The Urbanization of American Journalism

David Paul Nord

Kind Sir

I hope you will not think me bold, or rude, in thus addressing you, and asking a great favour of you.  But as a drowning man grasps at a straw, so a person in trouble seeks a helping hand.  I will state my case as briefly as possible.  My Husband has lain upon a sick bed, since the eleventh of March, and there seems to be no change for the better, and I do not think he can get up again, yet he may hold out into next month, and I hate to have him sent away, but if I cannot make up the rent I will have to.  Now what I wanted to ask of you is this, could you let me know of some person, who could let me have twenty dollars.  I will give them a mortgage on my sewing machine, or any thing I have, and I will pay it back just as soon as I can get to work. . . .  God knows I hate to do this, but I don’t know which way to turn, and I knew you had a heart, that would lend a listening ear, as you are ever ready to defend the laborer, and may God make your noble paper still more prosperous. . . .  Hoping you will pardon my intrusion on your time, and patience, I remain 
Yours Respectfully, 
Mrs. M.J. Hawley

Scenes of despair were commonplace in nineteenth-century American cities.  City folk, especially newcomers, routinely found themselves alone and isolated, cut off from traditional support networks in kin and village.  In the impersonal environment of the modern metropolis, they had to create new forms of community life.  They had to seek aid from new sources.  Some turned to charitable associations, some to fraternal lodges and mutual aid societies, some to churches, some to government.  Mrs. Hawley turned to a newspaper. 

Why a newspaper?  Before the mid-to-late nineteenth century, no one would have supposed that a newspaper was the place to go in time of private trouble.  No one would have thought to address an editor as if he were a friend in time of need.  This was something new.  Mrs. Hawley’s plea—and it is one of many preserved in the manuscript  collections of Columbia University—marks, in its modest way, a great transformation in urban journalism in nineteenth-century America.  That transformation—which I call the urbanization of American journalism—is the subject of this essay. The urbanization of American journalism involved a coming to terms with modern city life.  It was a gradual change, but three rough stages can be discerned in it.  In the first stage, newspapers of the late eighteenth century began to treat local political and commercial life as prime news.  In the second stage, the so-called “penny papers” of the mid-nineteenth century greatly expanded their news nets to take in new forms of social and cultural news in the city and, in the process, to gain new readers.  In the third stage, newspapers began to promote a new ethos of urbanism.  In a sense, these third-stage papers were the first genuinely urban mass media in America.  They were the first to recognize that the rise of the modern city had radically changed the nature of community life.  They were the first to question the ideology of laissez-faire, of the private city, and to offer in its stead a vision of modern public life and urban community.

The newspaper Mrs. Hawley addressed was the New York World, and its proprietor was Joseph Pulitzer, the most successful and celebrated of the third-stage editors.  But though Pulitzer perfected the modern urban newspaper in America’s largest city, he did not invent it.  He found the idea in the Midwest.  It was in the new industrial cities of America’s heartland—Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis—that modern urban journalism was born.

The great cities of the Midwest were largely private property, private cities.  Their reason for being was entirely economic.  They were marketplaces.  People came to them to pursue their own private fortunes, whether million-dollar deals or dollar-a-day jobs.  Money was the measure of success, and everything was for sale.  Urban land was quintessentially private property, and the marketplace decided its use.  Great cities grew, unplanned and uncoordinated, from the choices and actions of a hundred-thousand separate decision-makers.  The result was an urban maelstrom of individualism and laissez-faire, of disorder and diversity. 

The metropolitan press of mid-century—the second-stage urban newspapers—shared the values of the private city.  By the 1870s, the leading metropolitan dailies were almost uniformly committed to the business values of the age of laissez-faire.  In Chicago, for example, this was true of self-proclaimed “businessmen’s papers,” such as the Chicago Tribune and Inter Ocean; it was also true of more popular newspapers such as the Chicago Times.  Though the Times brimmed with stories of sex, crime, and violence designed to appeal to the working classes, it was also unfailingly loyal to the business culture and to the ideology of laissez-faire.  The Times worshipped the “laws of political economy” and denounced those who would tamper with them, whether through government “paternalism,” business monopoly, or labor unionism.  On labor issues, this self-styled paper of the people declared that “no human contrivance can ever alter the principle that underlies the relation of labor to capital, even as no statute can modify the motions of the planets or control the ocean tides.” 

These papers also mirrored the disorder and diversity of the private city.  Indeed, diversity was the hallmark of the second-stage of the urbanization of American journalism.  The “penny papers” of the 1830s and ’40s aggressively expanded their readerships by expanding the range of the news.  The newspaper smorgasbord now so familiar to us—politics, business, crime, sports, society, religion, humor—was first laid out in these popular urban newspapers of mid-century.  As these papers grew in physical size as well as circulation, their content grew ever more eclectic.  By the 1870s, the typical metro newspaper was an incredible melange of miscellany.  Some stories were covered at length, but many others were handled in single paragraphs, jumbled into columns headed “The Latest News,” or “By Atlantic Telegraph,” or “Things from New York.”  Whatever could be written in the form of a brief statement of fact could make the paper.  From Washington came lists of bills, contracts, court dockets, appropriations, resolutions, proceedings, minutes, proclamations, and appointments.  Local government news was the same, with lists of ordinances, remonstrances, transferals, tax receipts, and commitments thrown in as well.  And anything that arrived by telegraph was automatically declared “news” and shoehorned into the paper. The Chicago Times, the most popular paper in that city in the 1870s, provides a wonderful window on this journalistic principle of “infinite variety,” as Times proprietor Wilbur Storey called it.  The Times covered the major stories, such as the Grant administration scandals, at great length and in fine detail, frequently with long verbatim transcripts of legal proceedings, legislative debates, speeches, and letters.  But the paper was also filled with column after column of tiny stories, under standing heads such as “Slices of News,”  “News Nebulae,” and “Local Skimmings.”  Counting all of these little unconnected items along with the scores of longer stories, it was not uncommon for an eight-page paper in the 1870s to contain more than a thousand separate bits of news! 

The “News Nebulae” column suggests the nature of this approach to news.  One of these columns, stuffed with Indiana and Iowa news, begins: 

They have a chain gang in Fort Wayne. 
Terre Haute is going to have a soup house. 
An Indiana man has 17,000 cat skins for sale. 
Here comes Greencastle, Ind., with the small pox. 
The crusaders of Keokuk will soon commence street work.

This strange randomness—the principle of “infinite variety”—did not develop accidentally; it reflected the social and economic philosophies of these newspapers.  On their editorial pages and in their business practices, these papers embraced and promoted private property, free enterprise, and the clockwork beauty of the marketplace.  The Chicago Times is an especially vivid example.  For the Times, the “city” was the individual people in it, not self-styled civic or philanthropic organizations and certainly not the government.  Times editor Wilbur Storey believed that the purpose of government should be solely to protect liberty and property at the least cost.  Storey argued that even the police, fire, and public works departments and the public schools could be abolished and replaced by private contractors.  In 1876, he urged that the municipality be fragmented into hundred of small subdivisions, each with its own “New England town meeting” of self-interested taxpayers.  These many meetings of property owners could contract for their own police, fire, and public works.  Such a decentralized system would make government directly responsible to the individual taxpayers, the “owners” of Chicago.  It would allow each citizen to live his own private life, in but not of the metropolis. 

Few newspapers were as fervent in their individualism as the Chicago Times of 1876, but many shared the Times’s basic understanding of economic life and the nature of cities.  These papers believed that cities were marketplaces where individuals must make their own way.  The news principle of “infinite variety” was the principle of the free market.  These newspapers were themselves the kind of marketplace that their proprietors loved, filled with unlimited choice.  Their function was to serve many individual, private interests.  They wanted all the news, as they frequently put it.  Then the readers, in all their unpredictable individualism, could choose. 

The big city newspaper of the 1870s, then, was a living metaphor of the nineteenth-century city.  Like the city, the newspaper had a structure that seemed to reflect order and symmetry.  The column rules, the routine classifications of news, and the use of standing headlines resembled the grid-like pattern of urban geography and the differentiation and specialization of land and labor.  But in both cases, these patterns masked a profound chaos.  A closer look reveals a kind of social randomness, bred of obsession with individual private lives.  The news content of the Chicago Times and other major urban newspapers of the 1870s was as diverse, fragmented, disorganized, and bewildering as life in the cities they served.

The chief problem in the late-nineteenth-century cities was that urbanization greatly intensified what economists would call the external diseconomies of industrialization.  That is, the negative byproducts of industry were especially troublesome in the close quarters of the modern city.  The decision to dump sewage into the local river may be the correct decision from a private business point of view.  If one person or firm does it, no harm is done; the diseconomies are negligible.  Similarly, a single chimney does not pollute the air.  But rational private decisions can produce a social nightmare when multiplied by a thousand or a hundred-thousand.  In the close confines of the nineteenth-century industrial city, the workings of rational private enterprise transformed the river into a festering sewer and the air into a black pall that hid the sun. 

The industrial city also found itself in need of services that private enterprise could not provide.  Police, fire protection, paved streets, sewers, health services, water supply, parks and open spaces—all were increasingly necessary but increasingly expensive as the city grew larger.  Most public works remained undone.  Some so-called “public utilities,” such as street railways, lighting gas, and electricity, were supplied by private enterprise.  But these utilities turned out to be natural monopolies that, without some sort of public guidance, operated for narrow private rather than general public ends.  In general in the private city, if the marketplace could not do it, it could not be done. 

Thus, urbanization aggravated the central tension of the liberal state.  Classic liberal theory decreed that each individual should be free to control his life, liberty, and property as he saw fit, so long as his actions did not trench upon the rights of others.  In the city, however, private lives were thrust together by circumstance, and private actions increasingly did encroach upon the welfare of others.  Furthermore, the striking inequality of wealth in cities meant that many people had little control over life, liberty, or property in any case.  If the industrial city was the harbinger of the future of America, some people began to doubt the moral and economic efficacy of laissez-faire and to urge instead a new public spirit, a community spirit, for the modern city.  This spirit was inspired less by a nostalgic longing for the civic virtue of the republican eighteenth century than by a fear of the very tangible problems of the capitalistic, individualistic nineteenth.  This was urban community, forced by the imperatives of modern urban life. 

Newspapers, it turned out, were early proponents of this new ethos of urban community, despite their traditional deference to the ideology of private property and laissez-faire.  Some newspapers, beginning in the 1870s, became so impressed by the interdependencies of urban life that they backed into an almost radical understanding of private property and of its rights and obligations in the modern city.  “Backed into” is the appropriate term here, for none of these papers espoused a self-conscious radicalism but rather they all professed the standard business values of the day.  They were moved, haltingly and hesitantly, away from the doctrines of laissez-faire by what they came to believe were the practical necessities of modern urban life.  These newspapers tended to be small afternoon dailies that circulated mainly within the city limits.  Perhaps the first of these new urban papers was the Detroit Evening News, founded in 1873 by James E. Scripps.  But the chief prototype of this new genre in journalism was the Chicago Daily News.

Though it began rather crudely in December 1875, the Chicago Daily News quickly caught on.  By the 1880s, it had passed the Tribune and Times to become the most popular newspaper in the city, with a circulation more than 100,000.  Circulation hit 200,000 by 1895, making the Daily News the first medium of mass communication in Chicago.

The Chicago Daily News was a newspaper quite unlike the Times or the Tribune.  It was a penny paper, a small-format, four-page sheet.  In appearance alone, it was strikingly different.  Everything was on a smaller scale:  smaller pages, fewer stories, and fewer departments; everything tightly edited and drastically condensed.  But, in a more subtle sense, its philosophy was as different as its look.  Of course, the Daily News was a business enterprise, and its enterprising founders—Melville Stone and Victor Lawson—were businessmen who shared many of the business values of the Times’s Wilbur Storey or the Tribune’s Joseph Medill.  The Daily News also reflected the social values of the dominant, Protestant, native-born elites of Chicago.  Yet from the start, the paper promoted an urban ethos much less dominated by rigid notions of private property and individualism.  In both editorial philosophy and journalistic technique, the Chicago Daily News was a quintessentially urban newspaper, an activist portrayer and promoter of public life and urban community. 

From the beginning, the editorial philosophy of the Daily News was much more attuned to the idea of interdependence than to the notion of individualism.  As a director of relief efforts after the Chicago Fire of 1871, Daily News editor Melville Stone was much impressed by the commonality of interest among residents of a large city.  In October, 1876, on the fifth anniversary of the Fire, he reminded Chicagoans of how they had all been left homeless and destitute, rich and poor alike.  Now that the city was prosperous again, the rich must not forget the poor and the sick, for all must rise together as all had stood together five years before.  Stone, in effect, had accepted in broad outline the idea that property rights were social—a view which he had not fashioned for himself through study and reflection, but one which had been forged for him in the Fire of 1871. 

Because of this belief in the interdependent nature of society, the Daily News was much less inclined than most papers of the time to lay the blame for social problems upon the heads of individual people.  Stone argued that the poor were poor because of hard times; prostitutes were prostitutes because they could find no honest work; bad boys were bad because of poor nurture in the schools and churches.  Rarely did the Daily News blame individuals.  With such a view of the power of environment and community over individual, it is not surprising that the Daily News was a strong advocate of charity.  The paper urged the creation of all sorts of philanthropic organizations, including shelters for prostitutes and homeless waifs, public baths, soup kitchens, and unemployment relief agencies.  Almost always, interdependence was the key idea. 

The Daily News also urged formal public action through government.  Stone was no socialist, in an ideological sense; and like other editors, he complained about high  taxes and government corruption.  But most of the time, the Daily News advocated increased government intervention in business and in urban life.  The paper demanded sweeping government regulation of business, large-scale public works, and expanded human services.  In a remarkable editorial during its first month of existence, the Daily News even called upon the city to provide a job to every person who needed one.  Stone believed that the community owed its most unfortunate members help in time of need, for their misfortune was no fault of their own and was the community’s misfortune as well.  While the Times was counseling the unemployed to get out of town, the Daily News was urging the town to take them in.  While the Times was calling for the dismantling of city government, the Daily News was urging more government enterprise and more government regulation as the only way to make life livable in a modern city. 

If its editorial philosophy set the Daily News apart from the other leading newspapers of Chicago and elsewhere, its news policy was just as different.  In a prospectus the first day of publication, Stone promised potential readers a compact newspaper that would cover a variety of news, but without the “never-ending miscellany” of other Chicago papers.  He said his philosophy of editing was to edit, rather than to print “all the news” in the custom of popular newspapers of the day.  Certainly the Daily News carried a wide variety of material, and the term “miscellany” sometimes applied.  But Stone also hoped to focus the attention of readers on a single, key story.  In other words, his news philosophy, like his philosophy of urban life, was not to cater to the myriad interests of a complex private city, but to seek the common interest. 

Other newspapers in other major cities soon developed along the same lines as the Chicago Daily News.  Perhaps the most important were the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Cleveland Press which launched the careers of Joseph Pulitzer and E.W. Scripps, two publishers who were highly influential in the growth of the new urban press. 

Pulitzer was a liberal Republican, and his Post-Dispatch reflected the standard business values of the age.  Though inspired by the Chicago Daily News, Pulitzer guided the Post-Dispatch on a somewhat more conservative course.  Yet from the start, the Post-Dispatch was concerned with the overall quality of life in St. Louis, and Pulitzer soon found himself backing into support for some very anti-laissez-faire policies, such as railroad and utility regulation, increased public works, and other reforms that called for an activist city government.  By the time Pulitzer invaded New York in 1883, he had come a long way in his understanding of what modern urban life meant for the rights of private property.  From the start, Pulitzer’s New York World recognized the social obligations of property.  Though Pulitzer’s own views on these matters were uncertain, the platform of the World was succinct and to the point: 

1. Tax luxuries.
2. Tax inheritances.
3. Tax large incomes.
4. Tax monopolies.
5. Tax privileged corporations.

The ideas propounded by the proprietors of the new urban press were, in some ways, genuinely radical.  But radical change was not their goal; their goal was to sell newspapers and advertisements.  They never meant to sell a program for a collectivist urban utopia.  Yet in their efforts to sell a newspaper that would appeal to some part of everyone in the city, they found such a program thrust upon them by the city itself. 

The birth of the modern urban newspaper, therefore, was fraught with irony.  These newspapers were, and would continue to be, businesses that assailed other businesses because it was good for business, that attacked privatism because it served their private interests, and that supported the poor because it made them rich.  This irony was routinely labeled crass hypocrisy by the critics of the new urban press.  But hypocrisy or not, the change was profound, in ideology and in action.  And, by century’s turn, the new urban newspapers had emerged as eloquent agents for the great transition from laissez-faire to the regulatory welfare state.

David Paul Nord is Associate Professor of Journalism at Indiana University.