by Paul Rule
Producing a newspaper must be a humbling experience these days. Struggling to stay afloat while watching your classifieds section dwindle to something thin enough to use as a cheese slicer can’t be fun. The newspaper business has never been this bad, right? Wrong, very wrong.
It depends on the point in history you pick to make your comparison. We like to compare to the decades since WW II, the glory days when the big metro dailies have been licenses to print money and their owners counted the profits by the hundreds of millions of bucks. Despite first radio, then television and finally the internet having the advantage for breaking news, newspapers still dominated local media markets.
This period of great riches was the exception. To appreciate what the newspaper business has been for most of its history, warp back a hundred years or so. Today’s papers look prosperous compared to the publications of the 1890s. There was no competition yet from electronic media, but most newspapers were pathetic looking beasts.
I found this out while doing some historical research involving early papers in my hometown in Virginia. Despite having had a population of only about 10,000, library-preserved copies and newspaper directories revealed that during the 1890’s the town had six newspapers – two dailies and four weeklies. I suspect that none of them were profitable on a steady basis. By 1900 all six had faded away and been replaced by more aggressive papers that invaded from nearby larger towns.
As to the purists who are shocked that some newspapers are selling ad space on the front page, be aware that many early papers sold all or nearly all of the front in small card ads. Particularly popular were pitches for patent medicines and miracle healing machines that used magnetic rays to cure everything from fatigue to lumbago (whatever lumbago is. It sounds like some sort of ballroom dance.)
Newspapers of a century ago had to be scrappy. Only the most scrappy, ingenious and energetic survived. Maybe the industry could use some of those publishers, editors and writers now.
Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.