The Media and Public Life: A History by John Nerone

Author:John Nerone [Nerone, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780745660202
Google: 41_YoQEACAAJ
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-06-29T20:26:00.922718+00:00

Industrializing the Newspaper

At the same time as the infrastructure of the media business industrialized, with the appearance of telegraphic wire services, features syndicates, advertising agencies and so forth, media firms themselves became more industrial in organization. Helped by new printing technologies and a changing business environment, daily newspapers especially embraced mass production. They set about rationalizing and maximizing capacity in their production of copies of newspapers and, at the same time, in their production of the news that filled it.

The appearance of new printing presses has already been mentioned. First steam, then cylinders, then rotary presses that could continually print, then machines that could fold newspapers, and trains and trucks to carry them to customers, increased the capacity of the newspapers that could afford to invest in the ever-improving equipment. The new machines also de-skilled some of the work of making newspapers. A couple of highly skilled engineers could lead a team of unskilled workers in running the more advanced presses. On the typesetting side, stereotyping meant that the work of a single compositor could be multiplied in house, even as more and more content was set outside the shop by other agencies. The print trades – unlike the newsroom staff – had formed unions early in the nineteenth century in the US and other countries, and resisted these economies. They fought long battles against “dead-heading” (the use of boilerplate copy, more or less) and insisted that new machines like the Linotype (which mechanized much of the work of typesetting) be staffed by union members being paid union rates (Nerone, 2008). Because the entire industry was expanding rapidly through the second half of the nineteenth century, it was possible to maintain industrial peace for the most part, though the process of industrialization was marked by a series of dramatic strikes in specific cities.

The newsroom labor situation also industrialized, but mostly without the worker activism of the pressroom. As newspapers hired reporters to cover local news, routines and mechanisms developed that mimicked the discipline and rationalization of industrial workplaces. Reporters became attached to particular “beats,” a term that apparently migrated from the jargon of newly professionalized police forces. Reporting beats, like city hall, the courthouse, the docks, and the markets, provided reliable flows of news. By the 1840s, the city editor had emerged on metropolitan dailies as the manager who orchestrated the movements of reporters around these beats and other events, such as rallies and speeches (Solomon, 1995). These reporters were the foot soldiers of the newswork army, producing material that was meant to be a raw collection of facts and transcripts. The city editor enforced discipline by controlling compensation for reporters. Reporters, unlike correspondents, were not independent voices or observing personae with apparent attitudes; they were workers, usually paid by the line, and required to keep their voices out of their copy. Should a reporter fail to produce good copy, the copy would be cut, cutting the reporter's income in turn. Reporters in industrial newspapers engaged in a life-and-death struggle

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