Rc 2.industrial.media

Editor's Notes

• #5 It’s six in the morning on November 29, 1814, and London’s Fleet Street is beginning to fill with the cacophony of commerce. But the rows of hand-pulled presses at The Times, London, hardly changed since Gutenberg, have for once stopped their creaking and rumbling. The printers have been standing idle, and they are wondering how the newspaper will be produced today. They were told to wait for important foreign news to arrive. Then at dawn, John Walter II, owner of The Times—a thin man with a beak-like nose and a long black coat—bursts into the pressroom and calls for the printers to gather around. He is holding up this morning’s issue of The Times—the same newspaper they had expected to be producing. Fearful glances are exchanged around the room. “The Times is already printed—by steam” he announces grandly. He passes the newspaper out to the printers, who regard the boss with anger and suspicion as he explains. Today’s The Times has been printed on a new kind of press designed by Friedrich Koenig, a mechanical engineer, he tells them. It was built in secret by Koenig’s men in a guarded warehouse down the street. It’s a tense moment. Workers all over England have been losing their jobs to the steam engine. Three years before, in the industrial cities north of London, the “Luddite” riots broke out when many thousands of textile workers were thrown out of work. Fifteen men were hung in York, and eight in Lancashire, for their roles in sabotaging the cotton mills. Walter warns against any Luddite rebellions in his shop. But he also says that, unlike the textile industry, The Times will stand by its workers. There will be no layoffs. In fact, the faster press will mean more work for everyone.
• #6 Steam presses and stereotyping created more profits for publishers in two ways: a) better economies of scale on the production side; and b) higher prices for advertising since messages reached more potential customers. Expanding circulation and rising advertising revenues meant that the newspaper could be sold for a lot less — as little as a penny per copy. And that, in turn, could mean more circulation and then more advertising.
• #7 Although the penny press system could have started in Britain with the introduction of the steam press, newspaper taxes held that development back. Four of New York’s emerging daily newspapers in the 1830s are remembered as prototypes of the penny press revolution: The Sun, the Herald, the Tribune and The New York Times. Only The Times survives in its original form today.
• #8 Benjamin Day (1810–1889), editor of the New York Sun, was trying to hang onto readers by publishing a fake scientific news item in 1835: “We were thrilled with astonishment to perceive four successive flocks of large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds, descend with a slow even motion from the cliffs on the western side, and alight upon the plain . . . They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orangoutang [sic], being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead . . . So far as we could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about on the summits of precipices.” Engraving printed in the New York Sun, Aug. 29, 1835. Library of Congress.
• #9 Responding to a young girl’s letter in 1897, New York Sun editor Francis P. Church (1839-1906) said “Yes” to the enduring spirit of childhood. The celebrated letter was part of a revival of the Christmas holiday tradition led by many other writers and by illustrator Thomas Nast, who here depicts Santa, caught by a child as he delivers presents, in 1892. Library of Congress. Church wrote: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished . . .There is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
• #10 Shocking cruelty and malevolent genius were the trademarks of James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald. An impoverished reporter at aged 40, characterized by grim determination, Bennett founded the Herald in 1835. He worked out of a cellar and struggled with bankruptcy for year before the Herald became one of the leading national newspaper of the 19th century. Success came because every day, the Herald served up a mix of robberies, rapes and murders from the criminal courts of New York. The only chance he had of dying an upright man “will be that of hanging perpendicularly from a rope,” said rival editor Benjamin Day. The Herald redefined what a newspaper was supposed to be, and Bennett sent reporters out to Wall Street, sports events and society affairs. He also set up bureaus in Washington, London and Paris. The Herald carried regular church news, but its editorial page attacked the Catholic Church, an institution reflecting the “darkness, folly and superstition of the tenth century,” Bennett said. Ostensibly a Catholic, Bennett even attacked Americans who “kiss the toe of every debauchee whom the College of Cardinals may elevate to the triple crown (the papacy).” Shortly afterwards he was excommunicated. That meant very little to Bennett. He once horsewhipped the editor of a rival newspaper in the streets, and many victims of his pen felt they had been similarly treated.
• #11 New York readers looking for something above crude sensationalism were relieved when Horace Greeley established the New York Tribune in 1841 with the idea of publishing a trustworthy and moral newspaper. Greeley was an eccentric man without much formal education, but his Tribune had a profound influence on American politics in the mid-nineteenth century. Greeley said he had “sat at the feet” of Hezekiah Niles, editor of the Baltimore-based Niles Weekly Register, whose view of the press was akin to that of a sacred trust. Greeley read every issue and absorbed many of Niles’ ideas about abolition of slavery, national economic development and fairness in news reporting.
• #12 New York was growing, and publishers like Greeley and Bennett were growing rich. But neither quite caught the spirit of Yankee pragmatism, being either too moralistic or too sensationalistic. So Henry Raymond and a partner had little trouble raising $70,000 and founding The New York Times in 1851, intending it to be a national newspaper of record. It was an immediate success.
• #13 The end of newspaper taxes in the mid 1850s opened the door for the British penny press newspapers, and leading the charge was the Daily Telegraph, established in 1855 by Joseph M. Levy. The Telegraph immediately confirmed its opponents’ worst fears about the penny press, featuring articles about crime, murder and curiosities modeled after the New York Herald, although somewhat muted to better suit British audiences.
• #14 In 1869, the Telegraph joined the New York Herald to back one of the best remembered stunt reporting sensations of the age, the search for Dr. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and explorer. Livingstone had been in Africa twice on British-financed expeditions to chart a navigable river into the interior. He had not been heard from for over six years; apparently his many letters never made it back to London. British journalist Henry Morton Stanley, working at the time for the Herald, proposed the search for Livingstone and, after two years, found him on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on October 27, 1871. He greeted him with the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
• #15 The history of the press is full of colorful characters, but few were as unusual and audacious as William Thomas Stead (1849–1912), editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. His promise to his readers was nothing short of Apocalyptic: “To secure the final overthrow of the Powers of Darkness in high places.”
• #16 The French press played a pivotal role in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, but the on-again off-again censorship of the post-Napoleonic period held back its development. Newspapers rose and fell as governments rose and fell, and as censorship rules were imposed or lifted. Technology transformed the French press as quickly as it has the American press, and the penny paper of France was called the presse _bon march_.
• #17 A major French innovation was the serialized novel, called the roman-feuilleton. Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo were early serialized novels. In Le Siecle.
• #18 On the morning of January 13, 1898, the daily newspaper L’aurore carried the famous headline in a banner across the front page: “J’Accuse . . . !” Emile Zola, one of the nation’s leading writers, accused ministers at the highest levels of government of sending an innocent Army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, to the notorious prison on Devil’s Island in order to cover up a miscarriage of justice. Dreyfus had been falsely convicted of treason and evidence of his connection to a real plot to spy for the German government was fabricated, Zola charged. The fact that Dreyfus was Jewish, and that anti-Semitism was rife in the Army, made him an ideal scapegoat. The affair was deeply divisive, with the church and conservatives on one side and liberals on the other.
• #19 The mid-nineteenth-century German press that Schurz and Marx tried to build was essentially more elite in character than in other nations; most German editors at the time had university degrees and many had doctorates. Most newspapers did not cater to popular tastes and mass audiences, but rather, were opinion journals containing partisan analysis of political trends.
• #20 Demand for democratic reforms broke out into revolutions across Europe in the spring of 1848. Here two boys, Ernst Zinna and Heinrich Glasewaldt, defend a barricade in Berlin. Illustration by Theodor Hosemann, 1848. The novelist Mór Jókai described the scene in Budapest: “Every one knows … what followed—how the human avalanche began to move, how it grew, and what speeches we made in the great square. But speech-making was not sufficient, we wanted to do something. The first thing to be done was to give practical application to the doctrine of a free press. We resolved to print the Twelve Articles of Pest, the Proclamation, and the "Talpra Magyar" without the consent of the censor. We turned up our sleeves and worked away at the hand-presses ourselves … Irinyi appeared at the window of the printing-office, for to get out of the door was a sheer impossibility. He held in his hands the first printed sheets from the free press. Ah, that scene! When the very first free sheets were distributed from hand to hand! I cannot describe it. "Freedom, freedom!" It was the first ray of a new and better era!... A free press! The first-fruit of the universal tree of knowledge of Paradise. What a tumult arose when they actually clutched that forbidden fruit in their hands.”
• #21 With a passion for his adopted country and a fiercely micro-managing style, Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was both adored and loathed.
• #22 Pulitzer’s editorial role was often that of a public scold, as in this Puck cartoon where he is giving orders to the world. Pulitzer also crusaded against racism. In a 1909 editorial, the World railed against President William Howard Taft’s decision not to appoint African Americans to federal positions in the South without the approval of Southern whites. “We cannot agree in drawing such a skin color or race line,” he said.
• #23  In this satirical cartoon, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are dressed in yellow baby gowns, symbolizing both yellow journalism and the “Yellow Kid” cartoon. They are also fighting over their roles in promoting the Spanish American War. William Barritt, Vim magazine, 1898. Library of Congress.  
• #24 Legend and truth are deeply mixed in the many accounts of press baron William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), the famed “yellow journalism” publisher whose career spanned the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. At its height in 1935, Hearst’s media empire included 28 newspapers read by 20 million people, as well as 13 magazines, eight radio stations and the International News Service.
• #25 Punch magazine takes a swipe at the yellow press. Unlike Pulitzer, Hearst had no ethical boundaries. He could be ruthless with people and dishonest in his approach to journalism, having reporters write fake news stories or plagiarizing the competition when it suited him.
• #26 Sleep was eluding star reporter Nelly Bly. It was 3 am on a Sunday night in 1888, and the next morning she would have to pitch a story idea to editors at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. “At last, tired and provoked at my slowness in finding a subject, something for the week's work, I thought fretfully: ‘I wish I was at the other end of the earth! … And why not?" the thought came: I need a vacation; why not take a trip around the world?" The idea was to beat the fictional record of Jules Verne’s character, Phileas Fogg, from the novel Around the World in 80 Days, published in 1873. At first, there were the usual objections. She was a vulnerable woman. She would have to carry too much luggage. It would take to long to get started. "I can start this minute," she insisted.
• #27 He called himself a “damned old crank,” and more than almost any other newspaper editor, Edward Wyllis Scripps (1854–1926) exemplified the free spirited industrial age of the press. His enormous size matched an oversized personality and his wild lifestyle matched his lack of formal education. Yet later, scientists would compare him with Aristotle and Voltaire for his innovations like the Oceanographic Institution and the Science News Service.
• #28 In 1896, Harmsworth started the London Daily Mail—and “struck a gold mine” with a circulation of 400,000 overnight. Londoners appreciated the same harmless but attention-getting tricks used in Answers. As historian Piers Brendon noted, the Daily Mail was amusing without being vulgar and its crime stories were exciting without being lurid