Although film historians regularly refer to Variety, Billboard, the New York Clipper, and the New York Dramatic Mirror as “trade papers,” these publications in the 1910s and 1920s regarded themselves more as “class papers,” addressed to entertainment professionals. Although the papers differed in terms of their emphases and editorial voices, they shared certain common characteristics. They carried news items related to the theater (a popular new play in London, for instance), and they reviewed productions and new acts (taste, then and now, mattered to creative professionals). Additionally, all these papers contained classified advertising sections—Billboard’s was especially large—that connected managers with performers, performers with hotel rooms, and even the occasional theater for sale with a prospective buyer.

Finally, there was the category of trade paper. Although the term eventually became expansive enough to include a class paper like Variety, a “trade paper” in the 1910s and 1920s meant something more specific: a periodical focused on the distribution and merchandising sides of an industry. These were the publications that connected manufacturers with the industry’s jobbers (a term that usually referred to wholesalers or brokers) and retailers. The Dry Goods Economist, for example, informed its readership about fabrics and other goods for sale, changing trends in women’s fashion, the threat of taxes and other policies, and the commodity markets for cotton...