![]() The Hearst chain owned 23 daily papers the Scripps-Howard chain had grown to 25. By 1930 there were 59 different newspaper chains operating in the U.S. Once multiple papers could share material efficiently, the benefits of chain ownership multiplied, and so did chains themselves. The same printing technologies-stereotype plates and matrices-drove the expansion of newspaper chains in the early 20th century. Some purchased their paper’s entire Sunday magazine from a syndicate. Local editors ordered syndicated features out of catalogs, choosing their paper’s sports column, women’s page, cooking feature, children’s page, and comic strips. Some were small and specialized, offering only science articles or fiction others sold a full array of features to thousands of newspapers. In 1913, there were 40 syndicates in operation by 1931, there were more than 160. ![]() Using prepared stereotypes also allowed syndicates to sell illustrations, setting the stage for one of their top sellers: the comic strip.īusiness boomed. Eventually syndicates began providing thin metal stereotype plates, or the lightweight casts used to make them, called matrices, which let publishers skip the typesetting process altogether. Workers at each paper would set casts of the type into columns using a linotype machine, and from those casts another set of workers would fabricate a metal printing plate. Receiving stories by telegraph or via paper “proofs” spared local publishers the trouble of hiring writers and reporters for all of the material that filled their pages.īut the system still required a lot of labor from local papers. But by the early 20th century, a series of copyright lawsuits had ended the era of free material and created an opening for companies, called feature syndicates, that offered entertaining articles at an affordable price.įeature syndicates commissioned articles and fiction from well-known authors such as Jack London, Frederick Douglass, and John Muir, and required that all papers purchasing the stories print them on the same date, so all could claim to be printing “fresh” or “first run” material. When it came to entertainment, 19th-century newspaper editors had simply reprinted material they found elsewhere, running jokes from magazines or serializing entire novels. Wire services such as the Associated Press offered breaking news by telegraph, with the understanding that editors would cut, embellish, or otherwise alter the text for their own pages. The rise of a telegraph network, in the middle of the 19th century, first enabled companies to sell content to multiple papers. These syndicate and chain systems rendered local papers far less local, homogenizing Americans’ news diets and spreading a consumer culture that retains its hold on Americans today. Scripps bought up multiple papers to form chains, which shared content among themselves. Meanwhile, publishers like William Randolph Hearst and E. Aided by a new technology called the stereotype, syndicates began to sell the same articles and illustrations to hundreds of different newspapers around the country. Yet to refer to any 20th-century daily paper as a “local paper” hides an important truth: The proportion of newspaper content that was written, designed, and printed locally decreased in the early 20th century. Many papers built lavish headquarters buildings that became signatures of the skyline, from Philadelphia’s Inquirer Building to Oakland’s Tribune Tower. ![]() “City desks” hummed with activity, as reporters worked up stories on the regular local beats: crime, politics, schools, society, sports. ![]() Larger cities might issue more than a dozen apiece. Even small cities boasted two or three dailies. From today’s vantage point, when many American cities struggle to sustain even a single print newspaper, the early decades of the 20th century look like glory days for local papers. ![]()
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