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Development of News Form

The complicated history of news form requires simplification. Not only have the thousands of published newspapers followed diverse paths of development, some genres have been self-consciously countercultural. We feel drawn to publications outside of the mainstream and have elsewhere argued for more attention to these in journalism history (Nerone, 1990, 1993, May 1993). In the case of newspaper form, however, we found that the history of the mainstream had not been written. By providing a first draft of that history, we aim to describe the series of hegemonic formations that the counterculture genres then countered. In the process, we have necessarily streamlined the process of change. Because there have been so many regional and generic variations, constructing a linear narrative of change requires some violence to the historical record. Similarly, because older styles and practices do not immediately cease when newer ones appear, we have had to cheat to achieve a neat division of events into periods, particularly before the twentieth century. Since the 1920s, the emergence of a self-conscious design practice has eased this problem.

We began the studies presented here more than ten years ago with an analysis of the then-current notion of a revolution in news appearance that supposedly began in the 1970s. The investigation led us back incrementally to the colonial era. To develop an outline of the different historical periods in the visual presentation of news, we first looked at a lot of newspapers. Based on appearance, we made an initial distinction between modern and Victorian newspapers; pursuing our research further, we added the prior category of printerly newspapers. Again, we based these distinctions initially on the appearance of newspapers. Printerly newspapers look bookish and homemade; Victorian papers seem crowded and busy; modern newspapers appear more purposeful and organized. The form of the modern newspaper clearly shows the hand of the design specialist, whereas earlier forms did not, although some notion of design is still evident. Both printerly and Victorian newspapers used a design sense that we call vernacular, emphasizing apparent balance and filling space with an increasingly varied but ad hoc typography. Vernacular design underplayed hierarchy or categorization; the news was largely unsegmented, presenting an impression of an unmapped and perhaps unmappable world. At first, even the boundary between advertising and editorial content was not clearly demarcated.

After further study, we concluded that appearance did not evolve independently, but instead emerged partly from what we call newspaper type. By this we mean the constellation of tasks and occupations involved in making newspapers. The syncretic presentation of content in printerly and Victorian newspapers expressed in visual form the habits of news work. Vernacular newspapers fit the routines and practices of journalism; certainly it was not an autonomous occupation, as design often is today. Although news appearance did follow stylistic movements experienced in the culture more generally, newspaper design grew principally out of journalism, as an extrusion of standard modes of news gathering or as an expression of systems of producing the news. Form followed practice as well as other kinds of form.

From our initial broad categories - the vernacular designs of the printerly and Victorian eras and the self-conscious designs of the modern era - we constructed a chronology that traces the newspaper from its roots in the American colonies to the present period of digital news. To cover so long a narrative, we developed a schematic view of different styles, types, metaphors, and formations of newspapers. The full meaning of these terms will become clear through the elaboration that follows. An abbreviated or simplified version of the overall course of development permits the long history of news form - from the printerly, through the Victorian, to the modern - to frame the arguments about the details and mechanisms of change over time.

Before Modernism

First we examine the forms of news before modernism, covering the design of American newspapers from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century (Part I). We begin with a discussion of the newspapers of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, then turn to the transformation of the newspaper that resulted from the growth of the market in the nineteenth century and the initial industrialization of print.

The first newspapers in America were the creatures of colonial printing trades, and we begin with a cultural analysis of newspaper design in the age of artisan production (Chapter 2). From the earliest newspapers in anglophone North America until the mid-nineteenth century, the basic system of production was craft oriented. The key figure was the printer, who operated a small shop with a couple (and in even the most elaborate cases fewer than a dozen) employees. The printer was the master of this establishment. His (and rarely her) bundle of tasks included what would today be the roles of the publisher, the editor, the copy editor, the reporter (occasionally), and the design specialist.

One element of practice in printerly newspapers was passive news gathering. Colonial printers received correspondence and culled other sources, print or oral, to fill their pages; they did not actively report the news, and they rarely inserted their own voices in the newspaper. In the early nineteenth century, editors began to impose their voices on passively gathered material, but reporting was slow to develop. The bookish and austere printerly style was well suited to production routines in printer's papers.

Thus the craft setting produced the forms and grammars of printerly design. Production routines called for austerity and simplicity, a style usually considered the poor stepsister of books. These newspapers, however, were quite sophisticated in articulating with social and cultural formations. Although considered visually primitive by today's aesthetic standards, such newspapers developed conventions that served to convey a particular kind of cultural authority, one suited to an austere and deferential society. The work of the newspaper, its reason for being, was politics and commerce. In the colonial era, newspapers tried to represent this realm as calm and gentlemanly.

The Revolution disrupted this terrain.  Revolutionary leaders required newspapers to serve the movement, subsidizing and contributing pointed content to supportive newspapers while silencing others.  The turbulent public arena changed the work of the newspaper, even though printers retained the forms of calm and passive management. The end of the Revolution did not return printers to their colonial situation.  Instead, after the Revolution, the newspaper was expected to take part in the process of continually generating legitimate authority and to help sustain a sphere of rational public deliberation. The public sphere was ideally non-partisan, but partisanism emerged nonetheless and with it an urge toward mass politics. The age of mass politics (or partisan era) augmented the printerly production of the newspaper by installing the editor, an autonomous agent of political organization not socialized into the printer's craft and values, as the chief functionary. The editor's newspaper remained a printer's paper in one sense, but prefigured a more elaborate division of labor.

The printer's paper yielded to the publisher's paper in the Victorian period. We next track the development of form as the newspaper shifted away from local community news organ toward mass-market commercial product and relocated from print shops to mechanized factories (Chapter 3). In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a series of social, cultural, and political transformations reconfigured the public sphere and reconstructed the uses of the newspaper. The rise of mass politics had co-opted the printer's newspaper, and party organizations installed editors whose job was to compose the content of the paper. The rise of a national market society and with it the commercialization of the press integrated newspapers more and more into business arrangements, producing what we call the publisher's newspaper.

The printer's newspaper had been a gentleman's conversation about the colonial world and then a citizen's town meeting. The editor's newspaper was a partisan advocate in the courtroom of political opinion. The publisher's newspaper was a commercial tool and a market good. In combination, the twin moments of political and commercial transformation produced a newspaper that was expansive in appeal to the public. The political parties and the advertisers, which both subsidized editing and publishing, wanted to reach as many readers as possible. At the same time, these newspapers were expansive in their representation of the world. More and more kinds of material found their way into the paper, which grew in size and density as a result.

As the newspaper changed its social function and internal structure, its form also changed. News, redefined as an almost limitless compendium of the social world, came to resemble the burgeoning marketplaces of an industrializing society. Newspapers placed this undigested, complex barrage on the page in the same bewildering abundance that characterized so much else of the culture of the marketplace in the nineteenth century (Lears, 1994).

In Victorian papers, news gathering became an occupation in its own right. Two types of reporting personnel emerged, recognized, in fact if not in name, as the correspondent and the scavenger. The correspondent was a manly observer of events and personages in distant and (usually) powerful places; he (rarely she) was a persona, although usually pseudonymous, who conveyed subjective impressions with an air of authority and confidentiality, like the colonial letter-writer. The scavenger was not a persona but a completely anonymous news hound, combing first the exchange papers, then the police courts, the theaters, and the taverns for bits of information that might be conveyed in a sentence or a paragraph or that might be turned into a story of a column or so. The correspondent was a gentleman, the scavenger a piece worker, often paid by the line or the column-inch. Their asymmetrical contributions neighbored in the paper, making the overall content active and miscellaneous, qualities its presentation matched.

Typography was the dominant face of news. As the industrial organization of newspapers became more articulated in the nineteenth century, the task of setting news into type fell to the emerging printing trades. One feature of the shift from printer's to publisher's newspapers was the appearance of a divide between editorial work and production work. Typesetters, proofreaders, and press operators worked for the business side of the press, insulated from editorial news workers and under the supervision of publishers. It was the publishers who decided the visual vocabulary of their newspapers. They based typographic decisions on custom and convention and on financial considerations. Editorial statements in Victorian newspapers make clear that publishers attended to visual issues, and their choices accumulated into a recognizable style.

Our schematic overview of the years up to the 1880s (Part I) describes several periods in the stylistic evolution of the press after the colonial era: the Federal, Transitional, Partisan, Imperial, and Victorian. The changing styles in appearance overlaid three successive types of newspaper, each of which we named according to the dominant position in its production: the printer's newspaper, which appeared during the colonial and Federal periods; the editor's newspaper, which emerged during the Transitional and typified the Partisan period; and the publisher's newspaper, which began in the Imperial and reached its height during the Victorian period. A master metaphor explained and animated each type of newspaper-producing system: The printer's newspaper operated under a town-meeting metaphor, the editor's under a courtroom metaphor, and the publisher's under a marketplace metaphor. These master metaphors combined descriptive and normative dimensions, explaining both how the newspaper did function and how the newspaper was supposed to function.

By the 1880s the eclecticism of Victorian design proved to be an unstable mediation. Its (not inaccurate) representation of the abundance of the new age clashed with the rationalizing spirit of the era of natural science and industrialization. Eventually, this spirit would produce modernist newspaper forms.