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Chapter 1 (part 1)

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The contents are inside of and part of the FORM.

Readers think they're seeing only the content, without paying attention to the form.

There are invisible rules when readers read the newspaper. Reading the newspaper, people know where to find information, because editors follow a rigid pattern.

For example, the New York Times is always the same newspaper, even though the articles change every day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FORM OF NEWS

Style, Production & Social Meaning, 1750-2000

 

The newspaper has always been a privileged form of communication in the United States. Law accords it a seriousness often denied other media, and popular culture endorses its power to expose and enlighten. Although the content of the newspaper often faces criticism as biased or sensationalized or silly, the form of the newspaper is almost sanctified. One might say that the form supplies the standard against which the content is measured.

 

Newspaper form derives its sanctity from its relationship to civic culture. Thinkers endowed the newspaper with a special role in supporting the public conversation of the American republic at a very early point in the nation's history - at a point when newspapers were really incapable of playing that role. Norms arose from this expectation, however, and inflected the design and development of the newspaper, giving it an iconic status it still enjoys, even though it has long since discarded many of its civic responsibilities. Very little in a modern newspaper enacts or even recounts political debate, but Americans still like to think that democracy is rooted in deliberation (is it any more? has it ever been?) and that the newspaper helps make deliberation possible.

 

This book explores the connections between the newspaper form and democratic civic culture. It does so by taking on the history of newspaper form over the long course of its development in the United States from the colonial era to the present. It takes seriously the sanctity that the newspaper has commanded as an instrument of democracy, and asks how and when it has lived up to its mission, how and whether it has reconciled its sacred political work with its profane commercial operation, and how it might be reworked in a changing media environment. Throughout we presume that deliberation is the soul of democracy.

 

There are many ways of thinking about deliberation (as there are many ways of thinking about democracy), and some suit the newspaper (real or imagined) better than others. One prevailing sense, especially among communication scholars, is that newspapers support deliberation by transmitting information to people, who in turn feed back preferences in various ways--votes, of course, but also letters to elected officials, poll results, or other political expressions. In this model, good newspapers provide adequate, reliable information in a clear and transparent fashion, good readers receive the information and process it rationally, and then they become good voters who express preferences informed by the news and responsive to justifiable values. This particular version of the so-called transmission model makes sense as well to many in the media, and to a certain extent it makes sense to us.

 

There is much, however, that the transmission model fails to capture. As James Carey (1988) has pointed out, it fails to capture the ritual functions of the media - the way news helps communities form and sustain themselves. It also fails to capture the dense overlapping network of relationships that forms the medium.

 

Any medium constitutes a complicated network of relationships. A medium is, after all, something "in between," something that mediates among  and connects other things. A newspaper connects sources of news with readers; it brings them into or facilitates particular relationships.  A simple transmission model of news imagines a unidirectional circuit - the world makes news, the newspaper carries it, the public consumes it.  But each way station along the route stands for something much more complicated. The world that makes the news is actually a disparate collection of institutional and non-institutional sources: the police, governments and their agencies, stock markets, sports associations, entertainment industries, polling organizations, the wire services, and so forth. The newspaper too is a collection of disparate actors: reporters and editors and all sorts of production personnel, from printers to paper boys, of course, but also lawyers and accountants and marketing experts. The public always has been segmented by age, gender, race, class, income, religion, and the like (although newspapers have only recently become more inclined to think of their audience as a group of disparate markets). So, just thinking within a transmission model, a newspaper sets up a very complicated, multidimensional set of relationships.  The Boston Globe simultaneously maintains relationships between the Red Sox and their fans, between the high-tech industries along Route 128 and their investors, City Hall and voters, and Shaw's supermarkets and people who buy groceries. In a material sense, the newspaper itself is the combination of all these relationships (see Nerone, 1994). But news is not just about material relationships.

 

There is another order of relationships constituting a newspaper, which we call represented relationships. These are the ways that the newspaper imagines and proposes that it mediates in the world.  Often these are expressed in truisms: The press is the eyes and ears of the people, or, The press is the restless adversary of corruption, or, The press is the palladium of liberty.  In formulations like these, the press proposes that it relates to the citizenry as a champion, and to powerful public and private institutions as a watchdog.  Obviously, this represented order of relationships works to explain and justify the material relationships that also constitute the newspaper. 

 

Such representations crystallize in the form of the newspaper.  By form we mean the persisting visible structure of the newspaper, the things that make the New York Times, for example, visible as the same newspaper day after day although its contents change. Form includes the things that are traditionally labeled layout and design and typography; it also includes habits of illustration, genres of reportage, and schemes of departmentalization. Form is everything a newspaper does to present the look of the news.

 

Any media form includes a proposed or normative model of the medium itself. Put another way, the form includes the way the medium imagines itself to be and to act. In its physical arrangement, structure, and format, a newspaper reiterates an ideal for itself.

 

This ideal is not a description of the material work of the newspaper.  The form proposes ideal relationships between the world and the public, for instance, that will not correspond exactly to the material relationships it actually sets up. The newspaper will figure its reader as citizen on one level and as consumer on another, as self-controlled rational investor on one level and as emotional buyer or fan on another, and so on. The relationship between material and represented relationships in any medium tells a lot about the work that the form does in the world. It is not accidental that we phrase this relationship in a way that echoes Althusser's famous definition of ideology as representing "the imagined relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (1969, p. 162). Our analysis of form will often read like an ideological critique. One premise of our critique is that form embodies the imagined relationship of a medium to its society and polity.

 

We hope that approaching the newspaper through its formal dimension will offer a new perspective on a familiar subject.  The newspaper is perhaps the oldest and best understood mass medium, and has been the subject of many histories and scholarly treatments. Content analyses have looked at all sorts of news matter, examining images as well as words. Audience studies have not only measured trends and demographics but also explored the act of reading, tracking of eye movements of readers, analyzing depictions of readers in the fine and graphic arts, doing ethnographies of practices among actual and historical readers. Structural research on the newspaper industry has revealed changing patterns of ownership and competition and probed shifting professional standards. All of these research traditions share a concern with the political consequences of news, and the rapidly growing field of political draws on all of them to explore the relationship between news and the agendas of public institutions.

 

The many studies illuminate one or more aspects of the newspaper without necessarily combining to reveal the larger whole. They tend to understand the newspaper as a fairly simple transmission channel, bracketing many of the material relationships the newspaper constitutes, and slighting the order of represented relationships. We think that formal analysis offers a promising framework for considering the whole newspaper. The form of the newspaper, encompassing words as well as images, gives a physical existence to the full range of imagined relations that scholars have described piecemeal.

 

Newspaper forms have a complicated history. In the United States alone, tens of thousands of newspapers have been published.  Obviously we could not give an account that includes all the varieties of newspaper form.  Instead, we hewed to the mainstream, looking for the most typical or hegemonic way of putting together a general interest newspaper at any given time.  Surprisingly, this story has not previously been told-sadly, too, because we are naturally happier critiquing a mainstream narrative for its exclusions. Instead of arguing for more complexity, here we have aimed for simplicity and elegance, trying to balance faithfulness to detail (all the noise of real history) with the clarity about the form of news as a whole that our account requires.

 

With those caveats, we have constructed a narrative based on a series of different newspaper formations: printerly, partisan, Victorian, and modern. Each formation combined a look with a system of newspaper production (or type) and a broader cultural configuration. The printerly newspaper combined a bookish appearance with craft production and the republican values of the Revolution, including a fantasy about the public sphere. The partisan newspaper used a larger format and more elaborate division of labor, with editors as chief operating officers, and was integrated into the rise of mass politics and the market economy. The crowded potpourri of Victorian newspapers emerged as publishers directed a news industry generating printed products for a newly imperial nation. And the modern, streamlined newspaper combined bureaucratic production with expert explanation in an era of monopoly capitalism.

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