It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
During the years 1870 to 1900, daily newspapers quadrupled in number from 489 to 1,967. Circulation (aggregated) rose from 2.6 million to 15 million copies. Weeklies grew from approximately 4,000 to 12,000 in number, mostly in rural areas.
The US population doubled during that period. The enormous growth of publications signaled something else going on: as Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. called it "the rise of the city". And that condition was accelerated principally due to mechanization, industrialism and a greatly expanded communications network that included:
- Widespread use of electricity fueling industry and light bulbs (helps in the convenience to read).
- Invention of the telephone by Bell (reached one phone per 100 households by 1900) and intercity lines covered the country.
- Western Union quadrupled its telegraph lines between 1880 and 1900.
- Railroads expanded its miles of track from 93,000 to 193,000 miles.
- And probably most important for publications, the federal postal service's expansion of services combined with the Postal Act of 1885 (provided a 1-cent-a-pound rate for newspapers and magazines) paved the way for low-cost delivery of publications.
- Introduction of the typewriter and adding machine facilitated the faster pace needed to handle the complexity of correspondence and record keeping.
The socio-economic life of the US greatly changed and thus brought incredible growth and opportunity for journalism, which was seized by the publishing world.
As an example, Joseph Pulitzer's New York enterprise (NY World in the mid-1890's) showed a $10 million valuation and $1 million net profit. Translated into 2005 dollars as a percent of GDP, that's $8.2 billion and considering that the World was just operating in the NY market, it makes Google look like retail shoe store. As the winds of change would have it, even from that lofty perch the World was defunct by the 1930's.
Newspaper and magazine share of market for ad dollars decreased by nearly 36% (from 1935 to 1980) after the introduction of radio and television. The fact that newspapers remained strong profit centers reflected the rapid growth in advertising expenditures that outstripped their loss of market share.
Newspapers have been profit harvesting for the past thirty years. That practice is over and the plight of the Inquirer and Daily News (as well as many other newspapers) is emblematic of that.
Socio-economic change similar in scope to the latter part of the 19th century is upon us again. Print publishing is, after all, a manufacturing enterprise and prospered during the industrial evolution as a result. Anyone foolish enough to buy a newspaper today with the notion that the profit harvesting will continue or that you can tweak the product to meet the socio-economic challenges of this period will suffer great disappointment.
The market share for printed products in their current form will diminish greatly over the next decade. Again, technology merely facilitates and influences the socio-economic trends and is not the cause. Newspapers have lost touch with their readers and failed to represent the context of a complex society within which news reporting must operate. Print journalists can restore it insofar as they relinquish their bias for the format and embrace the call of society for context and meaning and deliver it in the ways available to them.
Comments