Newsprint Metropolis by Julia Guarneri

Author:Julia Guarneri [Guarneri, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-34147-7
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

4.6 Map showing the circulations of both Chicago and satellite city newspapers in 1928. Robert E. Park, “Urbanization as Measured by Newspaper Circulation,” American Journal of Sociology 35 (July 1929): 68.

Newspapers Define the Region

On a midwestern country road in 1907, a farmer plowing his fields struck up a conversation with a country editor passing by. They stood two hundred miles west of the Missouri River and twelve miles from a railroad as the farmer spoke: “I see by today’s Kansas City papers,” he began as a visitor came alongside, “that there is trouble in Russia again.” “What do you know about what is in today’s Kansas City papers?” “Oh, we got them from the carrier an hour ago.”110 This up-to-date farmer surprised the wandering editor because, for most of the nineteenth century, no one living in such an isolated spot could hope to read fresh news. Yet by the early twentieth century, farmers often read city papers on the same day they were printed. As these newspapers sped from Chicago into households across the Midwest, they transformed the regional economy and regional culture and cultivated a regional identity for urban and rural readers alike.

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