It was inevitable that some newspapers, and especially those that refrained from irresponsible tactics, would suffer circulation losses. One of these was The New York Times, which only recovered after it was acquired in 1896 by newspaper investor Adolph S. Ochs, who promoted responsible journalism and reestablished The New York Times as the city’s leading serious journal. The paper’s slogans, “All the news that’s fit to print” and “It will not soil the breakfast cloth,” indicated Ochs’s commitment to fair-minded news reporting.
By 1900 there were half a dozen well-known newspaper barons in the United States. Hearst, whose collections at one time ran to 42 papers, was the most acquisitive of the early owners. Another early chain-builder was Edward Scripps, who began purchasing newspapers in 1878. Scripps bought small, financially insecure newspapers and set them on their feet by installing capable young editors, who were given a share of the profits as an incentive to improve circulation. The editors were always urged “to serve that class of people and only that class of people from whom you cannot even hope to derive any other income than the one cent a day that they pay for your newspaper.” Scripps wanted his papers to be of genuine service to the public, and though he succeeded in making money from them his motive was never exclusively profit. But the commercial advantage of owning newspaper chains soon became obvious, as it allowed newsprint to be bought on favourable terms and syndicated articles to be used to the fullest. Scripps’s methods were adopted by his rivals and by newspaper proprietors in other countries as the idea of chain ownership spread. Inevitably, the profitable newspapers attracted outside investors whose motives were commercial, not journalistic. This new type of proprietor was exemplified by Frank A. Munsey, who bought and merged many newspapers between 1916 and 1924, including the Sun and the Herald in New York City. In describing Munsey and others like him, the American author and editor William Allen White wrote that he possessed “the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker.”
Commercial consolidation into larger publishing groups continued immediately after World War I, when the struggle for circulation intensified. First published in 1919, the New York Daily News was written to a ruthless recipe of sex and sensationalism by Joseph Medill Patterson, and it sparked off a war with Hearst’s Daily Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic, both launched in 1924. The Graphic closed in 1932, and the Mirror ceased publication in 1963, selling many of its feature columns and comics to the Daily News, which underwent several ownership changes before being bought by Mortimer B. Zuckerman in 1993. Takeovers often led to title mergers or the complete disappearance of titles. In 1931 the New York Morning, Evening, and Sunday World titles were bought by the Scripps-Howard chain; the morning and Sunday editions were dropped, and the Evening World was merged with the New York Evening Telegram, an action that suited Americans’ preference for afternoon papers at that time. Newspapers with extensive circulations could command the attention of the larger advertisers, and this reinforced the disappearance of smaller titles in favour of a few high-circulation papers.
One outcome of the new ownership pattern was the gradual disappearance of the old press baron, who, as editor-proprietor, had tended to combine the roles of professional editor and management executive. Even the editor was to suffer a loss of personal impact as fame was increasingly won by columnists—men and women who were given regular columns to express forceful points of view or divulge society secrets. Among the most important political columnists of the 1920s were David Lawrence of the United States News, Frank Kent of the Baltimore Sun, Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald-Tribune, and Walter Lippmann of the New York World. Such writers could gain considerable national followings when their columns or articles were syndicated by major chains. Great Britain
The British press was slower to emerge as a popular, sensational medium, but a major turning point came in 1855 when the stamp tax was abolished. This was preceded in 1853 by the abolition of the duty on advertisements, and the more liberal climate exposed a remarkable national appetite for newspapers of all kinds. The abolition of taxes and duties, including that on paper in 1861, brought down the prices of newspapers, and this alone was enough to create what were, for the time, very high circulations. By 1861 sales of the Daily Telegraph had risen to a daily average of 130,000, double that of The Times. Abolition of the tax on paper was said to have brought an additional £12,000 a year to the Telegraph. The Telegraph’s daily circulation exceeded 240,000 by 1877, then the highest in the world. The Telegraph, however, differed greatly from the more colourful New York papers. It was a worthy newspaper, more than half of it being taken up with reports of proceedings in Parliament, but its readers and those of The Times came almost exclusively from the growing mercantile middle class, for whom the two papers provided the writings of many of the best authors of the day at a comfortably affordable price. Journalistic independence was usually upheld, but as the party political hostility between William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli grew sharper, each paper became more partisan, a development that in turn stimulated sales.
Later in the century the British press began to adapt to the demand for less exacting reading matter. In 1888 the halfpenny evening Star was launched by the Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor. Aiming at a wider public than any previous newspaper, the Star incorporated short, lively news items of human interest in a bold, attractive display. The new paper also gave good racing tips, thus endearing it to a group of men who have always contributed substantially to the circulation of what are known in the United Kingdom as the “populars.” Another contemporary evening paper, the Pall Mall Gazette, adopted American tactics for some of its crusades. In a series of articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon”, W.T. Stead exposed the prostitution of young girls in London by himself procuring one. (Indeed as a result he served a term in jail.) This early example of investigative journalism—in which the reporter creates hard news stories by investigating (sometimes clandestinely and by direct experience from inside) illegal or scandalous activities—led to the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, which improved protection of minors. It also highlighted the power of the press to define what is unacceptable to society.
At the turn of the century, popular journalism came into its own in Britain with the rise of Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), who can be called the first of the British press barons both for his title and for his enduring influence on the press. During his lifetime he owned, at various times, the Daily Mail, the Mirror, The Times, and the Observer. As his first effort he launched a cheap weekly magazine in 1888, when he was only age 23. Using short sentences, short paragraphs, and short articles, the new style of editing was aimed at attracting a large following among those who had learned to read as a result of the 1870 Education Act that made school compulsory for all British children. In 1894 Harmsworth bought the Evening News, and by combining his editing style with some of the methods of American yellow journalism, he quadrupled its circulation within a year. In 1896 came Harmsworth’s main innovation, the Daily Mail, which within three years was selling more than 500,000 copies a day. This was more than twice the figure reached by any competing paper up to that time. The Daily Mail went on to sell more than one million copies a day during the South African (Boer) War (1899–1902).