On the surface, the American newspaper industry appears to have changed little from 1945 to 1965, remaining both healthy and prosperous: The number of newspapers in 1965 was about the same as that of 1945, while during the twenty-year period advertising revenues increased substantially despite new competition from television. The vast majority of newspapers went to press with improved but old-fashioned letterpress methods in 1965, just as in 1945. And newspaper reporters still professed a strong, if now somewhat shaken, faith in the federal government at the end of the twenty years.

But the surface appearance of both stability and profitability obscured profound change. In the two decades after World War II, the business of newspaper publishing changed significantly in myriad ways. By 1965, editors and publishers had recognized the extent of these changes and were beginning to adjust. Each of the changes was significant of its own accord, and the range of challenges throughout the twenty-year period combined to transform newspapers and the nation they served by 1965. This transformation was evident, to varying degrees, in newspapers' content, their production methods, their economic position within the overall media marketplace, and their relationship with government. Newspapers--some more than others--made strides to keep up with and overcome some of these challenges. But in each of these areas, newspapers as a group were slow to respond to the problems facing journalism.

In content, newspapers began a long, slow journey to update their methods of reporting. The most significant trend during the two decades was the movement toward interpretation of the news. Rooted in the 1930s, interpretation spread in the 1950s as a response to the sensational rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The trend's roots did not go deep, however, and in 1965 proponents such as Lester Markel of the New York Times were continuing to complain that newspapers remained far too wedded to nuts-and-bolts, objective reporting of the facts offered without elaboration or explanation. Newspapers' coverage of the civil rights movement was symptomatic of the industry's commitment to its old ways and its resistance to change. Reporters tended to cover the movement from crisis to crisis, ignoring the long-term trends the crises represented. The deep-seated social movement of blacks' struggle for equality and the trend's roots in social and demographic shifts were often ignored. Most newspapers' reaction to the movement, and to news in general, was centered on the occurrence of day-to-day events. While the largest, most successful newspapers--such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times--indeed stepped up their interpretation of the day's news, the vast majority of American newspapers did not. Most newspapers looked much the same two decades after World War II as they did the day the war ended. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted in a comparison of newspapers in 1947 and 1962, "On the front pages at least, not many of the stories on the 1962 front pages would have looked out of place on the 1947 pages." Postwar changes in newspapers' editorial content, the magazine concluded, could "hardly be called revolutionary."⁽¹⁾

In coming to terms with television, their most threatening rival of the postwar years, newspapers were equally slow to adapt. In the 1940s and 1950s, editors and publishers dismissed television as an entertainment medium of limited threat--either in advertising or in news-gathering. If anything, television seemed to increase newspapers' readership, editors believed. Newspapers made a few token efforts to keep up with this upstart medium by hiring television critics and by publishing television listings. But, overall, newspapers did little as television, year by year, made further advances into their national advertising revenues and became more deeply ingrained as part of American life. By the 1960s, when television ventured further into newsgathering, publishers at last recognized their electronic rival as a threat. But in the 1960s as in the 1950s, there was little editors could do to combat the new medium.

In the audience newspapers served, vast changes swept the industry in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Newspaper publishers could only watch helplessly as the demographics of the newspaper audience shifted in the postwar years. As suburbs grew, so did suburban newspapers. As the big cities stagnated, so did metropolitan journals. Meantime, the postwar baby boom generation grew up in front of the television, and newspaper sales per household declined while overall newspaper circulation grew but slowly. Television's increasing news coverage coincided with the growth and expanded news coverage of the suburban press; together they weakened readers' attachment to metropolitan journals.

The changes in audience, competition, and content were part of a larger shift in the business environment that profoundly affected the financial viability of American newspaper publishing. Publishers' costs of doing business rose, both in wages and materials. New production methods that would eventually offset these rising costs were introduced in the 1940s, spread in the 1950s, and took firm root in the 1960s. But conversion to the new printing methods was hindered by publishers' commitment to letterpress methods, which remained entrenched both by union commitments to the old ways and by the high capital costs of updating pressrooms. Publishers had invested heavily in new presses after World War II and were reluctant to start over.

All of these business trends were tempered and partially concealed by a fortuitous characteristic of the postwar years--the booming economy. The prosperous national economy, and the accompanying boom in advertising revenues, minimized many of the threats to newspapers. Television's capture of national advertising revenues was obscured, as were the challenges of rising costs, suburbanization, and new technologies. An abundance of advertising revenues slowed newspapers' response to these challenges until the early 1960s, when the trends accelerated and threatened newspapers' very existence, particularly the metropolitan journals. Also obscuring many of these trends was the very real health of much of the newspaper industry, particularly the suburban dailies. It was this overall health, particularly in suburban and monopoly markets, that encouraged the growth of chains in this period.

In their relationship with government, newspapers and journalists recognized in the 1950s and 1960s that their trust in government officials was eroding significantly. The growing Cold War secrecy took its toll on the long-standing journalistic acceptance of the government's military aims. In the 1950s, journalists believed that government officials were using Cold War secrecy as an excuse to keep other, non-military matters confidential. This spread of government secrecy from military matters to non-military affairs prompted a greater distrust of government at all levels and a more adversarial stance by reporters. Such a response was to be expected given the unprecedented nature of the peacetime secrecy journalists faced in the early Cold War years. Reporters had long resented any peacetime withholding of information; what was new in the postwar era was the mushrooming extent of secrecy--at both federal and state levels. Journalists' concern with government secrecy and federal information policies was further heightened by the news management techniques of the Kennedy administration. The press-government relationship had deteriorated substantially by the time of the Vietnam War.

Of course, accurate generalizations about the newspaper industry are extremely difficult to make. The "newspaper industry" in 1965 actually consisted of 1,751 newspapers in disparate markets, each facing discrete economic and journalistic challenges. But as an industry, American daily newspapers were slow to adapt to the changes and challenges transforming them in the postwar years. In these years, they exhibited the same reluctance to change that had long been a characteristic of newspapers. James Reston of the New York Times, in summing up in 1959 the plethora of challenges facing American newspapers, remarked that print journalism was behind the times, but no more so than other institutions also facing profound change. "I don't suppose the press is in a very different position from that of almost any other institution in America today--the university, the Executive branch of the government, the Legislature," Reston said. "We are making progress, but the basic problem of the country is that we are in a kind of race with our own history, and its pace is so swift that we should be going faster, we should be quicker, we should be achieving more than we are achieving." The press wasn't keeping up with the pace of society, Reston said, but neither were most other American institutions. "Nobody is doing as well as he could in this particular generation," Reston concluded.⁽²⁾ Tom Leathers, editor of the Country Squire in Kansas City, Missouri, summarized newspapers' transformation more succinctly: "These are shifting days for our industry," he said in 1966, "and newspapers can't expect to be an exception."⁽³⁾

But why were publishers--and their newspapers--so slow to respond to such profound shifts in their environment? Their delay had its roots in publishers' perceptions of themselves in the postwar era. Predominantly, newspaper publishers saw themselves as businessmen after World War II. This was no new phenomenon; newspaper publishing had been growing steadily more complex since the mid-nineteenth century. By 1945, the days of one-man newspapers--when a hardy printer could start a newspaper with a shirttail full of type--were long gone. Newspapers were phenomenally expensive both to establish and to operate. Both the equipment and the manpower required for even a small-town newspaper were extensive. Newspaper publishers--though certainly concerned with the public they served and committed to the journalistic ideals they followed--were primarily concerned with operating sound, healthy businesses. At most newspapers, journalistic endeavors were of secondary importance to profitability.

To the vast majority of publishers, then, the postwar advertising boom mitigated against a response to the changes descending upon newspapers in this period. The vast majority of publishers continued to reap healthy profits in the earliest postwar years. As most newspapers continued to make money, it was certainly no surprise that newspaper owners remained unalarmed about potential threats. In the case of television, to repeat one example noted earlier, the new medium's inroads into newspapers' national advertising was minimized by the heady profits most newspapers were making.

But the postwar boom was not the only mitigating factor against newspaper response to the change in its business environment. Equally important was a long-entrenched assumption held by publishers, a mindset that discouraged them from responding decisively to environmental changes. Throughout the postwar years, publishers assumed that the trend toward consolidation and mergers in the newspaper industry--a long-term process that had been underway for decades--was a monolithic, natural process that was beyond the control of businessmen to reverse. This thinking was typified in the editorials of Editor & Publisher--the leading trade journal of the daily newspaper industry--and in articles by the postwar era's leading analyst of newspaper industry trends, Raymond B. Nixon. Both Editor & Publisher editor Robert U. Brown and Nixon consistently espoused the idea that newspaper closings and mergers were naturally occurring events. They believed that the newspaper industry was steadily evolving so that each American city or town could support just one newspaper and no more. It was certainly understandable that Brown, Nixon, and most publishers blamed this economic trend for newspapers' problems; the number of daily newspapers had been declining so long (since 1919 to be exact) that to publishers the steady diminution seemed the natural procession of events. Moreover, these arguments were an effective response to critics' charges of monopolistic tendencies in the newspaper industry, and in this respect their arguments had some validity. But while there is little doubt that newspaper trends resulted from long-term economic factors--not publishers' greed--there is also little doubt that this assumption was a strong indicator--and also a cause--of the passivity that dominated newspaper publishing in the postwar years, particularly in the booming years of high profits in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

But publishers held fast onto these assumptions in the prosperous postwar years, reinforcing their passivity at a time when striking developments were transforming their business environment, a time when more decisive action might have strengthened many newspapers. This passivity, as noted earlier, led newspapers to act far too slowly to take advantage of technological developments. Publishers turned to new printing methods only briefly in the late 1940s, and the newspaper industry as a whole continued to spend but meager amounts on research throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The newspapers that did pioneer in the development of new technology--the Wall Street Journal, with its multiple printing plans using Teletypesetting, for example--prospered. But most newspapers adopted only the technological developments that offered immediate benefits. Publishers, flush with profits in the earliest postwar years, did not invest in their future when the time was ripe. An exception was in the suburbs, where entrepreneurial publishers did invest early in the new technologies of newspaper publishing--particularly offset--and prospered from the late 1950s onward.

By the 1960s, newspaper publishers had realized that they had waited too long to confront the economic challenges facing them. By then, of course, the "crisis" in newspaper publishing was apparent, both in the accelerating pace of newspaper closures and in the proliferation of newspaper chains. But with the weight of financial pressures falling so heavily upon publishers in the mid-1960s, there were few options left for declining newspapers in competitive markets. And in the many cities in which daily newspapers had no print competition, publishers were even less inclined to be risk-takers. Profits were assured whether newspapers took risks or not.

At the same time that publishers were greatly concerned with profits, the professionalization of journalism continued in the postwar years. Ironically, working editors and journalists became more concerned with professional issues at the same time that the newspaper industry as a whole was solidifying its position as a business enterprise. This professionalization was evident in the spread of newspaper-related organizations in the postwar years and in the many efforts to improve journalism that prospered at the grass-roots level. In the late 1940s, for example, these improvement efforts were evident in the founding of the American Press Institute, the growing popularity of interpretation, and the accreditation of journalism education programs. These efforts were fueled by journalists' realization in the postwar years of the need for improved methods of newspaper writing and presentation. The complex demands of postwar life seemed to demand better newspapers, many journalists believed.

But while professionalization grew, its influence in improving newspapers was limited by the business concerns of newspapers. At the same time that journalists were calling for more interpretation of the news, the proportion of editorial space in American newspapers was dropping: The editorial-to-advertising ratio decreased from about 60-40 at World War II's end to about 40-60 shortly thereafter. This decline in the proportion of editorial material to advertising material was due to the need for increased advertising revenue to offset rising costs. Moreover, the suburbanization of the American newspaper industry--the growth of the suburban press and the decline of metropolitan journals--further pinched many metropolitan newspapers and increased their reluctance to spend money to advance their reporting methods.

The necessary advances in journalism practices to meet the challenges of a changing media environment were slowed, then, not by publishers' greed but by their caution. Publishers were too concerned about diminishing profits to divert money into editorial improvements. The essential irony of this position was that the publishers' caution was not only bad for journalism, it was also bad for business. Publishers' delay in responding to television, to suburbanization, and to the other postwar editorial challenges weakened newspapers' greatest asset--their relevance as a public affairs medium. In the meantime, television gained in influence and profits, and at newspapers' expense. Publishers' ultimate failure in the postwar years was, as some journalists of the period were quick to point out, that they looked only to economic answers--not to journalistic ones--to meet the challenges of rising costs, population shifts, and competition.

1. "1947 v. 1962: Two Days in the Press," Columbia Journalism Review, Summer 1962, 18-28.

2. Transcript of "The Press and the People," reprinted in Washington and the Press (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1959), 12-13.

3. Tom Leathers, "The Newspaper's Biggest Story," Grassroots Editor, July 1966, 29-30.