Tag Archives: journalism history

1970s newspaper wisdom

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In 1971 Har­vard Busi­ness School grad, Robert G. Mar­but, approached the Harte fam­ily who owned a Texas news­pa­per group, to ask if they’d back his pub­lish­ing ven­ture. They turned him down. Instead, they asked him to run the fam­ily busi­ness, Harte-Hanks. Mar­but took the com­pany pub­lic and in a year had taken it out of Texas and doubled its size to 27 papers.

Mar­but also brought in all the 1970s busi­ness school stuff you’d expect: cost con­trol, budget­ing, and plan­ning. And the language.

Mar­but knew what a news­pa­per was. It wasn’t ink, pages and prose, it was “a pack­age of het­ero­gen­eous inform­a­tion designed to appeal to a num­ber of mini-audiences, each made up of read­ers who share sim­ilar values.”

He was pretty clear about what a news­pa­per group was, too: “We con­sider ourselves inform­a­tion pro­viders for inform­a­tion con­sumers. This approach frees us to util­ize fully the tools of the con­sumer product mar­keter, provid­ing tailored products to meet unique inform­a­tional needs.”

Under Mar­but, Harte-Hanks papers became what For­bes magazine called “aggress­ive mar­ket­ing vehicles tailored for advertisers.”

In 1976 he com­mis­sioned a huge piece of mar­ket research called Young People and News­pa­pers: An Explor­at­ory Study, to look at why 18–24 year olds weren’t inter­ested in read­ing papers.

Mar­but was wor­ried about the future, and what tech­no­logy would mean for his product. “The fact that the same tech­no­logy will be used by media other than daily news­pa­pers will mean that oth­ers could enter the mar­ket­place for meet­ing inform­a­tion needs and encroach on the fran­chise of an estab­lished news­pa­per … new tech­no­logy will make it pos­sible for the con­sumer to get his needs met in a vari­ety of ways in the future, again set­ting the stage for con­tin­ued frag­ment­a­tion of media which could lead to fur­ther encroach­ment of the newspaper’s share of market.”

In 1997, Harte-Hanks sold its news­pa­per, TV and radio interests.

The first use of the word ‘Journalism’

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The first use of the word journ­al­ism is recor­ded in the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tion­ary like this:

1833 Westm. Rev. Jan. 195 (Review­ing a French work ‘Du Journ­al­isme’) ‘Journ­al­ism’ is a good name for the thing meant..A word was sadly wanted. Ibid. 196 The power of journ­al­ism is acknowledged..to be enorm­ous in France.

But the OED is wrong…
Here is The Quarterly Review from 1832:

‘The growth of every thing both in art and nature,’ says Hume, ‘at last checks itself.’ So it proved with Jac­obin­ism, which, when it obtained power, brought about its own destruc­tion by its excesses—so it will prove with Journ­al­ism, that fourth estate which has been described by one of its mem­bers as a power stronger than both the Chambers.

This is from The Met­ro­pol­itan, 1831:

The truth is, “Journ­al­ism” is favour­able to the rights of the people, and to the cor­rec­tion of abuses; there­fore is it an object of anim­os­ity to those who profit from mis­us­ing them…

The Mech­an­ics’ Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gaz­ette, 1831:

Pro­gress of Journ­al­ism.—The pro­por­tion which the num­ber of journ­als in each quarter of the world bears to its pop­u­la­tion is as follows:—In Asia there is one paper for every 14,000,000; in Africa, one for every 5,000,000; in Europe, one for every 106,000; in Amer­ica, one for every 40,000.

And this is from The Monthly Review, vol. VI, 1827:

He seems to be con­vinced, that the mor­bid eager­ness for the trans­it­ory pleas­ures which journ­al­ism, to make use of a French term, can only afford, is yield­ing to the domin­ion of a more healthy appet­ite, which demands whole­some and sub­stan­tial knowledge.

All that, care of Google Books. Scary new old world, isn’t it?

Journalism — serving your community

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Having been raised in what journ­al­istic cliché calls a “close knit com­munity,” I’m deeply sus­pi­cious of the glor­i­fic­a­tion of com­munit­ies in the media. Some of the closest are also some of the nastiest.

I take as my text an essay by the great Jessie Daniel Ames, called Edit­or­ial Treat­ment of Lynch­ings (1938).

In a sec­tion The Dilemma of Edit­ors, Ames writes:

Edit­ors are good cit­izens. As indi­vidu­als they con­demn lynch­ing. Lynch­ing gives the South the wrong kind of pub­li­city. It makes it a bit more dif­fi­cult to attract out­side cap­ital and to increase immig­ra­tion of the right people. The South wants all pos­sible “out­side” agen­cies with money to invest to invade its sec­tion, but this inva­sion must come on local terms, chief of which is that the nat­ive pop­u­la­tion must be allowed to handle their “pecu­liar situ­ation” in the tra­di­tional way. Thus must edit­ors sit on the sta­tion­ary horse while desir­ing to ride rap­idly into the sun­rise of pro­gress and prosperity.

But you have to look out­side of Ames’ work to find a really excor­i­at­ing example of a com­munity and its news­pa­per in cahoots.

The lynch­ing of Mat­thew Wil­li­ams in Salis­bury, Mary­land in 1931 was head­lined by a news­pa­per over a hun­dred miles away in Bal­timore: ‘SHORE MOB HANGS, BURNS NEGRO; Mob of 2,000 Hangs and Burns Accused Negro at Salis­bury; Over 2,000 Men and Women Applaud as Accused Killer Swings From Noose; 40 Gal­lons of Gas­ol­ine Poured on Vic­tim. The lynch­ing pro­duced one of H.L.Mencken’s most fam­ous and damning edit­or­i­als.

The local paper, the Salis­bury Times repor­ted the lynch­ing on its front page like this:

This paper is today omit­ting the details of the demon­stra­tion which occurred last night when Mat­thew Wil­li­ams Handy, con­fessed slayer of D.J. Elli­ott, was hanged in the court­house square, for the very obvi­ous reason that almost every reader of our paper has had an oppor­tun­ity to learn of them first hand from eye witnesses.

The facts which form the back­ground for the demon­stra­tion and the dir­ect causes are also well known and a repe­ti­tion of them would be super­flu­ous. The slay­ing of Mr Elli­ott was deplor­able as was also the mob scene.

Mencken noted how the Salis­bury Times:

went to almost incred­ible length of dis­miss­ing the atro­city as a ‘demon­stra­tion.’ Well, the word some­how fits. It was indeed a demon­stra­tion of what civil­iz­a­tion can come to in a region wherein there are no com­pet­ent police, little save a simian self-seeking in pub­lic office, no appar­ent intel­li­gence on the bench, and no cour­age and decency in the local press. Cer­tainly it would be irra­tional to ask for enlight­en­ment in com­munit­ies whose ideas are sup­plied by such pathetic sheets as the…Salis­bury Times.

Mencken’s stand, and the stand of his own paper cost it sub­scribers and advert­isers. In Salis­bury, and Maryland’s East­ern Shore, it was dis­missed as no more than met­ro­pol­itan dis­dain. Con­demning the lynch­ing wasn’t even pop­u­lar in Bal­timore itself, Mencken noted. Nor did Mencken’s inter­ven­tion mobil­ise sup­port for anti-lynching legis­la­tion in Congress.

The Salis­bury Times shut up shop in 1964. Another com­munity news­pa­per forced out of business…

Facts and opinion

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The fam­ous line of C.P.Scott, editor and the pro­pri­etor of the Guard­ian — “com­ment is free, but facts are sac­red” — is immor­tal­ised not just in the Guard­ian’s op-ed, but also in Sac­red­Facts, Richard Sam­brook’s blog.

Scott was in his sev­en­ties when he wrote the essay from which the line is taken, back in 1921. But the divi­sion between fact and opin­ion wasn’t accep­ted by every­one at the Guard­ian.

George Dibblee was for many years the busi­ness man­ager of the Guard­ian, whilst Scott edited it. In 1905, on the death of its then pro­pri­etor Edward Taylor, Dibblee was appoin­ted one of the paper’s trust­ees. Taylor had recom­men­ded the Guard­ian be sold to Scott for £10,000. Dibblee and his fel­low trust­ees shif­ted that price to £242,000. Per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, Dibblee left the Guard­ian when Scott bought it. Per­haps more sur­pris­ingly, he took a fel­low­ship at All Souls.

Dibblee used his time as an aca­demic to write a book on the press called simply The News­pa­per (1913). He argued that news and opin­ion were all but insep­ar­able, because opin­ion shaped a newspaper’s edit­or­ial agenda and pri­or­it­ies:

As far as the pub­lic is con­cerned, there is very little dis­tinc­tion made between the func­tion of news­pa­pers as news­gather­ers and their duties as pur­vey­ors of opin­ion. This arises from a very simple case. While news is nom­in­ally an imper­sonal thing, as a mat­ter of prac­tice it is far from being so. In obtain­ing it the fac­ulty of selec­tion is required in the highest degree by the news­gatherer or ‘story writer.’ Selec­tion again is strenu­ously required in determ­in­ing the com­pet­i­tion between one item of news and another. Finally the present­a­tion of news in words and para­graphs leaves a wide open­ing for indi­vidual pref­er­ences and inclin­a­tions. Thus it comes about, nat­ur­ally enough, that the same series of habits, which gov­ern the con­duct of avowed opin­ion in a news­pa­per, habits summed up briefly in the term, the policy of a news­pa­per, express them­selves, not so con­sciously but even more effect­ively, in its news columns.