The daily newspaper industry in the United States, like the society it served, underwent tremendous change in the twenty years following World War II. The Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and other postwar changes transformed American society and newspapers' relationship to it. At the same time, daily newspapers coped with advances in printing technology, competition from television, a professionalizing workforce, and increasing corporate ownership. This study examines these major trends in the American newspaper industry from 1945 to 1965, considering especially how these trends combined and interacted in ways to fundamentally alter American print journalism by the mid-1960s.

Of necessity, this study will focus only upon the most significant trends that changed daily newspapers both as journalistic institutions and as businesses in the two decades following World War II. This dissertation does not attempt a broad survey of all newspapers' history for this twenty-year period; such a study would be too broad and fall short of our more specific goal. Instead, the focus here is limited to the trends that affected newspapers as an industry and journalists as a whole.

This research project makes an important contribution to the study of American media history by providing, for the first time, a complete history of the overall changes in the newspaper industry from 1945 to 1965. While many of these trends affecting newspapers have been studied individually, no study has examined them collectively. This study seeks to fill this void. This dissertation will detail the broad currents of change as they swept across American newspapers after World War II, exploring how these trends interacted, intersected, and built upon one another. Specifically, the study will explore how suburbanization, technological change, rising costs, an evolving relationship between newspapers and government, and emerging competition from television all interacted to transform the American daily newspaper by 1965.

The twenty-year period after World War II is especially appropriate for study. The year 1945 is a natural starting point, as newspapers were in their heyday in the booming postwar years but were beginning to face increasing competition and rising costs. Television was on the horizon. In the 1950s, suburbanization, the television boom, a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and new printing technologies would combine to transform newspapers' content and the audiences they served. By 1965, the world that newspapers covered had changed drastically, and so had newspapers. While the trends this dissertation chronicles were not complete by 1965, they were in full swing. Newspapers were being transformed.

Scholars have studied many specialized topics of interest concerning the American newspaper industry following World War II. Categories of studies have included ownership trends, changes in technology, declining newspaper competition, the press and the Cold War, and press/government relations. While there is certainly a wealth of material available about this era, the vast majority of scholarship is specialized, describing specific issues, individual journalists, or individual newspapers. No work has been done on the era as a whole to place all of the period's changes in context or to fit all of the newspaper trends together.

Moreover, the historiography of modern newspapers tends to reflect the ideological and contemporaneous concerns of historians. Historians have held particularly strong opinions about the effects of the changing economic structure of the newspaper industry on the freedom of the press. In this area as in others, modern newspaper history lacks a dispassionate account of the events since World War II. This is partially due to the fact that much of modern newspaper history has been written by journalists writing about their own profession.

Studies of newspaper history since 1945 can be divided into the following categories:

Business trends

A number of writers have considered the vast changes in the economic structure of newspapers since 1945, considering particularly the stagnation of newspaper circulation, the decline in competition, and the increase of corporate ownership. Historians have differed as to whether business trends in newspapers were a cause for great alarm or were simply the result of long-term cultural and economic trends.

Ben Bagdikian's The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media described the rapid advances in newspaper production technology prior to its publication in 1971, considering both the burgeoning increase in offset printing along with advances in teletypesetting.⁽¹⁾ By 1983, when he published The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian had come to see the increasing concentration of ownership in newspapers in the years following World War II as a threat to press freedom. More ominous, he concluded, was the control of the American media by fifty corporations beginning in the 1960s. And, unique for a historian of newspaper business trends, Bagdikian described how newspaper content had been changed by newspapers' increasing reliance upon advertising following World War II.⁽²⁾

Like Bagdikian, Bryce Rucker, in The First Freedom (1968), also viewed the growth of the news media into multinational, interconnected conglomerates as a threat to press freedom and to democracy.⁽³⁾ Similarly, Carl E. Lindstrom in The Fading American Newspaper (1960) argued that newspapers' effectiveness was diminishing because they had become primarily businesses rather than journalistic institutions. Lindstrom believed newspapers were disappearing because they had failed to compete with television.⁽⁴⁾ Like Bagdikian, Lindstrom was a veteran journalist, not a historian.

Historians have tended to view the concentration of media ownership in more neutral terms. Benjamin M. Compaine et al, in Who Owns the Media (1982), believed the trend toward mergers in the communications industry resulted from media firms' increasing profitability, which made them attractive to investors. Also, inheritance laws prompted independent owners to sell out to chains. Compaine and his co-authors argue that while chain ownership had increased by the early 1980s, no one chain held as high a percentage of overall newspaper circulation as did William Randolph Hearst at the close of World War II.⁽⁵⁾

The historian Raymond B. Nixon, in a number of studies, argued that newspapers were complemented, rather than threatened, by the emergence of television. In studies published in 1954 and 1961, Nixon maintained that the expansion of media voices that accompanied the rise of television after World War II ensured that newspapers would not monopolize the media marketplace. Moreover, he argued that newspapers were continuing to prosper despite recent mergers and consolidations, and that overall circulation of newspapers was increasing in proportion to the adult population. Nixon saw the postwar decades as an era of stability in which the lengthy decline in the number of dailies was beginning to subside, with the establishment of new dailies offsetting mergers and closures.⁽⁶⁾ Nixon, unlike Bagdikian, regarded consolidations and mergers in the newspaper industry without alarm. He argued that the vast changes in the newspaper industry since 1900 were due to economic forces, increasing homogeneity among newspapers due to journalists' standards of objectivity, rising competition from electronic media, and the rapid growth of the suburbs.⁽⁷⁾

Jon Udell has described American newspaper trends in the period under study in two books, Economic Trends in the Daily Newspaper Business, 1946 to 1970 (1970) and Economics of the American Newspaper (1978).⁽⁸⁾ Like Nixon, Udell blamed economic factors for the evolving business fortunes of the newspaper.

Historians agree that the emergence of television in the 1950s had a profound effect on the health of American newspapers. Television eventually attracted a substantial share of advertising revenues, particularly national advertising, that previously had gone to newspapers. One well-known study, Maxwell McCombs' monograph on "Mass Media in the Marketplace," concluded that the amount of money advertisers and the public spend on all media remains constant over time, and that the addition of another mass medium into the marketplace erodes advertising support for existing media.⁽⁹⁾ While McCombs and others agree on the economic effects of television upon newspapers, no scholars have examined how television affected newspaper journalism in the 1950s and 1960s.

Of course, there are other books and monographs on the economics of the American newspaper industry, though the works mentioned above cover the spectrum of the various interpretations of developments in American newspapers since 1945. However, most works that describe economic trends in newspapers fail to place those trends in the larger context of other changes newspapers were experiencing in this era.

The Press and the Cold War

The central historical event of the postwar era was the Cold War. Still, surprisingly little has been written about the relationship between the press and the Cold War. Much of the historiography maintains that the press was culpable for America's Cold War excesses, such as McCarthyism, because of newspapers' support for government policies and reporters' commitment to standards of objectivity.

James Aronson's The Press and the Cold War (1970) argued that the press unquestioningly accepted the government's aims in the Cold War and thereby promoted those aims. This naturally resulted, Aronson argued, from the fact that the news media were controlled by big business, which cooperated with and shared the interests of the government.⁽¹⁰⁾ Similarly, Louis William Liebovich's doctoral dissertation on the origins of the Cold War argued that newspapers failed to support any accommodation with Russia in the early years of growing tensions following World War II.⁽¹¹⁾

Edwin R. Bayley took a more charitable view of press practices in the early Cold War period in Joe McCarthy and the Press, published in 1981. Bayley maintained that while newspapers' commitment to objectivity and conservative politics helped McCarthy early on, by 1954 McCarthyism had forced newspapers to change for the better. Thanks to McCarthy in the early 1950s, Bayley argued, interpretive reporting and news analysis--which had their origins in the 1930s--became firmly established in American journalism.⁽¹²⁾

The Civil Rights Movement and the press

Though African-Americans' long struggle for equal rights in the American Civil Rights Movement has been well documented, there have been few books written about the interaction of the American press and the movement.

John Kneebone summarized the evolution of Southern liberal thought in Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race (1985), but Kneebone's book stopped at World War II. No comparable study exists for the years after 1945.⁽¹³⁾ Richard Lentz wrote about the newsmagazines' treatment of Martin Luther King in Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (1990), but nothing similar has been written about newspapers' coverage of the civil rights leader.⁽¹⁴⁾

Hugh Davis Graham described the reaction of one state's newspapers to desegregation in Crisis in Print: Desegregation and the Press in Tennessee (1967).⁽¹⁵⁾ Otherwise, however, book-length treatments of civil rights issues as related to the press have been rare, though many journalists have written their memoirs.⁽¹⁶⁾

Individual newspaper histories

Books abound about individual newspapers and journalists in this period. The strength of many of these works is that they cover in great detail their specialized topics. Richard Kluger's The Paper (about the New York Herald-Tribune and its ancestors), Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the Power (about the New York Times), and David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (about CBS, Time Inc., the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) are exhaustive in their detail about the organizations they profile.⁽¹⁷⁾ The specialization of these works would count as a weakness to a reader searching for a broader overview of the period. Moreover, many of the works, particularly those written by former journalists, often delve deeply into press practices and press coverage of particular issues at the expense of exploring broader issues of press-society interaction.

The professionalization of journalists

Newspapermen and women solidified their positions as professionals in the twenty years following World War II. Hallmarks of professionalization, such as college training, professional journals, and journalists' organizations, flourished in these years as journalists came to see themselves as a profession with a standard set of training and practices.

While many works have acknowledged or described this trend, few have placed it within the context of other changes also taking place within journalism in this period. However, two studies that examined the status of journalists in the 1970s and 1980s could provide valuable insights or serve as models for a historical investigation of the status of journalists following World War II. The two are John W.C. Johnstone et al, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work (1976) and David H. Weaver and Cleveland Wilhoit's The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (1986).⁽¹⁸⁾

A history of journalism higher education is William R. Lindley, Journalism and Higher Education: The Search for Academic Purpose (1975). Paul Alfred Pratte's history of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gods Within the Machine, was published in 1995.⁽¹⁹⁾ Again, what's lacking in works of this kind is any effort to tie in these trends toward professionalization with the larger context of newspaper history in this period.⁽²⁰⁾

Government/Press relations

Undoubtedly, the relationship between newspapers (and all of the news media) and the government changed dramatically in the years following World War II. Newspapers and reporters, which had tended to be uncritical of the government in the years leading up to and during the war, became increasingly critical of government officials and institutions in the 1950s and 1960s. This was due partly to the increased secrecy demanded by the government as the Cold War escalated and to the growing professionalization of journalists, who increasingly viewed themselves as watchdogs of the government and of the public interest. By the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and in the opening days of the Vietnam War, journalists were much more likely to question the motives and intentions of their government than were their journalistic forebears producing newspapers twenty years previously.

Historians have recognized this trend, though they have failed to place it in the broader context of what was happening in American newspapers in this time period. Most often, historians, particularly those who were former journalists, simply assumed that the adversary role of journalists was the appropriate one for journalists to take. See, for example, Talese's The Kingdom and the Power and Halberstam's The Powers That Be, cited above.

Of course, there are some ideological historians, as named above, who instead see the press as supporting the status quo throughout this time period. A dispassionate account of the changing status of press-government relations in this period remains to be written.

The chapters of this dissertation are divided as follows:

Chapter 1: Introduction.

The current chapter, including a statement of the theme and significance of this study, the literature review, the preliminary outline, and the sources consulted.

Chapter 2: Business trends in the Postwar Press: High Profits and Impending Change, 1945-1949.

The postwar newspaper industry was booming along with the rest of the national economy, but it nonetheless began to cope with changes and difficulties that, as it turned out, would confront American daily newspapers for the next two decades. This chapter will explore the economic health of the nation's newspapers in the opening years after World War II and briefly examine the myriad economic changes beginning to confront print journalism. The most significant of these trends--rising costs--troubled all newspapers in this period and prompted the first tentative steps toward modernizing printing technology.

Chapter 3: Improvement and criticism: The rise of press responsibility, 1945-1949.

In the postwar years, the press faced criticism from both within and without. The Hutchins Commission report of 1947, reflecting widespread criticism of the press in the postwar years, challenged the press to more responsibly cover a changing world. At the same time, the postwar years saw an increase in newspapers' self-improvement efforts, including the founding of the American Press Institute, the institution of standards for journalism education, widespread efforts to improve newspaper writing, and increased emphasis on interpretive reporting. This chapter will show how the press' self-improvement efforts reinforced and coincided with the postwar criticism of daily newspapers.

Chapter 4: Government, the Cold War, and Newspapers, 1950-1953.

The relationship between government officials and newspaper reporters began to change in the years following World War II. During the war, mainstream journalists as a group had seldom doubted the government's war aims. But a postwar rise in government secrecy paralleling the escalation of the Cold War led to increasing distrust of the government. At the same time, the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy led newspapers to question their reliance upon traditional news values and objectivity. McCarthy's mastery of the press eventually led newspapers to a greater reliance upon and acceptance of interpretative news articles. This chapter describes reporters' increasing distrust of the government in the early Cold War years and their reaction to McCarthy.

Chapter 5: The press and television, 1948-1960.

The rapid rise of television in the 1950s gave print journalists' little pause at first. While television was admittedly a threat to advertising revenues, publishers and editors saw little threat to newspapers from the new electronic medium. Television coverage of news events seemed to help, not hinder, newspaper circulation. And the economic boom of the 1950s ensured increasing advertising revenues for all media, minimizing broadcasting's threat to newspapers' advertising revenues. This chapter explores print journalists' slow accommodation to television and the adjustments broadcasting eventually forced newspapers to make.

Chapter 6: Newspapers and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1957.

The Civil Rights Movement grew just as newspapers were slowly improving their treatment of black Americans. Still, the movement's acceleration after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education posed many difficulties to the nation's publishers and editors. The movement prompted a split between Northern and Southern editors over the desegregation issue while highlighting the press' difficulty in covering sensitive social issues. This chapter explores newspapers' handling of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and editors' attempts to come to terms with the movement, one of the most important continuing news stories of the postwar years.

Chapter 7: The seeds of long-term change: Newspaper trends, 1950-1963.

Two long-term trends intersected throughout the 1950s that had profound consequences for the nation's daily newspapers. These two trends, suburbanization and rapidly improving production techniques, took root in the 1950s and forced American daily newspapers to accommodate them. This chapter considers how the spread of offset printing and other technologies first gained a foothold in American newspapers in the 1950s, benefiting smaller newspapers much more than they did larger journals. It also explores how suburbanization led to a booming suburban press and contributed to the multiplying woes of metropolitan newspapers.

Chapter 8: Kennedy and the Press, 1960-1963.

John F. Kennedy's open efforts to manage the news contributed to a widening distrust between government and journalists even as Kennedy himself enjoyed warm friendships with many individual reporters. This chapter examines Kennedy's press relations, including his many innovations in the press-presidential relationship. Kennedy's use of television tended to help the public stature of that medium, again forcing journalists to adjust. Kennedy's handling of several foreign policy crises, most notably the crises in Cuba in 1961 and 1962, caused deep resentment among journalists about his press policies.

Chapter 9: An industry in transition: Daily newspapers, 1960-1965.

A number of the trends that had converged upon newspapers during the 1940s and 1950s accelerated in the 1960s. Rising costs, new printing methods, suburbanization, and other factors all combined in the 1960s to create a crisis in metropolitan newspaper publishing. The long-time trend toward newspaper consolidations increased, and chain ownership grew. Suburban newspapers prospered. At the same time, television emerged as a more serious competitor to newspapers following several developments in the early 1960s that enhanced its credibility as a news medium, most notably the assassination of Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This chapter explores the combined effects of all of these trends upon American daily newspapers.

Chapter 10: Conclusion.

This chapter summarizes the many trends as they affected newspapers after World War II.

Primary materials for this study abounded. Conceivably, every living editor, reporter, and publisher active in the industry after World War II could have been a potential source of insights, and every newspaper in the country a possible object of study. Add to this reservoir of potential sources the vast amount of material about newspapers that has piled up since World War II--newspaper articles, memoirs, proceedings, archival records, all the rest--and the totality of primary materials quickly becomes overwhelming, even incomprehensible. Accordingly, hard choices had to be made to pare down this vast amount of primary materials to manageable levels while ensuring that the sources ultimately consulted would be the most appropriate evidence for understanding the industry's predominant trends from 1945 to 1965.

For this study's purposes, one most logical source of primary materials was the newspaper trade journals. The journals, by specializing in newspaper trade issues, spoke most directly to overall daily newspaper trends, and they offered numerous advantages to a researcher seeking to understand the industry. First, there were numerous publications providing numerous perspectives. Editor & Publisher is now, and has been since the late nineteenth century, the predominant voice of the nation's newspaper publishers. Quill and Nieman Reports are the largest forums for the nation's reporters and editors. The Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is an influential organ of the nation's newspaper editors, particularly the nation's larger dailies. Other trade journals included Journalism Quarterly, American Editor, Columbia Journalism Review, and the ANPA Bulletin. Second, these journals offered not only secondary accounts of trade-related issues but also numerous primary materials seldom available elsewhere. Between 1945 and 1965, all of the trade journals frequently printed articles by editors, publishers, and reporters commenting upon and explaining newspaper issues and trends with which the authors had direct involvement. The journals also frequently reprinted documents of great importance to the newspaper industry. Editor & Publisher, for example, frequently published reports drafted by editors' groups, studies undertaken by publishers' associations, and other valuable primary materials.

While the trade journals provided a wealth of materials for this study, other specialized materials were examined for their insights into trade issues in the postwar years. One valuable source of information about journalists' thinking in this period was the annual proceedings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The annual proceedings include verbatim reproductions of speeches and roundtable meetings at the society's annual meeting and are published yearly in book form. Materials were available locally covering the period under study.⁽²¹⁾ Another first-hand source of editors' efforts to cope with a changing industry was the annual proceedings of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, the APME Red Book. A useful source for newspaper articles from around the country about civil rights issues was the Southern Education Research Service clipping file called Facts on Film, available microfilm.⁽²²⁾ Numerous Congressional reports and transcripts of Congressional hearings on issues affecting newspapers were also studied.

Manuscript materials were plentiful. For this study, two resources of primary materials were most useful. The National Newspaper Association's library in Reston, Va., was a valuable resource of information about newspaper industry trends, as was the library of the Freedom of Information Center in Columbia, Mo. Also useful was the papers of American Society of Newspaper Editors, particularly the minutes of ASNE's board of directors' meetings, at the ASNE headquarters in Reston. In addition, the journalism collection at Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss., was consulted. The collection includes the papers of many prominent journalists and publishers, including Turner Catledge, former editor of the New York Times.

Of course, autobiographies of journalists and editors who worked during the period of study were also consulted, as well as histories--both published and unpublished--of newspapers, newspaper organizations, and press issues. These were plentiful.

1. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

2. Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

3. Bryce Rucker, The First Freedom (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).

4. Carl E. Lindstrom, The Fading American Newspaper (1960; reprint ed., Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964).

5. Benjamin M. Compaine, Christopher H. Sterling, Thomas Gruback, and J. Kendrick Noble, Jr., Who Owns the Media? Concentration of Ownership in the Mass Communications Industry, 2d ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982).

6. Raymond B. Nixon, "Trends in Daily Newspaper Ownership Since 1945," Journalism Quarterly 31 (1954): 3-14; Raymond B. Nixon and Jean Ward, "Trends in Newspaper Ownership and Inter-Media Competition," Journalism Quarterly 38 (1961): 3-14. See also Raymond B. Nixon, "Concentration and Absenteeism in Daily Newspaper Ownership," Journalism Quarterly 22 (1945): 97-114, and Raymond B. Nixon, "Implications of the Decreasing Numbers of Competitive Papers," in Communications in Modern Society, ed. Wilbur Schramm (Champagne, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1948).

7. Nixon, "Trends in Newspaper Ownership," 3-14.

8. Jon G. Udell, Economic Trends in the Daily Newspaper Business, 1946 to 1970 (Madison, Wis.: American Newspaper Publishers Association, 1970); Jon G. Udell, Economics of the American Newspaper (New York: Hastings House Communication Arts Books, 1978).

9. Maxwell McCombs, "Mass Media in the Marketplace," Journalism Monographs 24: 55-56. A quantitative analysis of intermedia competition and its effect on newspapers is David Pearce Demers, "Structural Pluralism, Intermedia Competition, and the Growth of the Corporate Newspaper in the United States," Journalism Monographs 145: 1-43.

10. James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).

11. Louis William Liebovich, "The Press and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944-1947," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1986.

12. Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

13. John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

14. Richard Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1990)

15. Hugh Davis Graham, Crisis in Print: Desegregation and the Press in Tennessee (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967).

16. Crusading Southern journalists, in particular, have published their autobiographies or have been the subject of book-length works. See J. Oliver Emmerich, Two Faces of Janus: The Saga of Deep South Change (Jackson, Miss.: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973); Ira B. Harkey, Jr., The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman (Jacksonville, Ill.: Harris-Wolfe, 1967); Gary Huey, Rebel With a Cause: P.D. East, Southern Liberalism and the Civil Rights Movement (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1985); P.D. East, The Magnolia Jungle: The Life, Times and Education of a Southern Editor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960); and Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

17. Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (New York: Knopf, 1986); Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969); David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York, Knopf, 1979).

18. John W.C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bowman, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Journalists and Their Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). The similarity between the titles of the two books is intentional, as the latter study updates the former.

19. William R. Lindley, Journalism and Higher Education: The Search for Academic Purpose (Stillwater, Okla.: Journalistic Services, 1975); Paul Alfred Pratte, Gods Within the Machine: A History of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1923-1993 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1995).

20. A brief but useful account of the history of journalism education is included in Wm. David Sloan, Makers of the Media Mind: Journalism Educators and their Ideas (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), 1-22.

21. American Society of Newspaper Editors, Problems of Journalism: Proceedings of the ... convention, American Society of Newspaper Editors (Washington, D.C.: The Society, 1948-1981).

22. Facts on Film, Southern Education Reporting Service, Fisk University Library, Nashville, Tennessee.

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