Module 3_Week 3_Print, Books, and Film_Media and Culture

Module 3

Print, Books, and Film

A. A Brief Overview of the Evolution of Books

As detailed in the chapter on mass communication, culture, and media literacy,

the use of Gutenberg’s printing press spread rapidly throughout Europe in the last half of

the 15th century. But the technological advances and the social, cultural, and economic

conditions necessary for books to become a major mass medium were three centuries

away. As a result, it was a printing press and a book industry much like those of

Gutenberg’s time that first came to the New World in the 17th century.

The earliest colonists came to America primarily for two reasons—to escape

religious persecution and to find economic opportunities unavailable to them in Europe.

So, most of the books they carried with them to the New World were religiously oriented.

Moreover, they brought very few books at all. Better-educated, wealthier Europeans were

secure at home. Those willing to make the dangerous journey tended to be poor,

uneducated, and largely illiterate.

There were other reasons early settlers did not find books central to their lives.

One was the simple fight for survival. In the brutal and hostile land to which they had

come, leisure for reading books was a luxury for which they had little time. People

worked from sunrise to sunset just to live. If there was to be reading, it would have to be

at night, and it was folly to waste precious candles on something as unnecessary to

survival as reading. In addition, books and reading were regarded as symbols of wealth

and status and therefore not priorities for people who considered themselves to be

pioneers, servants of the Lord, or anti-English colonists. The final reason the earliest

settlers were not active readers was the lack of portability of books. Books were heavy,

and few were carried across the ocean. Those volumes that did make it to North America

were extremely expensive and not available to most people.

The first printing press arrived on North American shores in 1638, only 18 years

after the Plymouth Rock landing. It was operated by a company called Cambridge Press.

Printing was limited to religious and government documents. The first book printed in the

colonies appeared in 1644—The Whole Booke of Psalms, sometimes referred to as the

Bay Psalm Book. Among the very few secular titles were those printed by Benjamin

Franklin 90 years later. Poor Richard’s Almanack, which first appeared in 1732, sold

10,000 copies annually. The Almanack contained short stories, poetry, weather

predictions, and other facts and figures useful to a population more in command of its

environment than those first settlers. As the colonies grew in wealth and sophistication,

leisure time increased, as did affluence and education. Franklin also published the first

true novel printed in North America, Pamela, written by English author Samuel

Richardson. Still, by and large, books were religiously oriented or pertained to official

government activities such as tax rolls and the pronouncements of various commissions.

The printers went into open revolt against official control in March 1765 after

passage of the Stamp Act. Designed by England to recoup money it spent waging the

French and Indian War, the Stamp Act mandated that all printing—legal documents,

books, magazines, and newspapers—be done on paper stamped with the government’s

seal. Its additional purpose was to control and limit expression in the increasingly restless

colonies. This affront to their freedom, and the steep cost of the tax—sometimes doubling

the price of a publication—was simply too much for the colonists. The printers used their

presses to run accounts of antitax protests, demonstrations, riots, sermons, boycotts, and

other antiauthority activities, further fueling revolutionary sympathies. In November

1765— when the tax was to take effect—the authorities were so cowed by the reaction of

the colonists that they were unwilling to enforce it.

The U.S. newspaper industry grew rapidly from this mix, as detailed in the

chapter on newspapers. The book industry, however, was slower to develop. Books were

still expensive, often costing the equivalent of a working person’s weekly pay, and

literacy remained a luxury. However, due in large measure to a movement begun before

the Civil War, compulsory education had come to most states by 1900. This swelled the

number of readers, which increased the demand for books. This increased demand,

coupled with a number of important technological advances, brought the price of books

within reach of most people. In 1861 the United States had the highest literacy rate of any

country in the world (58%), and 40 years later at the start of the 20th century, 9 out of

every 10 U.S. citizens could read. Today, nearly total literacy reigns in America.

The 1800s saw a series of important refinements to the process of printing, most

notably the linotype machine, a typewriter-like keyboard allowing printers to set type

mechanically rather than manually, and offset lithography, permitting printing from

photographic plates rather than from heavy, fragile metal casts. The combination of this

technically improved, lower-cost printing (and therefore lower-cost publications) and

widespread literacy produced the flowering of the novel in the 1800s. Major U.S. book

publishers Harper Brothers and John Wiley & Sons—both in business today—were

established in New York in 1817 and 1807, respectively. And books such as Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), and Mark

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) were considered by many of their readers to be equal to

or better than the works of famous European authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontës,

and Charles Dickens.

Dime novels were “paperback books” because they were produced with paper

covers. But publisher Allen Lane invented what we now recognize as the paperback in

the midst of the Great Depression in London when he founded Penguin Books in 1935.

Four years later, publisher Robert de Graff introduced the idea to the United States. His

Pocket Books were small, inexpensive (25 cents) reissues of books that had already

become successful as hardcovers. They were sold just about everywhere—newsstands,

bookstores, train stations, shipping terminals, and drug and department stores. Within

eight weeks of their introduction, de Graff had sold 325,000 books (Menand, 2015).

Soon, new and existing publishers joined the paperback boom, their popularity boosted

by Fawcett Publication’s decision in 1950 to start releasing paperback originals.

Traditionalists had some concern about the “cheapening of the book,” but that was more

than offset by the huge popularity of paperbacks and the willingness of publishers to take

chances. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, African American writers such as Richard

Wright and Ralph Ellison were published, as were controversial works such as J. D.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Eventually, paperback books became the norm,

surpassing hardcover book sales for the first time in 1960. Today, the majority of all

physical books sold in the United States are paperbacks, and bookstores generate half

their revenue from these sales.

B. Book

The book is the least “mass” of our mass media in audience reach and in the

magnitude of the industry itself, and this fact shapes the nature of the relationship

between medium and audience. Publishing houses, both large and small, produce

narrowly or broadly aimed titles for readers, who buy and carry away individual units.

This more direct relationship between publishers and readers renders books

fundamentally different from other mass media. For example, because books are less

dependent than other mass media on attracting the largest possible audience, books are

more able and more likely to incubate new, challenging, or unpopular ideas. As the

medium least dependent on advertiser support, books can be aimed at extremely small

groups of readers, challenging them and their imaginations in ways that many sponsors

would find unacceptable in advertising-based mass media. Because books are produced

and sold as individual units—as opposed to a single television program simultaneously

distributed to millions of viewers or a single edition of a mass circulation newspaper—

more “voices” can enter and survive in the industry. This medium can sustain more

voices in the cultural forum than can other traditional mass media. As former head of the

New York Public Library, Vartan Gregorian, explained to journalist Bill Moyers (2007),

when among books, “suddenly you feel humble.

Free of the need to generate mass circulation for advertisers, offbeat,

controversial, even revolutionary ideas can reach the public. For example, Andrew

Macdonald’s Turner Diaries is the ideological and how-to guide of the antigovernment

militia movement in the United States. Nonetheless, this radical, revolutionary book is

openly published, purchased, and discussed. Want to definitively win an argument? Look

it up. We often turn to books for certainty and truth about the world in which we live and

the ones about which we want to know. Which countries border Chile? Find the atlas.

James Brown’s sax player? Look in Bob Gulla’s Icons of R&B and Soul. Books have

been edited and fact-checked, unlike much of what you might find online, and they often

contain information and detail that you might not know to search for.

What was the United States like in the 19th century? Read Alexis de

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. England in the early 1800s? Read Jane Austen’s

Pride and Prejudice. Written during the times they reflect, these books are more accurate

representations than those available in the modern movie and television depictions. The

obvious forms are self-help and personal improvement books. But books also speak to us

more individually than advertiser-supported media because of their small, focused target

markets.

Suzanne Collins, John Grisham, Stephenie Meyer, and Stephen King all

specialize in writing highly entertaining and imaginative novels. The enjoyment found in

the works of writers Veronica Roth (the Divergent series), John Irving (The World

According to Garp, Hotel New Hampshire), Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, Beach

Music), Paula Hawkins (Girl on a Train), and J. K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series) is

undeniable. As such, books tend to encourage personal reflection to a greater degree than

these other media. We are part of the tribe, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan would

say, when we consume other media. But we are alone when we read a book. “Books

allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media

today,” explained Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the launch of his book club, A

Year of Books.

Because of their influence as cultural repositories and agents of social change,

books have often been targeted for censorship. A book is censored when someone in

authority limits publication of or access to it. Censorship can and does occur in many

situations and in all media (more on this in the chapter on media freedom, regulation, and

ethics). But because of the respect our culture traditionally holds for books, book banning

takes on a particularly poisonous connotation in the United States.

Book publishers can confront censorship by recognizing that their obligations to

their industry and to themselves demand that they resist censorship. The publishing

industry and the publisher’s role in it are fundamental to the operation and maintenance

of our democratic society. Rather than accepting the censor’s argument that certain

voices require silencing for the good of the culture, publishers in a democracy have an

obligation to make the stronger argument that free speech be protected and encouraged.

The short list of frequently censored titles in the previous paragraph should immediately

make it evident why the power of ideas is worth fighting for. You can test your own

willingness to censor in the Cultural Forum box entitled “Would You Ban a Book by

Adolph Hitler? One by Milo Yiannopoulos?”

Censors ban and burn books because books are repositories of ideas, ideas that

can be read and considered with limited outside influence or official supervision. But

what kind of culture develops when, by our own refusal to read books, we figuratively

save the censors the trouble of striking the match? Aliteracy, wherein people possess the

ability to read but are unwilling to do so, amounts to doing the censors’ work for them.

As Russian immigrant and writer Joseph Brodsky explained when accepting his Nobel

Prize for Literature, “Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no

criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can

condemn the material suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of

censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation:

that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the

offender is a nation, it pays with its history”.

More than 300,000 traditional and nontraditional (print-on-demand, self-

published, and niche) titles are published in the United States each year; Americans

annually by nearly 700 million books (Milliot, 2016b), generating $29 billion in sales

(Statista, 2016). Today, more books than ever are being published. More books are being

read; more people are writing books. Books that would never have been released through

traditional publishers are now routinely published. Like all the media with which we are

familiar, convergence is changing the nature of the book industry. In addition to

convergence, contemporary publishing and its relationship with its readers are being

reshaped by conglomeration, hypercommercialism and demand for profits, the growth of

small presses, restructuring of retailing, and changes in readership.

Convergence is altering almost all aspects of the book industry. Most obviously,

the Internet is changing the way books are distributed and sold. But this digital

technology, in the form of e-publishing, the publication of books initially or exclusively

in a digital format, also offers a new way for writers’ ideas to be published. In fact, many

of today’s “books” are no longer composed of paper pages snug between two covers. As

former Random House editor Peter Osnos explained, “Unlike other printed media, books

do not have advertising, so there is none to lose. They don’t have subscribers, so holding

on to them is not an issue either. The main challenge is to manage inventory, making

books available where, when, and how readers want them.

In her mid-forties, Erika Mitchell, writing under the pen name E. L. James, was

having some success publishing fan fiction based on the vampire novels Twilight as e-

books —books downloaded in electronic form from the Internet to computers, e-readers,

or mobile digital devices. This brought her to the attention of traditional publisher

Random House, and working together they turned her 50 Shades of Grey trilogy into a

series of best sellers and major motion pictures. Romance writer Meredith Wild, who

writes mainly after her children leave for school, has sold more than a million and a half

self-published erotic novels on Amazon and other websites. This brought her a $6.5

million advance from traditional publisher Forever (Alter, 2016c). Established authors

fare well, too. Stieg Larsson’s smash best seller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the

other books in his trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the

Hornet’s Nest, have sold more digital than hard-copy editions, and big-name authors like

Stephen King now routinely write works primarily for e-publication.

Another advantage is financial. Authors who distribute through e-publishers

typically get royalties of 40% to 70%, compared to the 5% to 10% offered by traditional

publishers. This lets aspiring writers offer their books for as little as 99 cents or $2.99,

making those works more attractive to readers willing to take a low-cost chance to find

something and someone new and interesting—earning writers even more sales.

Traditional book publishers say their lower royalty rates are mandated by the expense of

the services they provide, such as editorial assistance and marketing, not to mention the

cost of production and distribution. The debate over self- versus traditional publishing is

really a disagreement over the value of disintermediation, eliminating gatekeepers

between artists and audiences. Eliminate the middlemen and more original content of

greater variety from fresher voices gets to more people. Keep the middlemen and quality

is assured, and while an occasional interesting work or new voice might be missed, the

industry’s overall product remains superior.

For books, disintermediation in the form of self-publication runs the gamut from

completely self-published-and-promoted works to self-publishing with an assist, with

digital publishers providing a full range of services—copyediting, securing and

commissioning artwork, cover design, promotion, and in some cases, distribution of

traditional paper books to brickand-mortar bookstores. And of course, there is a hybrid

model, such as Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, a self-publishing online platform for fan fiction

where successful authors can be offered contracts and production and editing support

from Amazon Publishing, the company’s book division. Other major publishers such as

Penguin and Harlequin now have self-publishing divisions. How successful are self-

published authors? In every week of 2015, a third of the 100 best-selling Kindle books

were self-published, and over the last five years, nearly 40 self-published authors have

sold a million copies of their e-books on Amazon.

Print on demand (POD) is another form of e-publishing. Companies such as

Xlibris, AuthorHouse, and iUniverse are POD publishers. They store works digitally and,

once ordered, a book can be instantly printed, bound, and sent. Alternatively, once

ordered, that book can be printed and bound at a bookstore that has the proper

technology. The advantage for publisher and reader is financial. POD books require no

warehouse for storage, there are no remainders (unsold books returned to publishers to be

sold at great discount) to eat into profits, and the production costs, in both personnel and

equipment, are tiny when compared to traditional publishing. These factors not only

produce less expensive books for readers but also greatly expand the variety of books that

can and will be published. And although a large publisher like Oxford University Press

can produce thousands of volumes a year, smaller POD operations can make a profit on

as few as 100 orders.

Large commercial publishers have also found a place for POD in their business,

using the technology to rush hot, headline-inspired books to readers. In 2008, for the first

time, American publishers released more POD titles than new and revised titles produced

by traditional methods; in 2010 the ratio was more than three to one. The availability of

POD books will grow even more with the continued rollout of the Espresso Book

Machine, a joint effort of several major book publishers. The device, which can print and

bind a 300-page book in four minutes, is available in hundreds of locations across the

globe and has access to more than 7 million books available from self-publishers, a

growing list of traditional publishing houses, and the public domain.

Many booksellers and even publishing companies themselves offer e-books

specifically for smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, digital devices with the appearance of

traditional books that display content that is digitally stored and accessed. Although

earlier attempts at producing e-readers had failed, the 2006 unveiling of the Sony Reader,

dubbed the iBook, proved so successful that it was soon followed by several similar

devices, such as Amazon’s various Kindle models, Apple’s iPad, and Barnes & Noble’s

Nook. (In 2014 Sony discontinued its e-reader technologies.) In addition, smartphone and

tablet apps like Bookari and Scribd and other e-reading alternatives such as online

publisher Zinio, which makes titles available for most digital devices, and Pronoun,

which offers video-enhanced books, have also appeared. Today, just under one in five

American adults owns a dedicated e-reader, but because 68% have smartphones and 45%

have tablets, the large majority holds in its hands the ability to read digital books.

More than any other medium, the book industry into the 1970s and 1980s was

dominated by relatively small operations. Publishing houses were traditionally staffed by

fewer than 20 people, the large majority by fewer than 10. Today, however, although tens

of thousands of businesses call themselves book publishers, only a very small percentage

produces four or more titles a year. The industry is dominated now by the so-called Big 5

publishing houses —Penguin Random House (250 imprints, or individual book

publishing companies), Hachette (23 imprints), HarperCollins (120 imprints), Macmillan

(30 imprints), and Simon & Schuster (52 imprints)—and a few other large concerns, like

Time Warner Publishing. Each of these giants was once, sometimes with another name,

an independent book publisher. All are now part of large national or international

corporate conglomerates (Alter, 2016b). These major publishers control more than 80%

of all U.S.

The negative view is that as publishing houses become just one in the parent

company’s long list of enterprises, product quality suffers as important editing and

production steps are eliminated to maximize profits. Before conglomeration, publishing

was often described as a cottage industry; that is, publishing houses were small

operations, closely identified with their personnel—both their own small staffs and their

authors. The cottage imagery, however, extends beyond smallness of size. There was a

quaintness and charm associated with publishing houses—their attention to detail, their

devotion to tradition, the care they gave to their façades (their reputations).

“The act of publishing is essentially the act of making public one’s own

enthusiasm,” reminisced Robert Gottlieb, longtime editor-inchief at old-line houses

Simon & Schuster and Knopf (in Menand, 2015, p. 80). The world of corporate

conglomerates has little room for such niceties, as profit dominates all other

considerations. Critics of corporate ownership see profits-over-quality at play in recent

publishing practices, such as when publishers use “big data” from online e-book

readership not only to determine which books get published (Alter & Russell, 2016), but

also to help shape characters and story lines in books as they are being written (Miller,

2014), as well as when fans read online manuscripts and then vote on which should be

published.

The threat from conglomeration resides in the parent company’s overemphasis on

the bottom line—that is, profitability at all costs. Unlike in the days when G. P. Putnam’s

sons and the Schuster family actually ran the houses that carried their names, critics fear

that now little pride is taken in the content of books and that risk taking (tackling

controversial issues, experimenting with new styles, finding and nurturing unknown

authors) is becoming rarer and rarer. Daniel Menaker, fiction editor for The New Yorker,

explains, “Being a book editor is often, on balance, a rum game. The arts—high and low

—have a way of moving forward, backward, or to the side, which leaves their servants

perpetually scrambling to catch up with and make sense of their direction and their very

nature. Profit, when it gets into bed with them, doesn’t like the unpredictability of the

arts. It tries to rationalize them and make them financially reliable. Can’t be done”

(2009). As a result, Jason Epstein, longtime editor at Random House and founder of

Anchor Books, writes that his is an “increasingly distressed industry” mired in “severe

structural problems.” Among them are a retail bookselling system that favors “brand

name” authors and “a bestseller-driven system of high royalty advances.”

The importance of promotion and publicity has led to an increase in the release of

instant books. What better way to unleash millions of dollars of free publicity for a book

than to base it on an event currently trending on Twitter? Publishers see these

opportunities and then initiate the projects. For example, within days of the two political

parties’ 2016 nominating conventions, Trump vs. Clinton: In Their Own Words:

Everything You Need to Know to Vote Your Conscience was available for Kindle. Lost

in the wake of instant books, easily promotable authors and titles, and blockbusters,

critics argue, are books of merit, books of substance, and books that make a difference.

The overcommercialization of the book industry is mitigated somewhat by the

rise in the number of smaller publishing houses. Although these smaller operations are

large in number, they account for a very small proportion of books sold. Nonetheless, as

recently as seven years ago there were 20,000 U.S. book publishers. Today there are

more than 80,000, the vast majority being small presses. They cannot compete in the

blockbuster world. By definition alternative, they specialize in specific areas such as the

environment, feminism, gay issues, and how-to. They can also publish writing otherwise

uninteresting to bigger houses, such as poetry and literary commentary.

Relying on specialization and narrowly targeted marketing, books such as Ralph

Nader and Clarence Ditlow’s The Lemon Book, a guide on buying a used car, published

by Moyer Bell; Claudette McShane’s Warning! Dating May Be Hazardous to Your

Health, published by Mother Courage Press; and Split Verse, a book of poems about

divorce published by Midmarch Arts, can not only earn healthy sales but also make a

difference in their readers’ lives. And what may seem surprising is that it is the Internet,

specifically Amazon, that is boosting the fortunes of these smaller houses. Because it

compiles data on customer preferences (books bought, browsed, recommended to others,

or wished for), it can make recommendations to potential buyers, and quite often those

recommendations are from small publishers that the buyer might never have considered

(or never have seen at a brick-and-mortar retailer). In other words, Amazon helps level

the book industry playing field.

Another alternative to the big chain store is buying books online. Amazon is the

best known of the online book sales services. Thorough, fast, and well stocked, Amazon

boasts low overhead, and that means better prices for readers. In addition, its website

offers book buyers large amounts of potentially valuable information. Once online,

customers can identify the books that interest them, read synopses, check reviews from

multiple sources, read sample pages from a book, and see comments not only from other

readers but sometimes from the authors and publishers as well.

Of course, they can also order books. Although books represent only 7% of the

Seattle company’s $75 billion in annual revenue, it dominates book retailing, selling 40%

of all new books sold every year and controlling 60% of all e-book sales (Packer, 2014).

This size gives Amazon quite a bit of power in the book industry. Critics say it uses its

position to extort high payments from the publishers, who have little choice but to sell

their books on its site, while defenders see much benefit for readers, who get a greater

variety of books at lower prices.

C. A Concise Account of the Evolution of Newspapers

The opening vignette makes an important point about contemporary newspapers

—they are in a state of disruptive transition—radical change brought about by the

introduction of a new technology or product—but they are working hard and often

successfully to secure new identities for themselves in an increasingly crowded media

environment. As a medium and as an industry, newspapers are in the midst of a

significant change in their role and operation. The changing relationship between

newspapers and readers is part of this upheaval. And while it’s not uncommon to read or

hear comments such as this one from about 10 years ago from Microsoft CEO Steve

Ballmer, “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over

IP [Internet Protocol] network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are

delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form” (in Dumenco,

2008, p. 48), newspapers in paper form are still around. They have faced similar

challenges more than once in the past and have survived.

In Caesar’s time, Rome had a newspaper, the Acta Diurna (actions of the day). It

was carved on a tablet and posted on a wall after each meeting of the Senate. Its

circulation was one, and there is no reliable measure of its total readership. However, it

does show that people have always wanted to know what was happening and that others

have helped them do so. The newspapers we recognize today have their roots in 17th-

century Europe. Corantos, one-page news sheets about specific events, were printed in

English in Holland in 1620 and imported to England by British booksellers who were

eager to satisfy public demand for information about Continental happenings that

eventually led to what we now call the Thirty Years’ War.

Englishmen Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, and Nicholas Bourne eventually

began printing their own occasional news sheets, using the same title for consecutive

editions. They stopped publishing in 1641, the same year that regular, daily accounts of

local news started appearing in other news sheets. These true forerunners of our daily

newspaper were called diurnals, but by the 1660s the word newspaper had entered the

English language. Political power struggles in England at this time boosted the fledgling

medium, as partisans on the side of the monarchy and those supporting Parliament

published papers to bolster their positions. When the monarchy prevailed, it granted

monopoly publication rights to the Oxford Gazette, the official voice of the Crown.

Founded in 1665 and later renamed the London Gazette, this journal used a formula of

foreign news, official information, royal proclamations, and local news that became the

model for the first colonial newspapers.

The Boston News-Letter was able to survive in part because of government

subsidies. With government support came government control, but the buildup to the

Revolution helped establish the medium’s independence. In 1721 Boston had three

papers. James Franklin’s New-England Courant was the only one publishing without

authority. The Courant was popular and controversial, but when it criticized the

Massachusetts governor, Franklin was jailed for printing “scandalous libels.” When

released, he returned to his old ways, earning himself and the Courant a publishing ban,

which he circumvented by installing his younger brother Benjamin as nominal publisher.

Ben Franklin soon moved to Philadelphia, and without his leadership the Courant was out

of business in three years. Its lasting legacy, however, was demonstrating that a

newspaper with popular support could indeed challenge authority.

In 1734 New York Weekly Journal publisher John Peter Zenger was jailed for

criticizing that colony’s royal governor. The charge was seditious libel, and the verdict

was based not on the truth or falsehood of the printed words but on whether they had

been printed. The criticisms had been published, so Zenger was clearly guilty. But his

attorney, Andrew Hamilton, argued to the jury, “For the words themselves must be

libelous, that is, false, scandalous and seditious, or else we are not guilty” (in Pusey,

2013). Zenger’s peers agreed, and he was freed. The Zenger trial became a powerful

symbol of colonial newspaper independence from the Crown.

But a mere eight years later, fearful of the subversive activities of foreigners

sympathetic to France, Congress passed a group of four laws known collectively as the

Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Acts made illegal writing, publishing, or printing

“any false scandalous and malicious writing” about the president, Congress, or the federal

government. So unpopular were these laws with a citizenry who had just waged a war of

independence against similar limits on their freedom of expression that they were not

renewed when Congress reconsidered them two years later in 1800. See the chapter on

media freedom, regulation, and ethics for more detail on the ongoing commitment to the

First Amendment, freedom of the press, and open expression in the United States.

At the turn of the 19th century, New York City provided all the ingredients

necessary for a new kind of audience for a new kind of newspaper and a new kind of

journalism. The island city was densely populated, a center of culture, commerce, and

politics, and especially because of the waves of immigrants that had come to its shores,

demographically diverse. Add to this growing literacy among working people, and

conditions were ripe for the penny press, one-cent newspapers for everyone. Benjamin

Day’s September 3, 1833, issue of the New York Sun was the first of the penny papers.

Day’s innovation was to price his paper so inexpensively that it would attract a large

readership, which could then be “sold” to advertisers. Day succeeded because he

anticipated a new kind of reader. He filled the Sun’s pages with police and court reports,

crime stories, entertainment news, and human interest stories. Because the paper lived up

to its motto, “The Sun shines for all,” there was little of the elite political and business

information that had characterized earlier papers.

People typically excluded from the social, cultural, and political mainstream

quickly saw the value of the mass newspaper. The first African American newspaper was

Freedom’s Journal, published initially in 1827 by John B. Russwurm and the Reverend

Samuel Cornish. Others soon followed, but it was Frederick Douglass who made best use

of the new mass circulation style in his newspaper The Ram’s Horn, founded expressly to

challenge the editorial policies of Benjamin Day’s Sun. Although this particular effort

failed, Douglass had established himself and the minority press as a viable voice for those

otherwise silenced. Douglass’s North Star, founded in 1847 with the masthead slogan

“Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all

Brethren,” was the most influential African American newspaper before the Civil War.

The most influential African American newspaper after the Civil War, and the first black

paper to be a commercial success (its predecessors typically were subsidized by political

and church groups), was the Chicago Defender. First published on May 5, 1905, by

Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Defender eventually earned a nationwide circulation of

more than 230,000. After Abbott declared May 15, 1917, the date of “the Great Northern

Drive,” the Defender’s central editorial goal was to encourage southern black people to

move north.

In 1848, six large New York papers, including the Sun, the Herald, and the

Tribune, decided to pool efforts and share expenses collecting news from foreign ships

docking at the city’s harbor. After determining rules of membership and other

organizational issues, in 1856 the papers established the first news-gathering (and

distribution) organization, the New York Associated Press. Other domestic wire services,

originally named for their reliance on the telegraph, followed—the Associated Press in

1900, the United Press in 1907, and the International News Service in 1909.

M In 1883 Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer bought the troubled New York

World. Adopting a populist approach to the news, he brought a crusading, activist style of

coverage to numerous turn-of-the-century social problems—growing slums, labor

tensions, and failing farms, to name a few. The audience for his “new journalism” was

the “common man,” and he succeeded in reaching readers with light, sensationalistic

news coverage, extensive use of illustrations, and circulation-building stunts and

promotions (for example, an around-the-world balloon flight). Ad revenues and

circulation figures exploded.

The years between the era of yellow journalism and the coming of television were

a time of remarkable growth in the development of newspapers. From 1910 to the

beginning of World War II, daily newspaper subscriptions doubled and ad revenues

tripled. In 1910 there were 2,600 daily papers in the United States, more than at any time

before or since. In 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued the “Canons

of Journalism and Statement of Principles” in an effort to restore order and respectability

after the yellow era. The opening sentence of the Canons was, “The right of a newspaper

to attract and hold readers is restricted by nothing but considerations of public welfare.”

The wire services internationalized. United Press International started gathering news

from Japan in 1909 and was covering South America and Europe by 1921. In response to

the competition from radio and magazines for advertising dollars, newspapers began

consolidating into newspaper chains—papers in different cities across the country owned

by a single company. Hearst and Scripps were among the most powerful chains in the

1920s. For all practical purposes, the modern newspaper had now emerged. The next

phase of the medium’s life, as we’ll soon see, begins with the coming of television.

D. Newspapers

Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults, 121 million people, will read a printed

newspaper in an average week (half of them read exclusively in print; Meo, 2016); when

digital readership is included, newspapers reach 8 in 10 Americans every month

(Benninghoff, 2016). The industry that serves those readers looks quite different from the

one that operated before television became a dominant medium. There are now fewer

papers. There are now different types of papers. They deliver the news on different

platforms, and more newspapers are part of large chains. The advent of television at the

end of World War II coincided with several important social and cultural changes in the

United States. Shorter work hours, more leisure, more expendable cash, movement to the

suburbs, and women joining the workforce in greater numbers all served to alter the

newspaper–reader relationship. When the war ended, circulation equaled 1.24 papers per

American household per day; today that figure is 0.37 per household per day.

Today there are more than 8,000 newspapers operating in the United States. Of

these, 14% are dailies, and the rest are weeklies (77%) and semiweeklies (8%). They

have a combined print circulation of nearly 130 million. Pass-along readership—readers

who did not originally purchase the paper—brings 100 million people a day in touch with

a daily and 200 million a week in touch with a weekly. But as we’ve seen, overall print

circulation is falling despite a growing population. Therefore, to have success and to

ensure their future, newspapers have had to adjust.

We traditionally think of the newspaper as a local medium, our town’s paper. But

two national daily newspapers enjoy large circulations and significant social and political

impact. The older and more respected is The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889 by

Charles Dow and Edward Jones. It has been ranked the most believable and credible

newspaper in every Pew Research newspaper study since 1985. Its focus is on the world

of business, although its definition of business is broad. The Journal has a circulation of

1.4 million (2.3 million including digital subscribers), and an average household income

of its readers of $150,000 makes it a favorite for upscale advertisers. In 2007 it became

part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire. The other national daily is USA

Today. Founded in 1982, it calls itself “The Nation’s Newspaper,” and despite early

derision from industry pros for its lack of depth and apparent dependence on style over

substance, it has become a serious national newspaper with significant global influence.

Today, the paper’s daily circulation of 958,000 (4.1 million including special branded

editions and digital subscriptions) suggests that readers welcome its mix of short, lively,

upbeat stories; full-color graphics; state-by-state news and sports briefs; and liberal use of

easy-to-read illustrated graphs and tables.

To be a daily, a paper must be published at least five times a week. The

circulation of big-city dailies has dropped over the past 30 years, and they continue to

lose circulation at a rate approaching 10% a year. Many old, established papers, including

the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Washington Star, have stilled their presses in recent

years. When the Chicago Daily News closed its doors, it had the sixth-highest circulation

in the country. As the United States has become a nation of transient suburb dwellers, so

too has the newspaper been suburbanized. Since 1985 the number of suburban dailies has

increased by 50%, and one, Long Island’s Newsday, is the 12th largest paper in the

country, with combined print and digital circulation of nearly 700,000.

Many weeklies and semiweeklies have prospered because advertisers have

followed them to the suburbs. Community reporting makes them valuable to those people

who identify more with their immediate environment than they do with the neighboring

big city. Suburban advertisers like the narrowly focused readership and more manageable

advertising rates. Readers looking for national and international news have countless

online sources for that information, but those looking for local and regional news as well

as the “holy trinity” of local information—high school sports, obituaries, and the police

blotter—do not.

One hundred and thirty U.S. cities are served by at least one Spanishlanguage

publication. This number has remained constant for some time as publications backed by

English-language papers, such as the Tribune Company’s Hoy (in several cities) and the

Dallas Morning News’s Al Día, join more traditional weekly and semiweekly

independent Spanish-language papers, such as the nation’s several La Voz Hispana

papers. This stability is a result of three factors. First, the big dailies have realized, as

have all media, that to be successful (and, in this case, to reverse ongoing declines in

circulation) they must reach an increasingly fragmented audience. Second, at 18% of the

population, selfdescribed Hispanic or Latino people represent not only a sizable fragment

of the overall audience but America’s fastest-growing minority group. Third, because the

newspaper is the most local of the mass media, and nonnative English speakers tend to

identify closely with their immediate locales, Spanish-language papers—like most

foreign-language papers—command a loyal readership, one attractive to advertisers who

have relatively few other ways to reach this group. In fact, annual advertising spending

on Hispanic and Latino media is growing at a rate of 17%, far exceeding that of overall

U.S. ad spending.

Another type of paper, most commonly a weekly and available at no cost, is the

alternative press. The offspring of the underground press of the 1960s antiwar,

antiracism, pro-drug culture, these papers have redefined themselves. The most

successful among them—the Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly, the Miami New Times,

and the Seattle Weekly—succeed by attracting upwardly mobile young people and young

professionals, not the disaffected counterculture readers who were their original

audiences. Their strategy of downplaying politics and emphasizing events listings, local

arts advertising, and eccentric personal classified ads has permitted the country’s 114

alternative weeklies to attract 25 million hard-copy and online readers a week. But this

figure masks the fact that the number of hard-copy readers is in decline, as content once

considered “alternative” and therefore not suited for traditional newspapers is quite at

home on the Web. In response, most alternative papers have a Web presence, and there

are now Webonly alternative “papers,” leading the industry trade group, the Association

of Alternative Newsweeklies, to change its name in 2011 to the Association of

Alternative Newsmedia. Beyond declining circulation, the trend that best characterizes

the state of contemporary alternative papers is acquisition by the dominant newspaper in

their respective cities.

The reason we have the number and variety of newspapers we do is that readers

value them. When newspapers prosper financially, it is because advertisers recognize

their worth as an ad medium. Nonetheless, the difficult truth for newspapers is that print

advertising revenues fell 8% from 2014 to 2015, typical of several years of declining

income. A 1% uptick in online advertising hardly compensated for that precipitous drop.

Of the industry’s nearly $38 billion in income in 2015, two-thirds was from advertising

and one-third from subscriptions (Barthel, 2016). Still, over $25 billion in annual ad sales

suggests that advertisers find newspapers’ readers an attractive audience. One reason is

the medium’s reach. Eighty percent of all Americans read a print or online paper every

month, 4 out of 10 every day, or the equivalent of a daily Super Bowl broadcast. A

second reason is newspapers are local. Supermarkets, car dealers, department stores,

movie theaters, and other local merchants who want to announce a sale or offer a coupon

or circular automatically turn to the local paper. A third reason is newspaper readers,

regardless of the platform on which they read, are attractive to advertisers: they are likely

to be more educated than are nonreaders and have annual household incomes over

$100,000.

Much of the 35% of the newspaper that is not advertising space is filled with

content provided by outside sources, specifically the news and feature services. News

services, as we’ve already seen, collect news and distribute it to their members. (They are

no longer called “wire” services because they no longer use telephone wires. Today

material is more likely to come by computer network or satellite.) Unlike the early days

of the wire services, today’s member is three times more likely to be a broadcast outlet

than a newspaper. These radio and television stations receive voice and video, as well as

written copy. In all cases, members receive a choice of material, most commonly national

and international news, state and regional news, sports, business news, farm and weather

reports, and human interest and consumer material. The feature services, called feature

syndicates, do not gather and distribute news. Instead, they operate as clearinghouses for

the work of columnists, essayists, cartoonists, and other creative individuals. Among the

material provided (by satellite, by computer, or physically in packages) are opinion

pieces such as commentaries by Ellen Goodman or Garrison Keillor; horoscope, chess,

and bridge columns; editorial cartoons, such as the work of Scott Willis and Ben

Sergeant; and comics, the most common and popular form of syndicated material.

Among the major syndicates, the best known are the New York Times News Service,

King Features, Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), The Washington Post News

Service, and United Feature Syndicate.

The newspaper industry has seen a dramatic decline in competition. This has

taken two forms: loss of competing papers and concentration of ownership. In 1923, 502

American cities had two or more competing (having different ownership) dailies. Today,

fewer than 12 have separate competing papers. With print circulation and advertising

revenues continuing to fall for urban dailies, very few cities can support more than one

paper. Congress attempted to reverse this trend with the 1970 Newspaper Preservation

Act, which allowed joint operating agreements (JOAs). A JOA permits a failing paper to

merge most aspects of its business with a successful local competitor as long as their

editorial and reporting operations remain separate. The philosophy is that it is better to

have two moreor-less independent papers in one city than to allow one to close. Six

cities, including Detroit, Michigan, and Charleston, West Virginia, currently have JOAs.

Chains do have their supporters. Although some critics see big companies as more

committed to profit and shareholder dividends, others see chains such as McClatchy,

winner of numerous Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, as turning expanded economic and

journalistic resources toward better service and journalism. Some critics see outside

ownership as uncommitted to local communities and issues, but others see balance and

objectivity (especially important in one-paper towns). Ultimately, we must recognize that

not all chains operate alike. Some operate their holdings as little more than profit centers;

others see profit residing in exemplary service. Some groups require that all their papers

toe the corporate line; others grant local autonomy. Gannett, for example, openly boasts

of its dedication to local management control.

As in other media, conglomeration has led to increased pressure on newspapers to

turn a profit. This manifests itself in three distinct but related ways—

hypercommercialism, erasure of the distinction between ads and news, and ultimately,

loss of the journalistic mission itself. Many papers, such as USA Today, The New York

Times, the Orange County Register, and Michigan’s Oakland Press and Macomb Daily,

sell ad space on their front pages, once the exclusive province of news. Other papers,

Rhode Island’s Providence Journal, for example, take this form of hypercommercialism

halfway, affixing removable sticker ads to their front pages. Many papers now permit

(and charge for) the placement of pet obituaries alongside those of deceased humans. The

Southeast Missourian sells letters-to-the-editor placement to those who want to support

political candidates.

Why so much talk about money? You and the new digital technologies are why.

You are increasingly moving your media consumption online. The Internet has

devastated newspapers’ advertising income. For example, one social networking site,

Facebook, siphoned off $1.3 billion dollars in local ad dollars from newspapers in 2016

alone, with 79% of local advertisers—the lifeblood of the industry’s hard-copy business

—cutting their print advertising to fund their digital spending (Edmonds, 2016a). The

Internet has proven equally financially damaging in its attack on newspapers’ classified

advertising business. Before the Internet, classified advertising was the exclusive domain

of local newspapers. Today, the Internet overwhelms newspapers’ one-time dominance

through commercial online classified advertising sites (for example, eBay, Cars.com, and

Traderonline.com), advertisers connecting directly with customers on their own sites and

bypassing newspapers altogether, and communitarian-minded (that is, free community-

based) sites. Craigslist, for example, originating in San Francisco in 1995, is now in more

than 700 cities across 70 different countries. Craigslist alone cost local papers more than

$5 billion in classified ad revenues from 2000 to 2007, and as a whole, online classified

sites have reduced papers’ income from classified advertising from $20 billion in 2000 to

under $5 billion today (Seamans & Zhu, 2013; Edmonds et al., 2013). Advertising losses

are most striking in employment (more than 90%) and auto sales classifieds (more than

80%; Edmonds et al., 2013). To counter career sites like Monster.com, about one-third of

the papers across the country created their own national service, CareerBuilder, which

rivals Monster’s number of listings but not income. Two hundred dailies also have an

affiliation with Yahoo!’s HotJobs service. Dozens more work with competitor-turned-

partner Monster.com. To counter online auto sales classified sites, as well as real estate

and general merchandise sites, virtually every newspaper in the country now maintains its

own online classified pages. These efforts, however, have done little to save newspapers’

one-time classified dominance.

The local element offers several advantages. Local searchable and archival

classified ads offer greater efficiency than do the big national classified ad websites such

as Monster.com and Cars.com. No other medium can offer news on crime, housing,

neighborhood politics, zoning, school lunch menus, marriage licenses, and bankruptcies

—all searchable by street or zip code. Local newspapers can use their websites to develop

their own linked secondary sites, thus providing impressive detail on local industry. For

example, the San Jose Mercury News’s SiliconValley.com focuses on the digital

industries. Another localizing strategy is for online papers to build and maintain message

boards and chat groups on their sites that deal with important issues. One more bow to

the power of the Web—and users’ demands for interactivity—is that most papers have

begun their own blog sites, inviting readers and journalists to talk to one another.

Despite all this innovation and the readership it generates (“Newspapers don’t

have a demand problem,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “they have a business-

model problem”; in Fallows, 2010, p. 48), papers still face two lingering questions about

their online success. The first, as we’ve seen, is how they will earn income from their

Web operations. Internet users expect free content, and for years newspapers were happy

to provide their product at no cost, simply to establish their presence online.

Unfortunately, they now find that people are unwilling to pay for what the papers

themselves have been giving away for free online. So, newspapers have to fix their

business models.

Newspaper publishers know well that print newspaper readership in the United

States is least prevalent among younger people. A declining number of young people

reads a daily paper. Look at Figure 3. Note the dramatic difference in readership between

younger and older folks. How do you feel about the fact that so few young people read

the paper? The problem facing newspapers, then, is how to lure young people (readers of

the future) to their pages. Online and alternative weeklies might be two solutions, but the

fundamental question remains: Should newspapers give these readers what they should

want or what they do want?

E. Magazine Timeline

Magazines were a favorite medium of the British elite by the mid-1700s, and two

prominent colonial printers hoped to duplicate that success in the New World. In 1741 in

Philadelphia, Andrew Bradford published The American Magazine, or a Monthly View

of the Political State of the British Colonies, followed by Benjamin Franklin’s General

Magazine and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America. Composed

largely of reprinted British material, these publications were expensive and aimed at the

small number of literate colonists. Without an organized postal system, distribution was

difficult, and neither magazine was successful. American Magazine produced three

issues; General Magazine produced six. Yet between 1741 and 1794, 45 new magazines

appeared, although no more than three were publishing at the same time. Entrepreneurial

printers hoped to attract educated, cultured, moneyed gentlemen by copying the

successful London magazines. Even after the Revolutionary War, U.S. magazines

remained clones of their British forerunners.

In 1821 The Saturday Evening Post appeared. Starting life in 1729 as Ben

Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, it was to continue for the next 148 years. Among other

successful early magazines were Harper’s (1850) and Atlantic Monthly (1857). Cheaper

printing and growing literacy fueled expansion of the magazine as they had for the book

(see the chapter on books for more). But an additional factor in the success of the early

magazines was the spread of social movements such as abolitionism and labor reform.

These issues provided compelling content, and a boom in magazine publishing began. In

1825 there were 100 magazines in operation; 25 years later there were 600. Because

magazine articles increasingly focused on matters of importance to U.S. readers,

publications such as the United States Literary Gazette and American Boy began to look

less like London publications and more like a new and unique product. Journalism

historians John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman called this “the time of significant

beginnings” (1991, p. 13); it was during this time that the magazine developed many of

the characteristics we associate with it even today. Magazines and the people who staffed

them began to clearly differentiate themselves from other publishing endeavors, such as

books and newspapers. The concept of specialist writers took hold, and their numbers

rose. In addition, numerous and detailed illustrations began to fill the pages of magazines.

The modern era of magazines can be divided into two parts, each characterized by

a different relationship between medium and audience. Mass circulation popular

magazines began to prosper in the post–Civil War years. In 1865 there were 700

magazines publishing; by 1870 there were 1,200; by 1885 there were 3,300. Crucial to

this expansion was the women’s magazine. Suffrage—women’s right to vote—was the

social movement that occupied its pages, but a good deal of content could also be

described as how-to for homemakers. Advertisers, too, were eager to appear in the new

women’s magazines, hawking their brand-name products. First published at this time are

several magazines still familiar today, for example Good Housekeeping.

In 1956 Collier’s declared bankruptcy and became the first of the big mass

circulation magazines to cease publication. But its fate, as well as that of other mass

circulation magazines, had actually been sealed in the late 1940s and 1950s following the

end of World War II. Profound alterations in the nation’s culture—and, in particular, the

advent of television—changed the relationship between magazines and their audience.

No matter how large their circulation, magazines could not match the reach of television.

Magazines did not have moving pictures or visual and oral storytelling. Nor could

magazines match television’s timeliness. Magazines were weekly, whereas television was

continuous. Nor could they match television’s novelty. In the beginning, everything on

television was of interest to viewers. As a result, magazines began to lose advertisers to

television.

F. Magazine

Exactly who is the audience for magazines? Industry research indicates that it is a

large and demographically attractive audience. Ninety percent of American adults

consume magazines either in print or digital form, a proportion that grows to 95% when

considering only people younger than 25. They read on average 8.6 print magazines a

month, and the heaviest readers tend to be younger, under 35. It is a diverse audience, as

these data remain near constant across all ethnicities. In fact, African American, Hispanic

American, Asian American, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults read more

magazines a month than does the overall American population. You can see the level of

readership for these different groups in Figure 1. It is also an educated and well-off

audience. For example, magazines are the preferred medium among households with

incomes over $150,000.

Magazine specialization exists and succeeds because the demographically similar

readership of individual publications is attractive to advertisers. Marketers want to target

ads for their products and services to those most likely to respond to them. Despite

modest revenue declines over the last few years, this remains a lucrative situation for the

magazine industry. The average editorial-to-advertising-page ratio is 54% to 46%, and

the industry takes in more than $28 billion a year in revenue, about 50% of that amount

generated by advertising. Magazines command 7.5% of all the dollars spent on major

media advertising in this country (Sass, 2016c; “U.S. Ad Spending,” 2016). And of

particular importance to marketers, the return on advertising dollars spent is higher for

magazines than for any other medium (Guaglione, 2016).

Magazines price advertising space in their pages based on circulation, the total

number of issues of a magazine that are sold. These sales can be either subscription or

single-copy sales. For the industry as a whole, about 90% of all sales are subscription.

Some magazines, however—Woman’s Day, TV Guide, and Penthouse, for example—

rely heavily on singlecopy sales. Subscriptions have the advantage of an ensured ongoing

readership, but they are sold below the cover price and have the additional burden of

postage included in their cost to the publisher. Single-copy sales are less reliable, but to

advertisers they are sometimes a better barometer of a publication’s value to its readers.

Single-copy readers must consciously choose to pick up an issue, and they pay full price

for it.

Regardless of how circulation occurs, it is monitored through research. The Audit

Bureau of Circulations (ABC) was established in 1914 to provide reliability to a booming

magazine industry playing loose with self-announced circulation figures. In 2012,

recognizing that “circulation” should include digital editions and apps, the ABC became

platform agnostic and renamed itself the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). The AAM

provides reliable circulation figures as well as important population and demographic

data. Circulation data are often augmented by measures of pass-along readership, which

refers to readers who neither subscribe nor buy single copies but who borrow a magazine

or read one in places like a doctor’s office or library. The print version of WebMD

Magazine, for example, has a circulation of 1.4 million, but as it sits in doctors’ offices

and is passed along, its total monthly readership can reach as high as 10 million.

Even though the number of ad pages in print magazines has been declining, total

readership of American consumer magazines, both print and digital, continues to grow,

reaching 1.19 billion editions read in 2016, up 5.5% from the previous year (Guaglione,

2017). Nonetheless, the forces that are reshaping all the mass media are having an impact

on magazines. Alterations in how the magazine industry does business are primarily

designed to help magazines compete with television and the Internet in the race for

advertising dollars. Convergence, too, has its impact.

Online magazines have emerged, made possible by convergence of magazines

and the Internet. Rare is the magazine that does not produce a digital version, and almost

all that do offer additional content and a variety of interactive features not available to

readers of their hard-copy versions. Different publications opt for different payment

models, but most provide online-only content for free and charge nonsubscribers for

access to print magazine content that appears online. This strategy encourages readers

who might otherwise go completely digital (and drop print) to renew their subscriptions.

This is important to publishers and their advertisers because ads in hard-copy magazines

are more effective and therefore more valuable: print magazine advertising produces

greater increases in brand awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent than online

magazine advertising.

As with books and newspapers, mobile digital media are reshaping the

relationship between magazines and readers. In 2012, a group of major magazine

publishers came together to create Next Issue, basically a Netflix for magazines. Now

called Texture, a relatively low monthly fee gains readers full access to more than 300

magazines. Then in 2015, Magzter, which already offered a “newsstand” of apps that

allowed users to buy single issues of more than 5,000 magazines, expanded its service to

include the sale of full subscriptions to more than 8,000 titles. Today, there are a number

of other digital subscription services operating. Zinio offers access to more than 5,000

magazines. Amazon Prime, through a feature called Prime Reading, gives its members

access to a number of high-profile magazines. Although app subscribers make up only

4% of overall magazine circulation (Brustein, 2015), many publications have very sizable

mobile readership, for example ESPN the Magazine’s 65.5 million monthly unique

readers, Forbes’s 36.2 million, and WebMD’s 31.5 million.

Another trend finds its roots in the magazine industry’s response to an

increasingly crowded media environment. Custom publishing is the creation of

magazines specifically designed for an individual company seeking to reach a very

narrowly defined audience, such as favored customers or likely users or buyers. If you’ve

ever stayed at an Airbnb home-sharing location, for example, you might well have come

across Airbnb Magazine, distributed for free to member hosts. WebMD, the medical

information website, distributes for free to 85% of all American doctors’ offices a

magazine of the same name. Its monthly print circulation of 1.4 million is read by more

than 10 million people, a number further expanded by its 78 million digital readers and

the more than 53 million unique monthly mobile visitors (WebMD, 2016). Forty-one

percent of business-to-customer marketers use custom print magazines, as do 36% of

business-to-business marketers (Spaight, 2016). Naturally, such specifically targeted

magazines take advantage of readers’ engagement with and affinity for magazine

advertising.

As we’ve seen, the move toward specialization in magazines was forced by the

emergence of television as a mass-audience, national advertising medium. But television

again— specifically cable television—eventually came to challenge the preeminence of

magazines as a specialized advertising medium. Advertiser-supported cable channels

survive using precisely the same strategy as magazines—they deliver to advertisers a

relatively large number of consumers who have some important demographic trait in

common. Similar competition also comes from specialized online content providers, such

as ESPN’s several sports-oriented sites and the Discovery Channel Online. Magazines are

well positioned to fend off these challenges for several reasons.

Sometimes controversial is the influence that some advertisers attempt to exert

over content. This influence is always there, at least implicitly. A magazine editor must

satisfy advertisers as well as readers. One common way advertisers’ interests shape

content is in the placement of ads. Airline ads are moved away from stories about plane

crashes. Cigarette ads rarely appear near articles on lung cancer. In fact, it is an accepted

industry practice for a magazine to provide advertisers with a heads-up, alerting them that

soon-to-be-published content may prove uncomfortable for their businesses. Advertisers

can then request a move of their ad, or pull it and wait to run it in the next issue.

Magazines, too, often entice advertisers with promises of placement of their ads adjacent

to relevant articles.

G. A Compact History of the Film Industry

We are no longer illiterate in the grammar of film, nor are movies as simple as the

early Lumière offerings. Consider the sophistication necessary for filmmakers to produce

a fantastic feature such as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and the skill required for

audiences to read Manchester by the Seas’s (2016) unannounced shifts in time. How we

arrived at this contemporary medium–audience relationship is a wonderful story. Early

newspapers were developed by businesspeople and patriots for a small, politically

involved elite that could read, but the early movie industry was built largely by

entrepreneurs who wanted to make money entertaining everyone. Unlike television,

whose birth and growth were predetermined and guided by the already well-established

radio industry, there were no precedents, no rules, and no expectations for movies.

In 1873 former California governor Leland Stanford needed help winning a bet he

had made with a friend. Convinced that a horse in full gallop had all four feet off the

ground, he had to prove it. He turned to well-known photographer Eadweard Muybridge,

who worked on the problem for four years before finding a solution. In 1877 Muybridge

arranged a series of still cameras along a stretch of racetrack. As the horse sprinted by,

each camera took its picture. The resulting photographs won Stanford his bet, but more

important, they sparked an idea in their photographer. Muybridge was intrigued by the

appearance of motion created when photos are viewed sequentially. He began taking

pictures of numerous kinds of human and animal action. To display his work, Muybridge

invented the zoopraxiscope, a machine for projecting slides onto a distant surface.

The process of photography was first developed by French inventor Joseph

Nicéphore Niépce around 1816. Although there had been much experimentation in the

realm of image making at the time, Niépce was the first person to make practical use of a

camera and film. He photographed natural objects and produced color prints.

Unfortunately, his images would last only a short time. Niépce’s success, however,

attracted the attention of countryman Louis Daguerre, who joined with him to perfect the

process. Niépce died before the 1839 introduction of the daguerreotype, a process of

recording images on polished metal plates, usually copper, covered with a thin layer of

silver iodide emulsion. When light reflected from an object passed through a lens and

struck the emulsion, the emulsion would etch the image on the plate. The plate was then

washed with a cleaning solvent, leaving a positive or replica image.

Edison built the first motion picture studio near his laboratory in New Jersey. He

called it Black Maria, the common name at that time for a police paddy wagon. It had an

open roof and revolved to follow the sun so the performers being filmed would always be

illuminated. The completed films were not projected. Instead, they were run through a

kinetoscope, a sort of peep show device. Often they were accompanied by music

provided by another Edison invention, the phonograph. Patented in 1891 and

commercially available three years later, the kinetoscope quickly became a popular

feature in penny arcades, vaudeville halls, and big-city Kinetoscope parlors. This marked

the beginning of commercial motion picture exhibition.

The Lumière brothers made the next advance. Their initial screenings

demonstrated that people would sit in a darkened room to watch motion pictures

projected on a screen. The brothers from Lyon envisioned great wealth in their ability to

increase the number of people who could simultaneously watch a movie. In 1895 they

patented their cinématographe, a device that both photographed and projected action.

Within weeks of their Christmastime showing, long lines of enthusiastic moviegoers were

waiting for their makeshift theater to open. Edison recognized the advantage of the

cinématographe over his kinetoscope, so he acquired the patent for an advanced projector

developed by U.S. inventor Thomas Armat. On April 23, 1896, the Edison Vitascope

premiered in New York City, and the American movie business was born.

The Edison and Lumière movies were typically only a few minutes long and

showed little more than filmed reproductions of reality—celebrities, weight lifters,

jugglers, and babies. They were shot in fixed frame (the camera did not move), and there

was no editing. For the earliest audiences, this was enough. But soon the novelty wore

thin. People wanted more for their money. French filmmaker Georges Méliès began

making narrative motion pictures, that is, movies that told a story. At the end of the 1890s

he was shooting and exhibiting one-scene, one-shot movies, but soon he began making

stories based on sequential shots in different places. He simply took one shot, stopped the

camera, moved it, took another shot, and so on. Méliès is often called the “first artist of

the cinema” because he brought narrative to the medium in the form of imaginative tales

such as A Trip to the Moon (1902).

In 1908 Thomas Edison, foreseeing the huge amounts of money that could be

made from movies, founded the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), often simply

called the Trust. This group of 10 companies under Edison’s control, holding the patents

to virtually all existing filmmaking and exhibition equipment, ran the production and

distribution of film in the United States with an iron fist. Anyone who wanted to make or

exhibit a movie needed Trust permission, which typically was not forthcoming. In

addition, the MPPC had rules about the look of the movies it would permit: They must be

one reel, approximately 12 minutes long, and must adopt a “stage perspective”; that is,

the actors must fill the frame as if they were in a stage play.

As was the case with newspapers and magazines, the advent of television

significantly altered the movie–audience relationship. But the nature of that relationship

had already been shaped and reshaped in the three decades between the coming of sound

to film and the coming of television. The first sound film was one of three films produced

by Warner Brothers. It may have been Don Juan (1926), starring John Barrymore,

distributed with synchronized music and sound effects. Or perhaps it was Warner’s more

famous The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson, which had several sound and speaking

scenes (354 words in all) but was largely silent. Or it may have been the 1928 all-sound

Lights of New York. Historians disagree because they cannot decide what constitutes a

sound film.

The popularity of talkies, and of movies in general, inevitably raised questions

about their impact on the culture. In 1896, well before sound, The Kiss had generated a

great moral outcry. Its stars, John C. Rice and May Irwin, were also the leads in the

popular Broadway play The Widow Jones, which closed with a climactic kiss. The

Edison Company asked Rice and Irwin to re-create the kiss for the big screen.

Newspapers and politicians were bombarded with complaints from the offended. Kissing

in the theater was one thing; in movies it was quite another! The then-newborn industry

responded to this and other calls for censorship with various forms of self-regulation and

internal codes. But in the early 1920s more Hollywood scandals forced a more direct

response.

By 1932 weekly movie attendance had dropped to 60 million. The Great

Depression was having its effect. Yet the industry was able to weather the crisis for two

reasons. The first was its creativity. New genres held people’s interest. Feature

documentaries such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) spoke to audience needs to

understand a world in seeming disorder. Musicals such as 42nd Street (1933) and

screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938) provided easy escapism. Gangster

movies like Little Caesar (1930) reflected the grimy reality of Depression city streets and

daily newspaper headlines. Horror films such as Frankenstein (1931) articulated audience

feelings of alienation and powerlessness in a seemingly uncontrollable time. Socially

conscious comedies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) reminded moviegoers that good

could still prevail, and the double feature with a B-movie—typically a less expensive

movie—was a welcome relief to penny-pinching working people.

When World War II began, the government took control of all patents for the

newly developing technology of television as well as of the materials necessary for its

production. The diffusion of the medium to the public was therefore halted, but its

technological improvement was not. In addition, the radio networks and advertising

agencies, recognizing that the war would eventually end and that their futures were in

television, were preparing for that day. When the war did end, the movie industry found

itself competing not with a fledgling medium but with a technologically and

economically sophisticated one. The number of homes with television sets grew from

10,000 in 1946 to more than 10 million in 1950 and 54 million in 1960. Meanwhile, by

1955 movie attendance was down to 46 million people a week, fully 25% below even the

worst attendance figures for the Depression years.

N In 1948, 10 years after the case had begun, the Supreme Court issued its

Paramount Decision, effectively destroying the studios’ hold over moviemaking. Vertical

integration was ruled illegal, as was block booking, the practice of requiring exhibitors to

rent groups of movies, often inferior, to secure a better one. The studios were forced to

sell off their exhibition businesses (the theaters). Before the Paramount Decision, the five

major studios owned 75% of the first-run movie houses in the United States; after it, they

owned none. Not only did they no longer have guaranteed exhibition, but other

filmmakers now had access to the theaters, producing even greater competition for the

dwindling number of movie patrons.

The U.S. response to its postwar position as world leader was fear. So concerned

were some members of Congress that communism would steal the people’s rights that

Congress decided to steal them first. The Hollywood chapter of the virulent

anticommunism movement we now call McCarthyism (after the Republican senator from

Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, its most rabid and public champion) was led by the House

Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its chair, J. Parnell Thomas (later

imprisoned for padding his congressional payroll). First convened in 1947, HUAC’s goal

was to rid Hollywood of communist influence. The fear was that communist, socialist,

and leftist propaganda was being secretly inserted into entertainment films by “Reds,”

“fellow travelers,” and “pinkos.” Many of the industry’s best and brightest talents were

called to testify before the committee and were asked, “Are you now or have you ever

been a member of the Communist Party?” Those who came to be known as the

Hollywood 10, including writers Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo and director

Edward Dmytryk, refused to answer the question, accusing the committee, by its mere

existence, of being in violation of the Bill of Rights. All were jailed. Rather than defend

its First Amendment rights, the film industry abandoned those who were even mildly

critical of the “Red Scare,” jettisoning much of its best talent at a time when it could least

afford to do so. In the fight against television, movies became increasingly tame for fear

of being too controversial.

H. Film

We talk of Hollywood as the “dream factory,” the makers of “movie magic.” We

want our lives and loves to be “just like in the movies.” The movies are “larger than life,”

and movie stars are much more glamorous than television stars. The movies, in other

words, hold a very special place in our culture. Movies, like books, are a culturally

special medium, an important medium. In this sense the movie–audience relationship has

more in common with that of books than with that of commercial television. Just as

people buy books, they buy movie tickets. Because the audience, rather than advertisers,

is in fact the true consumer, power rests with the audience in film more than it does in

television.

Hollywood’s record year of 1946 saw the sale of more than 4 billion tickets.

Today, Americans buy about 1.32 billion movie theater tickets a year. Domestic box

office in 2016 was $11.4 billion. Twenty-eight movies in 2016 exceeded $100 million in

U.S.–only box office. Fifty-three topped that amount worldwide, and three were billion-

dollar movies: Captain America: Civil War, Finding Dory, and Zootopia. As impressive

as these numbers may seem, like other media people, movie industry insiders remain

nervous. On a percapita basis, U.S. moviegoing is at its lowest level in more than a

century, and the number of tickets bought by the average moviegoer is the lowest (3.5

tickets a year) that it has been since 1999 (Lang & Rainey, 2016). The question the movie

industry is asking about the future, one you can try to answer yourself after reading the

essay, is “Will We Continue to Go to the Movies?”

There are three component systems in the movie industry—production,

distribution, and exhibition. Each is undergoing significant change in the contemporary

digital, converged media environment. Production is the making of movies. About 700

feature-length films are produced annually in the United States, a large increase over the

early 1980s, when, for example, in 1985, 288 features were produced. As we’ll see later

in this chapter, significant revenues from home video are one reason for the increase, as

is growing conglomerate ownership that demands more product for more markets.

Technology, too, has affected production. Almost all American feature films are shot

digitally. The industry had been slow to make the change from film, citing the “coldness”

of digital’s look and digital’s roots in technology rather than art. But the success of

digitally shot movies big (all-time box office champ, 2009’s Avatar) and small (1999’s

Blair Witch Project, made for $35,000, earning $220 million worldwide) has moved

filmmakers to greater use of digital capture as a primary shooting format. In fact, even

though film is sometimes favored for titles requiring a specific look or feel, the Western

The Hateful Eight (2015), Forties-style musical La La Land (2016), and historical

docudrama Jackie (2016) for example, film shooting has become sufficiently rare that

major providers like Fugifilm and Kodak have ceased production of motion picture stock.

Distribution was once as simple as making prints of films and shipping them to

theaters. Now it means supplying these movies to television networks, cable and satellite

networks, makers of DVDs, and Internet streaming companies. In all, a distributor must

be able to offer a single movie in as many as 250 different digital formats worldwide to

accommodate the specific needs of the many digital retailers it must serve (Ault, 2009).

The sheer scope of the distribution business ensures that large companies (most typically

the big studios themselves) will dominate. In addition to making copies and guaranteeing

their delivery, distributors now finance production and take responsibility for advertising

and promotion and for setting and adjusting release dates. The advertising and promotion

budget for a Hollywood feature usually equals 50% of the production costs. Sometimes,

the ratio of promotion to production costs is even higher.

There are currently 43,000 movie screens in the United States spread over 6,000

sites. The four largest American movie chains are Regal Cinemas (7,334 screens), AMC

Entertainment (5,206 screens), Cinemark USA (4,457 screens), and Carmike Cinemas

(2,917 screens). These four control approximately half of all the country’s screens and

sell nearly 80% of all tickets (Dawson, 2016b). It is no surprise to any moviegoer that

exhibitors make much of their money on concession sales of items that typically have an

80% profit margin, accounting for 40% of a theater’s profits. This is the reason that

matinees and budget nights are attractive promotions for theaters. A low-priced ticket

pays dividends in overpriced popcorn and Dots. It’s also the reason that 60% of

moviegoers sneak contraband food into the theater.

Studios are at the heart of the movie business, and it’s the studios that come to

mind when we talk about Hollywood. There are major studios, corporate independents,

and independent studios. The majors, who finance their films primarily through the

profits of their own business, include Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, 20th

Century Fox, Universal, MGM/UA, and Disney. The corporate independent studios (so

named because they produce movies that have the look and feel of independent films)

include Sony Pictures Classics, New Line Cinema (Warner), Fox Searchlight, and Focus

Features (Universal). These companies are in fact specialty or niche divisions of the

majors, designed to produce more sophisticated—but less costly—fare to (1) gain

prestige for their parent studios and (2) earn significant cable, EST, and DVD income

after their critically lauded and good word-of-mouth runs in the theaters. Focus Features,

for example, is responsible for 2005 Best Picture Oscar-winner Brokeback Mountain and

2014 nominee The Theory of Everything; Fox Searchlight is home to 2013 Best Picture

winner 12 Years a Slave and 2014’s winner Birdman; New Line Cinema released the

three Lord of the Rings films and all the Rush Hour movies; Sony Pictures Classics

brought to the screen Best Picture nominees Whiplash (2014) and Midnight in Paris.

Flat box office, increased production costs largely brought about by digital special

effects wizardry, and the “corporatization” of the independent film are only a few of the

trends reshaping the film industry. There are several others, however, including some that

many critics see as contributors to Hollywood’s changing future. The marketing and

publicity departments of big companies love concept films—movies that can be

described in one line. Godzilla is about a giant, rogue monster. Jurassic Park is about

giant, rogue dinosaurs. Transformers is about good giant alien robots who fight bad giant

alien robots.

H Before a movie is released, sometimes even before it is made, its script,

concept, plot, and characters are subjected to market testing. Often multiple endings are

produced and tested with sample audiences by companies such as National Research

Group and Marketcast. Despite being “voodoo science, a spin of the roulette wheel,” says

Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, audience testing is “believed in like a

religion at this point. It’s considered part of filmmaking” (quoted in Scribner, 2001, p.

D3). This testing produced data indicating that Fight Club (1999) would be “the flop of

the century”; it made more than $100 million at the box office and has become a cult

favorite, earning even more on cable, DVD, VOD, and EST.

How many Batmans have there been? Jurassic Parks? American Pies and

Terminators? RoboCop kept the peace in 1987 and again in 2014. The surf at Point Break

was just as gnarly in 2015 as it was in 1991. Godzilla flattened cities in 1954 and 1998, as

well as in 2014. Hollywood is making increasing use of franchise films, movies that are

produced with the full intention of producing several more sequels. Classic film

franchises like James Bond (beginning in 1962) and Star Wars (beginning in 1977)

continue to churn out sequels over several decades with new casts, and film series based

on book series like Harry Potter (beginning in 2001) are begun before all of the books are

even written.

Given the fall-off in frequent moviegoing by younger audiences, producer Mike

Medavoy worries, “Millennials can play games or watch movies at home on a big screen,

so repeating the same kind of content over and over at the movie theater doesn’t really

make sense. If you don’t give people something that’s fresh and new, they’re not going to

show up” (in Lang & Rainey, 2016, p. 43). Nonetheless, teens and preteens still make up

a large proportion of the movie audience, and as a result many movies are adaptations of

television shows, comic books, and video games. In recent years CHiPs, Bewitched, Get

Smart, Sex and the City, The Simpsons, 21 Jump Street, and Star Trek have moved from

small to big screens. The 6 Million Dollar Man made it to the movies, too, but with an

upgrade to the Six Billion Dollar Man. The Addams Family, Dennis the Menace, Richie

Rich, Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman have traveled from the comics, through

television, to the silver screen. Sin City, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain

America, The Avengers, X-Men, Road to Perdition, 300, Men in Black, Fantastic Four,

and The Hulk have moved directly from comic books and graphic novels to movies.

Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, and Mortal Kombat went from Xbox to box office.

The convenience of digital movies has encouraged this digital distribution and

exhibition. In 2014 Paramount announced that it would no longer release movies on film

in the United States, with the other majors quickly following suit (Scott & Dargis, 2014).

As a result, almost all American movie screens have been converted to digital exhibition.

Digital exhibition’s savings in money and labor to both exhibitor and distributor are

dramatic. Rather than making several thousand film prints to be physically transported to

individual theaters in metal cans, the electronic distribution of digital movies costs under

$100 per screen for the entire process.

As they have with all media, smartphones, tablets, and social media are reshaping

the relationship between audiences and the movies. Although director David Lynch is

skeptical of small-screen viewing, stating, “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone,

you will never in a trillion years experience the film” (in Kenny, 2016, p. AR16), people

are indeed starting to warm to movies on their mobile devices. In late 2016, for the first

time, mobile devices accounted for more than 50% of all Internet video views, with half

of all that consumption longer than 5 minutes (Ooyala, 2016), and a quarter of all mobile

device owners daily watch movies or television shows.

Module 3_Week 3_Print, Books, and Film_Media and Culture

Students also viewed