The most important trend in journalism in the period between 1900 and 1930 was the maturing of what was called “the new journalism” or, more critically, “yellow journalism.” At a time when newspapers became large businesses, owners and editors sought new ways to attract the reading public and to capture subscribers from their competitors. They sought the profits not only from increased subscriptions but also from ADVERTISING revenues based on circulation. City newspapers like the New York World and the San Francisco Chronicle used innovative newspaper formats that relied on larger headlines, more graphics, and comic strips with colored ink to attract readers. Sensationalist reporting on murders, scandals, and campaigns drew new groups of subscribers. Working-class men and women, especially immigrants with limited English, became devoted followers of the major city dailies, which used bold print, plentiful illustration, and clear language to convey the news.
The Progressive Era was the Age of the Reporter. Previously newspapers had published largely unsigned articles; even editorial matters were often the anonymous voice of the owner/editor or that of a columnist using a pen name. During the 1890s, the journalistic wars between newspaper giants Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst gave new weight to the personality of the star reporter. One new practice was that of stunt reporting. Posing as mental patients, workers, and band members, stunt reporters investigated government offices, factories, asylums, and prisons. Hundreds of newspapers around the country followed this lead and employed reporters to investigate conditions in their cities. Stunt journalism helped to emphasize the individual reporter at work while routine reporting required a team effort. Writing up a single murder investigation could take up to eight writers and editors, each of whom specialized in their work.
In contrast to sensational news stories were the new standards of objectivity, with which New York Times editor Adolph Ochs was associated. Directing his paper at an educated middle-class audience, he defined journalism differently from his mass circulation rivals, the New York World and the New York Journal. “Facts” rather than “stories” were the key. Ochs also altered the newspaper’s appearance and expanded wireless service. Reinvestment of profits into new buildings, state-of-the-art presses, and professional staff placed the Times at the forefront of newspaper journalism. From 1896, when Ochs took over the newspaper, to 1921, when he retired, the circulation of the New York Times increased from 100,000 to 330,000 daily and 500,000 Sunday readers.
The demand for investigative reporting to bolster newspaper circulation gave rise to another development. In the context of PROGRESSIVISM, mass circulation newspapers began conducting their own investigations of private and public misdeeds. In 1905, seeking to launch yet another challenge against its rivals, the New York World began to investigate the Equitable Life Insurance Society. The ensuing public furor over the ways in which insurance companies “gambled” with their shareholders’ funds spiraled into a major state investigation and then state regulation of the industry. Not to be outdone, Hearst’s Journal American directed its attention to a new domestic agenda. Charging that “criminal trusts” were undermining democracy, Hearst’s editorial page showed its colors in attacking big business and urging the adoption of a graduated income tax, public ownership of utilities, DIRECT ELECTION OF SENATORS, and improvement of the public schools. At the same time, Hearst expanded his empire with the acquisition of newspapers in major cities. By 1930, his claim to be the “people’s champion” echoed in 26 daily newspapers and 17 Sunday newspapers in 28 cities.
The investigative efforts of big city dailies also inspired a new generation of journalists. Called MUCKRAKERS, the reporters took on a range of social and political problems as the target for investigation. The central themes of their work were the growing concentration of corporate wealth, political corruption, and the deplorable conditions of poverty and disease in the new industrial society—leitmotifs for both the new journalism and progressive reform as a whole. Investigative reporting soon spread to mass-market magazines like McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s, which already had expanded their circulation in the 1890s. By 1900, their expanded subscriber base ensured that the “literature of exposure” had a wide audience. Even the stalwart Ladies’ Home Journal got in on the act by attacking the patent medicine trade. Talented muckraking writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and UPTON SINCLAIR became household names. Investigating big city bosses, conditions in meatpacking plants, and corporate monopolies, the muckrakers built support for progressive reform. At the same time, the magazines for which they wrote saw subscriptions increase substantially.
The new environment of newspaper and magazine publishing opened the door for qualitative changes. Newspapers became big business in the period, and their profits encouraged the founding of many new city and country newspapers. In the decade between 1900 and 1910, the number of dailies in the United States increased from, 1,967 to 2,600. There were 14,000 general circulation weeklies. The new business of advertising stimulated the expansion of newspapers across the country. Between 1915 and 1929, advertising revenues nearly tripled from $275 million to $800 million annually. Revenues often were reinvested in the industry as newspapers and journals acquired highspeed and color presses, typesetting machines, and engraving plants, all of which required new infusions of capital. Competitive pressure from city dailies and standardization of news through services like the United Press Association, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, United Features, and Science Service Syndicate cost many country weeklies their subscriber base.
In smaller industrial cities, Edward W. Scripps founded a new chain of low-priced afternoon newspapers designed for the mass of readers. Beginning with the St. Louis Chronicle, Scripps invested small sums of capital to acquire local newspapers such as the Detroit News, Cleveland Press, and Cincinnati Post, extending the chain to 14 papers by 1911. The newspapers were, for the most part, well written in simple but direct prose. Small in size, they printed short news and human interest stories and local reform crusades. Dependent on circulation revenue and thus on general reader support, Scripps embraced a progressive agenda of support for public ownership of utilities and urban reform; he also backed labor unions. By the 1920s, the Scripps-Howard chain had become one of the largest in the country.
The advent of World War I had a tremendous impact on journalism in the United States and abroad. Not surprisingly, the war became a primary focus for newspaper coverage even before the United States entered the war. Wartime government censorship, paper rationing, and taxes fundamentally changed the political economy of newspaper and journal publishing. First, major newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News, the New York Times, and the New York Sun created news services and established European bureaus to cover the war. At the front line, reporters were confronted with severe restrictions on their access to military information, which often was released only as official communiques from government offices. They were largely restricted to feature stories from the frontlines, and even those stories, sent by either wireless or mail, faced government censors. Further, the War Revenue Act of 1917 and the Trading with the Enemy Act of the same year adversely affected newspapers and journals by introducing new costs and restrictions. The War Revenue Act raised postal rates every year for four years beginning in July 1918. The consequence of raising the rates was to undermine the financial base of small newspapers and to shift delivery and distribution of news out of the postal service. The Trading with the Enemy Act was somewhat more insidious. It required all foreign-language periodicals to translate their materials and submit them to a censor before publication. Hundreds of journals went out of print as a result. The same act allowed the postal inspector to refuse mailing permits to journals that voiced opposition to American intervention in the war or otherwise published radical sentiments. Finally, wartime inflation and escalating prices on paper, ink, linotype metal, and machinery put many publications out of business. The cost of paper alone tripled in the years between 1916 and 1921.
The economic pressures of the war and the suppression of foreign language newspapers furthered the movement toward consolidation of newspapers in the 1920s. The number of newspapers had begun to decline from its peak of 2,600 in 1910 to 2,042 in 1920 and 1,942 in 1930, a net loss of 258 newspapers. In the four years after World War I, more than 100 dailies were lost. At the same time, however, newspapers flourished in the more than 70 percent of cities and 80 percent of small towns that had a single newspaper.
Circulation grew from 27.5 million in 1910 to 40 million in 1930.
In the arena of magazine publishing, there were similar stories. By 1900, there were over 3,500 magazines read by 65 million readers. The real growth in magazine readership, however, was still to come. In the 1920s, new mass-market magazines captured the readership of older dime novels. These magazines focused on real-life stories and confessional articles such as “What I Told My Daughter the Night before Her Marriage,” “Indolent Kisses,” and “The Confessions of a Chorus Girl.” The increasing popularity of the movies encouraged star journals as well. True Confessions, Western Stories, and Detective Story drew a huge readership. True Story, which Bernarr Macfadden began publishing in 1919, had more than 300,000 readers by 1923. In 1924, the number rose to 828,000 and to almost two million in 1926. Other magazines in such new areas as muscle-building (Macfad-den’s Physical Culture and Health and Body) opened the door for ever greater specialization. There was a corresponding move for magazine consolidation as well.
Magazine publishers also helped introduce tabloid journalism to New York City. Modeled on the London Daily Mirror, newspapers such as Macfadden’s Daily Graphic, the Daily Mirror, and the New York Daily News began in 1920 to compete with older, more established newspapers. Their small size made them easier to read on crowded streetcars, but it was their news content that had a mass appeal. Instigating a new wave of sensationalist reporting called both “jazz” and “gutter” journalism, the Daily Graphic tapped such society scandals as the Fatty Arbuckle murder trial and the Kip Rhinelander interracial divorce case. Their graphic coverage of sex and crime scandals provoked the wrath of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which brought Macfadden and his editor, Emile Gauveau, into court. Tabloids also directed new attention to Hollywood and sports celebrities, such as Babe Ruth and Knute Rockne. Circulation increased from 400,000 in 1922 to nearly a million readers in 1925. At the same time, however, the failure of the tabloids to attract sufficient advertising revenue caused the Mirror and the Graphic to go out of print in the 1930s; only the Daily News survived.
The emergence of radio brought journalism to a new medium. Although radio stations were still small and had a limited audience, radio introduced amateur news coverage of elections as early as 1916. In 1920, stations KDKA in East Pittsburgh and WWJ in Detroit broadcast the national election returns. Regular news coverage was introduced in New York on stations WNYC and WEAR Large city newspapers invested in the new medium and acquired stations to broadcast coverage derived from their print reports. Despite initial protest, the Associated Press and the United Press formalized the use of news services on radio by creating two daily broadcast reports in 1928. This development coincided with the creation of national radio networks to distribute news and sports coverage. NBC emerged in 1926, and CBS in 1928. Throughout the period, there was at least the urge to distinguish radio news, which presumed equal access and neutrality, from the partisanship of newspaper reporting. The Radio Act of 1927, however, brought little regulation to news programs, and news stories continued to focus on political reporting that narrowly covered the two major political parties at their party conventions and national political addresses.
Despite the growth of radio news, mass-circulation newspapers reached new heights in 1930. The Hearst newspaper chain, which had begun modestly with two major city dailies, now included 26 dailies and 17 Sunday newspapers in 28 cities. The advent of radio broadcast news, however, suggested that there was a qualitatively different future ahead. Broadcast journalism on the radio and, within a few decades, on television began to supplement and then dominate how average citizens learned the news of their community, country, and world. The medium of broadcasting altered fundamentally the subject and approach of journalism and the definition of what was newsworthy.
See also literature; radical and labor press; Rhinelander case.
Further reading: Gerald Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Thomas Leonard, The Power of the Press; The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frank L. Mott, American Journalism; A History, 1690-1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
World History
