C0M62704

INTRO TO MASS COMMUNICATION

WEEK 4: NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Outline the history and development of the newspaper and magazine industries
and as a mediums.
2. Identify how the organizational and economic nature of the contemporary
newspaper and magazine industries shapes its contents.
3. Describe the relationship between the newspaper & magazines and its readers.
4. Understand the impact of technology changes in newspaper and magazine
industries.
5. Apply key print media-reading media literacy skills, especially in interpreting the
relative placement of stories and use of photos.
BRIEF HISTORY OF
NEWSPAPERS

• The Earliest Newspapers - In Caesar’s

time, Rome had a newspaper, the
Acta Diurna (actions of the day).
• It was carved on a tablet and posted
on a wall after each meeting of the
Senate.
• Its circulation was one, and there is
no reliable measure of its total
readership.
• However, it does show that people
have always wanted to know what
was happening and that others have
helped them do so.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS

• 1620 - Corantos, one-page news sheets about specific events,

were printed in English in Holland and imported to England by
British booksellers who were eager to satisfy public demand for
information about Continental happenings
• Englishmen Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, and Nicholas Bourne
eventually began printing their own occasional news sheets, using
the same title for consecutive editions.
• They stopped publishing in 1641, the same year that regular,
daily accounts of local news started appearing in other news
sheets.
• These true forerunners of our daily newspaper were called
diurnals.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS
• 1660s the word newspaper had entered the English language
(Lepore, 2009).

• 1665 - Oxford Gazette, the

official voice of the Crown,
later renamed the London
Gazette, this journal used a
formula of foreign news,
official information, royal
proclamations, and local
news that became the model
for the first colonial
newspapers.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS

• Colonial newspapers - bookseller/print shops became the focal

point for the exchange of news and information
• It was at these establishments that broadsides (sometimes
referred to as broadsheets), single-sheet announcements or
accounts of events imported from England would be posted.
• 1690 - Boston bookseller/printer (and coffeehouse owner)
Benjamin Harris printed his own broadside, Publick Occurrences
Both Forreign and Domestick.
• Intended for continuous publication, the country’s first paper
lasted only one day; Harris had been critical of local and European
dignitaries, and he had also failed to obtain a license.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS

• 1704 - Boston News-Letter survived until the Revolution.

• The paper featured foreign news, reprints of articles from England,
government announcements, and shipping news.
• It was dull and expensive but nonetheless, it established the
newspaper in the colonies and received government subsidy
America’s first political cartoon—“Join, or Die,
BRIEF HISTORY OF
NEWSPAPERS
• 1734 - New York Weekly Journal publisher
John Peter Zenger was jailed for criticizing
that colony’s royal governor.

• The charge was seditious libel, and the verdict

was based not on the truth or falsehood of
the printed words but on whether they had
been printed.

• The criticisms had been published, so Zenger

was clearly guilty.

• Attorney Andrew Hamilton, argued to the jury,

“For the words themselves must be libelous,
that is, false, scandalous and seditious, or else
we are not guilty” (in Pusey, 2013).

• Zenger’s peers agreed, and he was freed and

the Zenger trial became a powerful symbol of
colonial newspaper independence from the
Crown.
Long before the first amendment was written, newspaper printer John Peter
Zenger tests the freedom of the press. He commits sedition against the
governor, but he is acquitted by a jury which favors free speech.
 1833 – Benjamin Day’s New York Sun was
the first of the penny papers, price of
paper was inexpensive to attract a large
readership, which could then be “sold” to
MODERN advertisers.
Day succeeded because he anticipated a
NEWSPAPERS new kind of reader.

Sun’s pages with police and court reports,

crime stories, entertainment news, and
human interest stories.

Newspaper’s motto, “The Sun shines for

all,” - there was little of the elite political
and business information that had
characterized earlier papers.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS

• People typically excluded from the social, cultural, and political

mainstream quickly saw the value of the mass newspaper.
• 1827 - Freedom’s Journal, The first African American newspaper,
published By John B. Russwurm and the Reverend Samuel Cornish
• 1847 - North Star, with the masthead slogan “Right is of no
Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are
all Brethren,” was the most influential African American newspaper
before the Civil War.
 1905 (after the Civil War) - Chicago Defender, the first
black paper to be a commercial success, not
subsidized by political and church groups
NEWSPAPERS
AS MEDIUM
Earned a nationwide circulation of more than
230,000.

May 15, 1917 - , declaration of “the Great Northern

Drive,” the Defender’s central editorial goal was to
encourage southern black people to move north.
 1828 - Native Americans found early voice in papers such as
the Cherokee Phoenix, Georgia,

NEWSPAPERS AS
MEDIUM Cherokee Rose Bud, which began operation 20 years later
in Oklahoma.

The rich tradition of the Native American newspaper is

maintained today around the country in publications such as
the Oglala Sioux Lakota Country Times and the Shoshone–
Bannock Sho-Ban News, as well as on the World Wide Web.

For example, the Cherokee Observer, the Navajo Times, and

News from Indian Country can all be found online.
 NEWSPAPERS AS MEDIUM

• Throughout this early period of the popularization of the

newspaper, numerous foreign-language dailies also began
operation, primarily in major cities in which immigrants tended to
settle.
• By 1880 there were more than 800 foreign-language newspapers
published across America in German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and
various Scandinavian languages (Sloan, Stovall, and Startt, 1993).
 Six large New York papers, Other domestic wire services,
including the Sun, the Herald, originally named for their
and the Tribune, decided to reliance on the telegraph,
pool efforts and share followed—the Associated
expenses collecting news from Press in 1900, the United Press
foreign ships docking at the in 1907, and the International
city’s harbor. News Service in 1909.

WIRE
SERVICES 1856

1848 1900

After determining rules of

membership and other
organizational issues, in 1856
the papers established the first
news-gathering (and
distribution) organization, the
New York Associated Press.
 YELLOW JOURNALISM

He brought a crusading,
Yellow journalism was a style activist style of coverage to
1883 - Hungarian immigrant
of newspaper reporting that numerous turn-of-the-century
Joseph Pulitzer bought the
emphasized sensationalism social problems—growing
troubled New York World.
over facts. slums, labor tensions, and
failing farms, to name a few.

The audience for his “new

journalism” was the “common
man,” and he succeeded in
reaching readers with light, Ad revenues and circulation
sensationalistic news coverage, figures exploded.
extensive use of illustrations, and
circulation-building stunts and
promotions.
YELLOW JOURNALISM

Yellow Kid, a popular cartoon character of the time,

yellow journalism was a study in excess—
sensational sex, crime, and disaster news; giant
headlines; heavy use of illustrations; and reliance
on cartoons and color.

It was successful at first, and other papers around

the country adopted all or part of its style.

Large headlines, big front-page pictures, extensive

use of photos and illustrations, and cartoons are
characteristic even of today’s best new
 NEWSPAPERS GROWTH

The years between the era of yellow journalism and the coming of
television were a time of remarkable growth in the development of
newspapers.

From 1910 to the beginning of World War II, daily newspaper

subscriptions doubled and ad revenues tripled.

1910 - 2,600 daily papers in the United States

 NEWSPAPERS GROWTH
1923 - the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued the “Canons of
Journalism and Statement of Principles” in an effort to restore order and
respectability after the yellow era.

The opening sentence of the Canons was, “The right of a newspaper to attract and
hold readers is restricted by nothing but considerations of public welfare.”

The wire services internationalized, United Press International started gathering

news from Japan in 1909 and was covering South America and Europe by 1921.

In response to the competition from radio and magazines for advertising dollars,
newspapers began consolidating into newspaper chains—papers in different cities
across the country owned by a single company.
 National Daily
newspapers

Metropolitan Dailies

TYPES OF Weeklies and Semi-

NEWSPAPERS Weeklies

Ethnic Press

Alternative Press
 The main reason we have the number and variety of
newspapers we do is that readers value them.

NEWSPAPERS AS
A second reason is newspapers are local -
ADVERTISING Supermarkets, car dealers, department stores, movie
MEDIUM theaters, and other local merchants who want to
announce a sale or offer a coupon or circular
automatically turn to the local paper.

A third reason is newspaper readers, regardless of

the platform on which they read, are attractive to
advertisers: they are likely to be more educated than
are nonreaders and have higher annual household
incomes.
 Loss of competition within the industry

TRENDS & Conglomeration: Hypercommercialism, erosion

of the firewall, and loss of mission
CONVERGENCE
IN
NEWSPAPERS
Convergence with the Internet

Evolution of newspaper readership -

Smartphones, Tablets, and e-Readers
 BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGAZINES

Mid 1700’s - Magazines were a favourite medium of the British

elite

1741 - The American Magazine, or a Monthly View of the Political

State of the British Colonies, followed by Benjamin Franklin’s
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, for All the British
Plantations in America.

Composed largely of reprinted British material, these publications

were expensive and aimed at the small number of literate
colonists.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGAZINES

Between 1741 and 1794, 45 new magazines appeared, although no more than
three were publishing at the same time.

Entrepreneurial printers hoped to attract educated, cultured, moneyed gentlemen

by copying the successful London magazines.

Even after the Revolutionary War, U.S. magazines remained clones of their British
forerunners.
 BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGAZINES

1821 - The Saturday Evening Post appeared & among other successful
early magazines were Harper’s (1850) and Atlantic Monthly (1857).

Additional factor in the success of the early magazines was the spread of
social movements such as abolitionism and labour reform.

These issues provided compelling content, and a boom in magazine

publishing began.

In 1825 there were 100 magazines in operation; 25 years later there were
600 & these early magazines were aimed at a literate elite interested in
short stories, poetry, social commentary, and essays.
MASS CIRCULATION OF
MAGAZINES
• Mass circulation popular magazines began to
prosper in the post–Civil War years, specifically
the women’s magazines
• Suffrage—women’s right to vote—was the social
movement that occupied its pages, but a good
deal of content could also be described as how-
to for homemakers.
• Advertisers, too, were eager to appear in the new
women’s magazines, hawking their brand-name
products.
• First published at this time are several magazines
still familiar today, for example Good
Housekeeping.
MASS CIRCULATION OF MAGAZINES

Postal Act of 1879 -

permitted mailing magazines
at cheaper second-class
Widespread literacy
postage rates, and the
contributed to mass
spread of the railroad, which
circulation as well.
carried people and
publications westward from
the East Coast.
 MASS CIRCULATION OF MAGAZINES

However, a circulation war erupted

between giants McClure’s, Munsey’s
Reduction in cost - At 35 cents,
Magazine, and The Saturday Evening
readers largely by the upper class.
Post & soon magazines were selling
for as little as 10 and 15 cents, which
brought them within reach of many
working people.

Increased potential in advertising -

read by a large, national audience and Magazines kept cover prices low to
circulation (rather than reputation) ensure the large readerships coveted
became the most important factor in by advertisers.
setting advertising rates.
 ERA OF SPECIALIZATION

All media have moved in

this direction in their
Magazines can’t The industry had hit on
efforts to attract an
compete with television the secret of success:
increasingly fragmented
and newpapers, they’re specialization and a
audience, but it was the
not published daily lifestyle orientation.
magazine industry that
began the trend.
 TRENDS & CONVERGENCE IN MAGAZINE
PUBLISHING

Online magazines

Evolution of readership - Smartphones, Tablets, and e-Readers

Custom magazines

Advertiser influence over magazine content

Summary

• Newspapers and Magazines are the two most

common forms of print media which not only
educates you about the recent issues, events
or happenings locally, nationally and
internationally, but they also keep you
updated with the latest fashion, trends,
technology, lifehack and so forth.
• Newspaper is the best source of clear, brief
and objective information to many people. On
the contrary, a magazine often stresses on
specific and peculiar topics and current issues,
which are of general interest.
 Further Reading

S, S. (2020, November 10). Difference Between Newspaper and Magazine (with

Comparison Chart) - Key Differences. Key Differences.
https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-newspaper-and-
magazine.html#:~:text=Newspaper%20is%20the%20best%20source,whi
ch%20are%20of%20general%20interest.