[dredmorbius]

A period of rapidly-expanding advertising.

See Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, dating from 1909:

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft>

And I do mean see it. Read the damned thing, or at least the first dozen pages or so. It's a highly-readable, information-dense, and exceedingly insightful look at the development of commercial publishing in the US at the time, and its author is a magazine publisher himself.

[0xcde4c3db]

Hard to believe this was already being articulated so clearly over a century ago:

> No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people.

[lolinder]

And this:

> Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters, and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing — all to the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the selling price. But, on the other hand, with the growth of advertising a department had to be created in every paper for its handling. As advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper, until now the advertising department is the most important branch of the publication business, for it is the real source of the profits. Because the solicitor seeks the advertiser, and, therefore, is in the position of one asking for favors, he puts himself under obligations to the advertiser, and so in his keenness to bring in revenue for his paper, he is often tempted to ask the aid of the editor in appeasing the advertiser. Thus the advertiser tends to control the policy of the paper.

> And this is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession, but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and nothing else.

[dredmorbius]

It's interesting to look at what made newspapers reasonably immune to such pressures in the years after Holt's book / lecture. I'm a bit hazy on details, but generally:

- Growth especially of large-city dailies and some consolidation of markets effectively gave newspapers some market leverage over most advertisers. There were still some somewhat-untouchable entities, but for the most part, a reasonably-strong editorial independence was achieved.

- It was also possible to go muckraking in another district --- outlying suburbs or cities elsewhere in a state or country, which didn't contribute advertising to that particular institution.

- Increased reliance on classified advertising and legal notices. Each of these were huge contributors to newspapers' revenues, whilst at the same time giving relatively little risk of an advertising boycott. The dawn of Internet classifieds (Craigslist gets a lot of blame, but it was pretty much inevitable, someone would enter that niche) was absolutely devastating in that regard.

There's another bit of media history that I think pairs excellently with the Holt book. It's a 1970s interview with I.F. ("Izzy") Stone, on the PBS programme "Day at Night". That's on YouTube, which is ... somewhat less accessible to me with its current shenanigans, but might be available here:

<https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

<https://youtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

In particular, Stone calls out the distinction between major city dailies, which had strong editorial independence over local businesses and politicians in the 1970s, versus small-town and rural newspapers, which were far less independent. Keep in mind that this interview occurred in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters literally brought down the President of the United States --- it was a high-water mark for journalistic independence and power.

I return to both these references often.

[berniedurfee]

We’re pretty close to the end game here unfortunately.