The end of World War II heralded both challenges and opportunities for the nation's newspapers. Like many of their fellow businessmen and women, publishers looked forward to a booming postwar economy unleashed from manpower shortages and government controls on raw materials. Yet publishers and editors would soon face problems peculiar to the newspaper business: The growing difficulty of covering a changing and complex world; a pronounced public criticism of the press; the rapidly expanding cost of doing business; and the prospect of a tough new competitor, television. The changing world challenged newspapers on two fronts, first as businesses that must adjust to it, second as journalistic institutions that must explain it. These complex, persistent challenges, as it turned out, would confront newspapers for decades.

In the earliest postwar years, though, business challenges of reverting to a peacetime economy were paramount, and other problems seemed remote. Television was still too underdeveloped to be a serious competitor. Criticism of newspapers, on the rise through the 1930s, had abated during World War II as publishers and editors had thrown themselves into the war effort with gusto. Press criticism would certainly resurface and claim publishers' attention--the 1947 Hutchins Commission report would see to that--but concerns about newspaper content were subordinated in the early postwar years to the more practical problems of doing business.

While American daily newspapers emerged from World War II on a solid financial footing, publishers were nonetheless troubled by several postwar business trends. On the one hand, advertising revenues and newspaper circulation both improved significantly in the first years after the war. But the expense of putting out a daily newspaper also climbed dramatically in this period, threatening profits and prompting the first tentative steps toward modernizing newspaper printing. This combination of steadily rising costs and impending technological change--some were calling it "a revolution" even then--tempered publishers' optimism in the profitable postwar years.

The times were indeed booming, a welcome turnaround from the crippling Depression and stagnant wartime years. All the indicators of newspaper health were bright at war's end, including the most closely monitored indicator, circulation. "The outstanding thing which the war taught us about our newspaper business," declared the circulation manager of the Pittsburgh Press, "was that people need 'em and read 'em."⁽¹⁾ By the end of 1945, daily newspaper circulation had climbed to an all-time high of 48,384,188, a stunning increase of more than 2.5 million readers, or 5.3 percent, over 1944. The gain represented the largest numerical and percentage increase of any year since 1920. "The circulation figures tend to demonstrate the public must be satisfied only by the permanent newspaper record of the news," reflected Editor & Publisher, the industry's leading trade journal, in 1946.⁽²⁾

Significantly, newspapers continued to attract more readers in the years after the war, even without the pull of wartime headlines. Total circulation rose by 5.2 percent in 1946 and by about 1 percent in both 1947 and 1948. The steadily improving postwar figures, crowed Editor & Publisher, "set at rest once and for all the prognostication of some who said the `fantastic' circulations of wartime would subside when battlefront news ceased and the boys came home." Editor & Publisher, like other trade journals, repeatedly equated rising circulations with increasing public approval of newspapers.⁽³⁾

The year 1945 also marked a turning point in another yardstick of publishers' financial health: the number of daily journals. For the first time in decades, the number of daily newspapers increased slightly, to 1,749, with ten new dailies offsetting eight closures during the year. The longtime trend of declining daily newspapers appeared to have reversed. The number of dailies increased to 1,763 in 1946, 1,769 in 1947, and 1,781 in 1948. "It is obvious that newspapers today are healthier than they have been for fifteen years," contended Editor & Publisher in a 1946 editorial. "They also have a brighter future than at any time in that period."⁽⁴⁾

Indeed, the bright future was reflected in all classifications of newspaper revenue: circulation, national advertising, and local advertising. The increased circulation brought in increased revenue, and circulation income, which for many years had covered only newspapers' expenses, even surpassed national advertising revenue for many newspapers. National advertising also continued to increase. It reached $216,000,000 in 1945, up by 7.4 percent over the previous year. Local advertising revenue also boomed.⁽⁵⁾

In all indices of growth, newspapers continued to perform well from 1946 to 1949 as compared to overall growth in the national economy. Total newspaper employment grew faster than total United States employment. The number of pages printed in newspapers of more than 100,000 circulation increased by one-quarter. Newspaper advertising revenues and newsprint consumption grew faster than the gross national product. And circulation grew at about the same rate as the adult population.⁽⁶⁾

The growth in newspaper advertising in the postwar years was profound. Total newspaper advertising more than doubled from 1945 to 1949, from $921 million in 1945 to $1.91 billion in 1949. Newspapers' share of all advertising spent in all media jumped from 32 percent in 1945 to 37 percent in 1949. By contrast, radio and magazines' share of the advertising dollar dropped in these years. And television, still in its infancy, attracted a mere 1.1 percent of all advertising in 1949.⁽⁷⁾

Circulation increases and rising advertising linage were particularly pronounced in the first two years after the war. The 100 largest daily newspapers in the United States enjoyed an average circulation increase of 5.3 percent between 1945 and 1946. Advertising linage for the 100 papers rose by a whopping 26.2 percent in the same period. Virtually all newspapers enjoyed a substantial boost in advertising revenues. The New York Times boosted its advertising linage from 1945 to 1946 by 46 percent. In the same year, the Chicago Tribune increased its linage by 45 percent, the Seattle (Wash.) Post-Intelligencer by 53 percent, the St. Paul (Minn.) Dispatch and Pioneer Press by 54 percent, and the Miami Herald by 73 percent.⁽⁸⁾

The boom in newspaper advertising resulted in healthy profits for publishers. Two medium-sized newspapers of 50,000 circulation, according to Editor & Publisher profiles of "typical" but unnamed newspapers in 1946 and 1947, expected after-tax net profits of 11 percent of revenue in 1946 and 16 percent in 1947, robust profit margins reflecting a robust industry.⁽⁹⁾ Of the few newspapers that publicly released their profit and loss statements in these years, all reported healthy incomes. The parent company of the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Mirror reported that the newspapers made a net profit of 11 percent in 1946 and 8 percent in 1947. The Chicago Daily News recorded net profits of 13 percent and the Hartford (Conn.) Times of 15 percent in 1947. The Federated Publications chain, owners of three medium-sized dailies in Michigan, reported a net profit of 20 percent in 1946 and 16 percent in 1947.⁽¹⁰⁾ Journalism historian Raymond B. Nixon, reflecting the prevailing sentiment within the newspaper industry in the postwar era, declared in 1954 that since World War II the American newspaper industry had achieved "the highest degree of stability in its history." Nixon cited rising circulation figures and advertising revenues and declining numbers of newspaper failures.⁽¹¹⁾

The healthy financial picture and the end of wartime shortages led many newspapers to invest in improved facilities, either to expand their newspaper offices, modernize their presses, or both. During the war, virtually no new equipment had been manufactured, and only second-hand presses were available for expansion. Publishers had struggled just to keep their shopworn presses in operation. "It was really rough," recalled Carl Walters, managing editor of the Tupelo (Miss.) Journal during World War II. The Journal's antiquated press was in terrible shape during the war, and new equipment couldn't be had at any price. A black man "kept the press going with baling wire and whatever," Walters said. "He knew every whim of this old press."⁽¹²⁾ At the Journal as elsewhere, the end of the war unleashed expansion that had been postponed for years. In 1948 alone, the New York Times estimated that $50 million worth of expansion was underway in newspapers both large and small. From the Washington Post to the St. Louis Post

-Dispatch to the Portland (Ore.) Journal, newspapers were expanding. A 1948 ANPA survey of member newspapers found that more than half projected constructing a new building or buying new presses and equipment within the next two years. Some were making room for new company-owned television stations.⁽¹³⁾

Neither the number of television stations nor television viewers increased appreciably in this period; the small television industry seemed to present little danger to the daily newspaper for the time being. "I do not believe that any mechanical device will put it out of business," wrote Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of the New York Times, expressing a sentiment common among editors. People want to spread the news out in front of them, not to hear it or see it, Markel wrote in 1946. "So no television ticker is likely to take the place of the newspaper."⁽¹⁴⁾ Newspaper publishers such as Frank E. Gannett, owner of a growing chain of Northeastern dailies and weeklies, believed that television, like radio before it, would increase interest in the news and build circulation. "The coming of television will not, I predict, have any influence on newspaper circulation," declared Gannett in a 1945 speech.⁽¹⁵⁾

To print journalists, television seemed more like a potential partner to newspapers than a threat. "By the 1940s, [American Newspaper Publishers Association] discussions reflected an attitude that broadcast news complemented and stimulated newspaper readership more than it competed with published news," wrote historian Edwin Emery in the ANPA's official history.⁽¹⁶⁾ At a 1946 national conference on television, former New York World-Telegram publisher Merlin Hall Aylesworth stressed not competition, but close business ties between the two media. "It is impossible," he said, "for television to take the place of the newspapers any more than broadcasting did, but welded together, television will add to the newspaper's attractiveness and promote its drawing power." He said he found it difficult to imagine "an up-to-date newspaper without a television station as an affiliate in the future."⁽¹⁷⁾

Publishers dealt with the new medium by investing heavily in it, just as they had invested in AM radio that preceded it. Newspapers actively sought television station licenses as well as federal licenses for another new broadcasting medium, FM radio. The Federal Communications Commission reported in late 1945 that 40 percent of the pending applications for new television stations came from newspaper interests.⁽¹⁸⁾

Robert W. Brown, a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C., in the early postwar years, remembered this period as the prime of American print journalism. "The newspapers were uniformly good," he remembered. "We had then four daily newspapers in Washington. TV was not on the scene at that time, so it was sort of a heyday for newspapers. Everybody was reading newspapers to see what was going on. It was quite a period there."⁽¹⁹⁾ In these last few years before television, daily newspapers still ruled supreme as the nation's primary medium for news and advertising. J.E. Chappell, publisher of the Birmingham (Ala.) News and Birmingham Age-Herald, said in 1945 that the thirty-five-day strike that had closed both his newspapers at war's end had proven newspapers' worth both to readers and to businesses. Advertisers had complained during the strike that business had suffered, and readers had remained hungry for news. "It has proven to us," Chappell said of the strike, "that a community without at least one daily newspaper simply cannot function as a community, socially, commercially, or in any other way."⁽²⁰⁾

But the postwar years brought newspapers uncertainty as well as prosperity. The industry, despite its financial health, faced both long-term and short-term problems at war's end. In the long term, newspapers faced spiraling production costs, especially in newsprint and labor. In the short term, newspapers had to regain the manpower and material resources that all industries had lost to the war effort. "[D]uring the war," said Oregon Journal editor Donald J. Sterling in 1946, "we held the joint together with baling wire."⁽²¹⁾

For labor-intensive newspapers, the most important challenge was to rebuild staffs depleted by the wartime labor shortage. "Our first job is to get our staff back," declared Lee Wood, executive editor of the New York World-Telegram, at an editors' forum on postwar problems a month after V-J Day.⁽²²⁾ During the war, staff openings had been filled with older men and with women, the latter making their first inroads into newspapering in large numbers. The influx of women occurred in newspapers all over the nation, from small dailies to large metropolitan journals like the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times. "There had been a moment in World War II when the city room was overrun with copy girls from Smith and Vassar," recalled New York Times veteran Harrison E. Salisbury.⁽²³⁾ The Associated Press, which had only one woman reporter before Pearl Harbor, had sixty-five during the war. United Press employed 100 women, 20 percent of its wartime staff. According to one industry estimate, 8,000 reporters and editors had gone to war, most to be replaced by women. "Women have invaded such hitherto inviolate masculine precincts on newspapers as finance, politics, sports, and the police beat," the Saturday Evening Post reported in 1944. "Paper dolls are reading copy, working on the rewrite desk, taking pictures."⁽²⁴⁾

The infusion of female workers was short-lived, however, since most were let go at war's end. At the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, for example, fourteen women reporters and typists were fired in one day; all had been hired with the understanding that their jobs would last only until the boys came home.⁽²⁵⁾ Women workers in newspapers were uncommon after the war, and those who became editors were even something of a novelty. For example, Editor & Publisher published a feature on Jerry Fox, the first woman city editor of the Dayton (Ohio) Herald, when she was promoted in August 1945. Agness Underwood's promotion to city editor at the Los Angeles Herald & Express in 1947 was unusual enough to warrant a spread in Time magazine.⁽²⁶⁾ While Fox, Underwood, and other women would make some inroads into the nation's newsrooms in the early postwar years, most newsrooms were dominated by men well into the 1960s. The National Press Club in Washington did not admit women until 1955, and even then women were required to sit in the balcony.⁽²⁷⁾

In the face of postwar labor shortages in the nation's newspapers, record enrollments at journalism and printing schools promised some relief. Educator Frank Luther Mott reported crowded classrooms at the University of Missouri, a leading journalism school. Returning veterans began to outnumber the women who had flooded to school during what Mott termed the wartime "paper doll era." "Our two modest buildings and our struggling laboratories were crammed to their limits and past," Mott recalled.⁽²⁸⁾ Nationally, enrollments at journalism schools rose to pre-war enrollments by fall 1946, with many posting all-time highs. Returning veterans replaced women students at printing schools, also booming.⁽²⁹⁾

If the returning veterans promised a resolution to the labor shortage in time, another war-related shortage--newsprint--was not so easily solved. Newsprint had been in short supply in wartime and had been rationed beginning in 1943. Federal Printing and Publishing General Limitation Order L-240 limited newspapers to using only as much newsprint per year as they had in 1941. The rationing limited the size of many newspapers, requiring editors to tightly edit articles for space and also limiting the amount of space sold for advertising. Smaller newspapers using less than twenty-five tons of newsprint per quarter were exempt under the controls, which lasted until the end of 1945.⁽³⁰⁾

But the end of controls did not mean the end of shortages. Canadian newsprint mills were the chief suppliers for American newspapers, as domestic mills had long diverted production from newsprint into more profitable grades of paper. The lack of a domestic newsprint supply combined with burgeoning demand driven by postwar circulation increases steadily pushed up prices. The cost of newsprint jumped by 70 percent from 1945 to 1948, reaching $100 a ton in 1948.⁽³¹⁾ A contributing factor to rising prices was the end of federal control of newsprint sales after the war. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA), and other newspaper groups had lobbied to end the price controls, believing the mills would meet the demand if the price were right.⁽³²⁾

The postwar newsprint shortage especially hurt small newspapers. Publishers of smaller newspapers--accustomed to steady newsprint supplies during wartime rationing--were forced to rely upon the spot newsprint market, where prices skyrocketed during the shortage.⁽³³⁾ Among the small newspapers desperate for newsprint in 1946 was the tiny Wenatchee (Wash.) World, which nearly ran out of newsprint when the local mill stopped production while awaiting a new shipment of logs. World publisher Rufus Woods rallied thirty of his staffers, supplied them with axes and crosscut saws, and set them to work in a nearby forest. Their toil produced six carloads of logs for the local mill, resulting in forty tons of newsprint for the paper-starved daily.⁽³⁴⁾ Larger newspapers, unlike the World, benefited from long-term contracts with the mills, which usually ensured them a steady supply of paper. But periodic shortages of newsprint hurt even the largest dailies. The Los Angeles Times shrank one day in 1946 to eight pages because of the scarcity of newsprint. Newspapers in fifteen cities, including St. Louis, Dallas, Texas, and Houston, Texas, printed few or no advertisements during periods of scarcity the same year.⁽³⁵⁾

Several Congressional committees looked into the newsprint problem before the shortage began to ease in 1948-1949. A Senate small business committee held hearings on the newsprint situation in 1947 to determine its causes and effects. Witnesses testified that the newsprint shortage and high newsprint prices constituted the most pressing problems for the country's small- and medium-sized newspapers. The committee recommended that newspapers form co-operatives to finance newsprint mills in Alaska.⁽³⁶⁾ In late 1948, a House subcommittee found that the shortage was beginning to diminish because of higher imports from Europe, paper-sharing arrangements worked out among newspapers, greater production from the Canadian mills, and expanded mill capacity in the United States. The SNPA had coordinated the construction of a new mill in Childersburg, Ala., after the war.⁽³⁷⁾ By 1949, the worst of the shortage was over, though demand still exceeded supply.

Newsprint prices were part of an upward spiral in overall production costs, which began to increase during the war, escalated immediately after it, and steadily continued to rise in the decades that followed. Labor costs escalated. This was due partly to an overall increase in wages in the postwar era, when unions sought to hold on to wartime gains in fringe benefits and at the same time boost wages held stable during the war. For newspapers, the overall trend was somewhat disguised, since the rising costs were occurring at a time of skyrocketing revenues. Still, of all the new revenue pouring into newspapers' coffers in this period, wrote the historian of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, "very few pennies of the new income dollar remained in the till at the year's end."⁽³⁸⁾

Publishers were concerned because the overall increase in costs permeated all areas of newspaper spending. Editor & Publisher, in a 1947 summary of publishing costs, noted that labor and material costs had increased across the board by 28 percent in the first six months of the year, as compared to the same period a year before. Newsprint, stereotyping, and composing costs took up most of the increase, with increased costs of 52 percent, 43 percent, and 36 percent, respectively.⁽³⁹⁾ Wage increases, of course, accounted for most of the spiraling expenses. Hourly wage rates in the newspaper printing trades increased 65 percent from 1945 to 1949, compared to an average increase of 40 percent in all manufacturing trades.⁽⁴⁰⁾

"These costs are becoming unbearable and revenue is harder to obtain," Thomas F. Mowle, controller of the Wall Street Journal, told fellow newspaper finance officers in a 1948 speech. "We must prepare now, while we still have the time, to meet this situation." The rising costs, Mowle observed, were a potential disaster for the nation's newspaper industry.⁽⁴¹⁾ Journalism researcher James E. Pollard, surveying daily newspapers' cost-and-revenue trends in 1949, noted that costs had increased steadily through the early 1940s but had accelerated at an even faster pace after World War II. Most worrisome about the trend, Pollard noted, was that newspapers' costs were continuing to increase while revenues were beginning to level off.⁽⁴²⁾

Higher costs forced circulation rate increases, raising the cost of most daily newspapers from three cents--the dominant price for dailies at war's end--to five cents just one year later. The New York Times reported a rash of rate increases in 1946.⁽⁴³⁾ The fact was that most newspapers had little choice but to raise subscription and advertising rates. Production costs in the heavily unionized newspaper industry offered no room for cuts.

Unions, for their part, pushed for wage increases after the war, leading to a spate of newspaper-related strikes in 1945, 1946, 1947, and 1948. The ANPA attributed the unusual jump in strikes to workers' eagerness to make up for wages held stagnant in wartime. Another factor, after 1947, was the International Typographical Union, the chief union for newspaper composing rooms, which adopted a no-contract policy after the adoption of the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, the so-called Taft-Hartley Law. The ITU had tried to circumvent Taft-Hartley's ban of closed union shops by requiring its locals to work under union "conditions of employment." The conditions were supposed to substitute for contracts with employers, but newspaper management balked.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Strikes called by the ITU, coupled with walkouts by other craft unions, crippled scores of newspapers across the country throughout the late 1940s. The ITU struck seventy-eight newspapers between 1945 and 1947, more than the total of ITU strikes in the eight years from 1937 to 1944. Seventeen newspapers were involved in strikes at the end of 1946, thirty-eight at the end of 1947, and fifty at the end of 1948. The strikes hit cities both large and small. Some notable examples: In 1945, a Deliverer's Union strike hit seventeen dailies in the New York City area for more than two weeks; St. Louis deliverers struck for three weeks; and composing room strikes shut down newspapers in Fort Wayne, Ind., Reading, Pa., and Utica, N.Y. In 1946, strikes closed the newspapers in Seattle, Wash., for eight weeks and those in Cleveland for thirty-two days. In 1947, the newspapers in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Kansas City were struck. And in 1948 alone, the ITU struck forty-four newspapers in twenty-seven cities.⁽⁴⁵⁾ The strikes began to taper off in late 1949, however, after an ANPA challenge of the ITU's no-contract policy wound its way through the National Labor Relations Board, which decided against the ITU in October 1949. The NLRB's unanimous ruling found that the ITU's no-contract strategy was "a deliberate frustration of the bargaining process."⁽⁴⁶⁾

The ITU strikes were significant not just for the specific newspapers that were struck. While a minority of the nation's approximately 1,750 newspapers were affected by the work stoppages, the actions taken by publishers to continue publishing had far-reaching implications for all newspapers. Publishers' experiments with offset presses, photo-engraving, and other techniques marked the first large-scale efforts by the newspaper industry to update antiquated printing methods. These efforts prompted increased spending on printing research and foreshadowed a revolution in production methods that would transform the industry in decades to come.

Progress in printing, however tentative, was long overdue. "Newspapers have lagged far behind other media in technological advances," wrote Chicago Daily News publisher John S. Knight in 1947. "Basically, there have been no radical changes in the printing industry for generations."⁽⁴⁷⁾ Indeed, printing technology used by American daily newspapers had changed little from the 1880s, with the emergence of the Linotype machine, until the 1940s. The Linotype typesetting machine had been improved somewhat over the years but nonetheless set type at a painfully slow rate of just twenty-two to thirty-three column inches an hour. As Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer complained in the early 1950s, "A few spiral gears have replaced tooth gears but otherwise there has been no basic change in the hot metal method of setting type in this century."⁽⁴⁸⁾

The hot metal process was both labor intensive and expensive. Union Linotypers set copy into metal type on type-casting machines, complicated devices that required extensive training to use skillfully. Other union men took impressions of the pages of type to make curved metal plates to fit onto high-speed metal presses, which were then operated by other union men.

Alternatives to hot type--offset printing and photo-engraving--had been used by job printers, magazines, and small weeklies for years, but the processes were much too slow to be of use to daily newspapers.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Still, at the close of the war publishers began experimenting with the processes as a way to publish without printers. In San Antonio, where the newspapers were hit by a seven-week strike in the summer and autumn of 1945, management had kept the newspaper open by printing each day's edition using the photo-engraving process, making page-sized photo-engravings which were then cast as plates for the printing press.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Similarly, in Jersey City, N.J., the Jersey Journal resumed publication after a two-month strike using photo-engraving. Copy was typed on fifteen electric typewriters with three interchangeable typefaces.⁽⁵¹⁾

The new technology was primitive but offered publishers a new weapon against the unions. Previously, highly skilled workers were virtually impossible to replace in strikes, which inevitably shut down newspapers or severely limited their ability to publish. The new technology changed all that. "A long-accepted belief that a daily newspaper had to suspend publication when ITU composing room workers struck is now a myth," the ANPA's special standing committee on labor relations declared in 1949, as the postwar surge in strikes was beginning to die down. "[P]ublication goes on as usual."⁽⁵²⁾

The first large success with the new processes came in St. Petersburg, Fla., where innovative publisher Nelson Poynter was impressed with the new technologies not only for their strike-breaking potential but also for their potential long-term cost benefits. He bought an offset press and had his staff experiment with it. When St. Petersburg's printers went out on strike in November 1945, Poynter's staff at the St. Petersburg Times produced a sixteen-page newspaper using not offset but photo-engraving. In a front-page "Statement to Our Readers," Poynter apologized for the substandard quality of the poorly printed pages. "Don't shoot," Poynter implored, "we're doing the best we can."⁽⁵³⁾ The experiment was successful enough to attract other publishers from around the country to observe Poynter's success against the unions, but it ended the following January when strike-breaking typesetters were hired to print the paper the old way, with hot type. Letterpress technology still offered a far superior product to photo-engraved newspapers.⁽⁵⁴⁾

A larger-scale test of the new technology occurred in Chicago, where printers struck the Tribune, Sun, Times, and Daily News in November 1947 after the papers' management refused the ITU's demand to work without a contract. The newspapers hired typists to put out the newspaper using photo-engraving. By the end of the first week of the strike, the dailies were again printing papers their usual size, but the new process was not without its difficulties.⁽⁵⁵⁾ For one thing, photo-engraving was expensive, running about 30 percent higher than the cost of using typesetting machines. For another, it was slow. Deadlines had to be revised substantially in consideration of the new process. "Making a correction is such an involved process," one editor complained, "we don't do it unless it's libel."⁽⁵⁶⁾

But the process was successful in several ways. Readers reacted positively to the larger typeface used by the special typewriters required for photo-engraving. Advertisers were enthusiastic about its possibilities for creative ad layouts. And more importantly for publishers, the new process kept the newspapers printing throughout the strike, which lasted throughout 1948 and into much of 1949. By subverting the unions' ability to shut down the newspapers in a strike, photo-engraving gave publishers a powerful new weapon in collective bargaining. "If I were a member of the printers' union," declared executive editor Basil "Stuffy" Walters of the Chicago Daily News at the beginning of the Chicago strike, "I'd feel a bit scared."⁽⁵⁷⁾

Publishers and editors talked up the potential of the new technology, which they believed could eventually lower costs for existing journals, encourage new newspapers, and improve printing quality. "Instead of [spending] $50,000 to $100,000 for Linotypes to start a small-town paper, I'll bet you could start one for $10,000" once photo-engraving was perfected, mused one Chicago editor. "And you could put out a damned good-looking paper."⁽⁵⁸⁾ Knight, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News and other journals, wrote that the strike was finally spurring newspapers to undertake innovations to produce both cheaper and more eye-pleasing newspapers.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Carl R. Kesler, an editor at the Daily News who saw the experimentation in Chicago firsthand, agreed. "The Chicago strike directly stimulated research in typesetting, photo-engraving, stereotyping and printing," Kesler wrote after the strike ended. "This research will continue and nobody knows which direction it will take, or how soon."⁽⁶⁰⁾

Another technological innovation, also in its early development after the war, was teletypesetting. The system, begun mostly by smaller newspapers eager to cut costs, bypassed union Linotype operators by using low-skill typists to type copy into a machine which produced perforated paper tape. The tape was then fed into a machine attached to typesetting equipment. Teletypesetting was both cheap and fast, since low-wage stenographers could provide tape to keep typesetting machines operating steadily. "We use girl operators for the perforating equipment," one anonymous publisher told Editor & Publisher in 1946. "We try to get expert typists and find that in several months they make accurate and speedy Teletypesetter operators."⁽⁶¹⁾ By contrast, high-wage union typesetters required a lengthy apprenticeship to become proficient.

"The typesetting machine run automatically will double the speed of the fastest operator," proclaimed Alexander H. Washburn, editor and publisher of the Hope Star in Arkansas. The Star and four other newspapers shared wire service reports over a special telegraph wire circuit used to transmit teletypesetter signals.⁽⁶²⁾ Teletypesetting equipment was also used with success at newspapers in Illinois, Texas, and elsewhere across the country. "We're more than satisfied," said W.W. Ward of the Beaumont (Texas) Journal. "Production has increased and costs are down."⁽⁶³⁾

Publishers, eager to play their upper hand against the unions and demoralize the strikers, talked frequently of a printing "revolution." Donald L. Boyd, president of the Printing Industries of America, was one of those who believed that a revolution was underway. The revolution, he said in a 1948 speech, was not rooted in the technologies themselves; after all, many of these methods had been around for years. Rather, what was revolutionary was the methods' rapid introduction and acceptance within the newspaper industry.⁽⁶⁴⁾ The new technologies indeed had far-reaching implications, but they fell far short of revolutionary in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Relatively few newspapers, after all, were using photo-engraving, and then only for the duration of strikes.

Revolution or not, the new methods awakened newspaper publishers to the necessity for research to assure continued printing progress. For the first time, newspapers put significant resources into developing new printing methods. In early 1947 ANPA hired a research director, C.M. Flint, and the next year established a research laboratory to develop new lower-cost, higher-quality processes and to train production employees in the new methods. A 25 percent dues increase provided a $140,000 budget for the lab, located in Easton, Pa.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Southern newspaper publishers, most of whom were also ANPA members, passed a resolution in support of the ANPA's effort and reiterated the vital need "to achieve better, quicker, and more economical printing."⁽⁶⁶⁾

The Wall Street Journal reported in 1948 that the burst in research promised, eventually at least, to make hot type as outdated as the Model T Ford. "The daily newspaper plant, a laggard in industry's fast-moving march toward increased mechanization, is suddenly being tagged by a comet." The object of all the research, as the Journal perceptively pointed out, was "to transform a complex industry which is dependent now upon skilled artisans into a simpler operation requiring only semiskilled workers."⁽⁶⁷⁾

Research and experimentation were reported across the country. New York suburban dailies and a chain of Florida weeklies were experimenting with ways to speed up photo-engraving. Large publishing firms like Time, Inc., and Curtis Publishing were working on similar developments. Gannett and the Eastman Company were co-operating on a project to improve engraving. Research was widespread but in its earliest stages. Mergenthaler Linotype Corporation, the largest manufacturer of typesetting equipment, in 1948 downplayed the recent advances. "None of the new machines," a spokesman for the company said, "measure up to the casting method of producing type."⁽⁶⁸⁾

Indeed, the new methods were immature, but they represented a substantial change in direction for an industry whose production methods had changed little over decades. The "printing revolution" offered publishers their only hope for preventing rising costs from eroding record postwar revenues. Some optimistic publishers, like Gannett, even predicted that the wealth of research would eventually produce inventions as important as Gutenberg's. "Indeed, it is more important, for it will make possible the printing of books, magazines, and paper at such low cost that countless millions will be benefited," he proclaimed in 1947.⁽⁶⁹⁾

Such optimism was typical of late 1940s publishers. Costs were up, but the industry was finally doing something about the problem. Research was underway to address rising costs, and at the same time revenues remained high enough to allow for comfortable profits. Uncertainty remained, however, whether newspapers would face continued dramatic cost increases and, if so, whether the "revolution" would reap benefits soon enough to benefit newspapers threatened by them. Moreover, no one knew just how long the postwar boom would last. A Midwestern publisher who summarized the outlook for newspapers in his state in 1946 could have been speaking for newspaper publishers across the nation. "I expect the Iowa newspaper business to be very good for a time," he said, "just how long I don't know."⁽⁷⁰⁾

1. Quoted in George A. Brandenburg, "Daily Circulation Reaches New Peak With 6.4 Percent Gain," Editor & Publisher, 29 December 1945, 5.

2. Editor & Publisher International Year Book, 31 January 1946, 6; "New Circulation High, More Newspapers in '45," Editor & Publisher, 2 March 1946, 42. Newspaper circulations had increased steadily since 1920 except in the Depression years of 1930-1933 and 1938.

3. Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, 31 January 1947, 19; 30 January 1948, 17; 31 January 1949, 17.

4. "Future of Newspapers," Editor & Publisher, 17 August 1946, 36; ANPA statistics, Newspaper Association of America, Reston, Va. Each year's annual daily newspaper circulation figures are Audit Bureau of Circulation figures compiled by ANPA for the year ending September 30.

5. "Gannett Reaffirms Faith in Newspapers," Editor & Publisher, 27 October 1945, 24; "National Ads in Dailies Up $16 Million in '45," ibid., 22 June 1946, 49.

6. ANPA statistics, using figures from the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Commerce, Media Records, and Editor & Publisher yearbooks, quoted in Jon G. Udell, "The Growth of the American Daily Newspaper: An Economic Analysis," Wisconsin Project Reports 3 (1965): 14-16. Udell's study was sponsored by the ANPA. Some specific figures on newspaper growth from 1946 to 1949: The average number of pages published in newspapers of more than 100,000 circulation jumped from 27 to 34. Total newspaper circulation rose by 3.8 percent versus an increase in adult population (aged 21 to 68) of 4.1 percent. Newspaper advertising grew by 65 percent, and newsprint consumption increased by 29 percent versus a 23 percent increase in the gross national product. From 1947 to 1950, newspaper employment grew by 13 percent versus 3 percent in total employment.

7. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 2:856. The advertising figures for newspapers include all newspapers except farm newspapers and business journals.

8. Statistics quoted in Newsprint Supply and Distribution, Interim Report of the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, United States Senate, Eightieth Congress, First Session, 21 April 1947 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 4, 22-24.

9. "50,000-Circulation Daily Costs and Revenue Analyzed," Editor & Publisher, 23 February 1946, 7; "Robert U. Brown, "'46 Operating Costs Up 27 Percent On 50,000-Circulation Daily," ibid., 10 May 1947, 7.

10. Profit figures cited in Frank Hughes, Prejudice and the Press (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1950), 555.

11. Raymond B. Nixon, "Trends in Daily Newspaper Ownership Since 1945," Journalism Quarterly 31 (Winter 1954): 14.

12. "Mechanical Equipment of 2,326 U.S. and Canadian Newspapers," Editor & Publisher, 3 November 1945, 1;

13. "Papers Modernize and Expand Shops," New York Times, 6 June 1948, 37; "Newsprint Needs to 1960 Projected," ibid., 21 September 1948, 21.

14. Lester Markel, "The Newspapers," in While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States, ed. Jack Goodman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 372.

15. Frank E. Gannett quoted in "Gannett Reaffirms Faith in Newspapers," Editor & Publisher, 27 October 1945, 24.

16. Edwin Emery, ANPA - 75th Anniversary, 1887-1962 (New York: American Newspaper Publishers Association, 1962), 9. ANPA documents, reports, and studies are crucial sources for this study. Throughout the postwar era the ANPA was the dominant organization of daily newspaper publishers in the United States. The association lobbied for newspaper interests and provided a national forum for publishers to discuss business concerns at its national meetings, held annually. The ANPA membership reflected a cross-section of America's newspaper publishers; in 1947 ANPA counted 757 daily newspapers as members representing 88 percent of total daily American newspaper circulation. (ANPA B Bulletin No. 11, 5 March 1947, 25.) In the 1990s the ANPA and a host of other newspaper-related organizations merged to form the Newspaper Association of America.

17. Merlin Hall Aylesworth quoted in "Television Parley Attended by 1,200," New York Times, 11 October 1946, 21.

18. "Requests Filed by Newspapers," Editor & Publisher, 10 November 1945, 18.

19. Oral history interview with Robert W. Brown, 3 November 1973, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi.

20. Quoted in Hughes, Prejudice and the Press, 474.

21. Proceedings, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 23rd annual convention (Washington, D.C.: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1946), 108. For a discussion of postwar business problems of newspapers, see pp. 104-117. Hereafter cited as ASNE Proceedings.

22. Lee Wood quoted in "New York Editors Sum Up Postwar Tasks," Editor & Publisher, 8 September 1945, 28.

23. Harrison E. Salisbury, A Time of Change: A Reporter's Tale of Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 9; Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun: 1837-1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 251.

24. Stanley Frank and Paul Sann, "Paper Dolls," Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1944, 20. For a brief account of women newspaper reporters during World War II, see the chapter "Rosie the Reporter," in Nan Robertson's The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York Times (New York: Random House, 1992), 63-70.

25. Robert N. Pierce, A Sacred Trust: Nelson Poynter and the St. Petersburg Times (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1993), 136.

26. "Metropolitan City Desk Becomes Female Job," Editor & Publisher, 25 August 1945, 38; "City Editor," Time, 30 June 1947, 61-62. Underwood's delightful autobiography of her hard-driving tenure as city editor is Newspaperwoman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). Editor & Publisher's treatment of women journalists in its pages was respectful if somewhat lighthearted; the magazine's preferred term for women reporters was "newshens"; a close second was "newsgals."

27. Robertson, Girls in the Balcony, 100-101. When Eleanor Jordan interviewed for a reporter's job at the Tampa Tribune in 1966 she could see only one other woman in the newspaper's vast newsroom. "They had just had a new turnover in managing editors, and the old one had a policy of never hiring women--except in the field," Jordan recalled. "In other words, in the club areas or districts was fine [for women], but not for the nitty-gritty." Jordan, however, was hired for the city desk. (Oral history interview with Eleanor Jordan, 1981, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi.)

28. Frank Luther Mott, Time Enough: Essays in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 157.

29. "Thirty-Four AASDJ Schools Report 9,603 Students," Journalism Quarterly 23 (December 1946): 427; Walter C. Johnson and Arthur T. Robb, The South and Its Newspapers, 1903-1953 (1954; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 278. Johnson and Robb's book is a history of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.

30. See "Texts of Print Paper Limitation Orders," Editor & Publisher, 9 January 1943, 5; and "Suspension Orders Go Out with L-240," ibid, 29 December 1945, 9.

31. "Newspaper Prices Rise in Some Areas," New York Times, 31 August 1946, 20, 23; Lawrence Resner, "Publishers See Costs as Problem With Newsprint Shortage Eased," ibid., 27 April 1949, 25. For a discussion of the hardships newsprint shortages imposed on newspapers, see Elizabeth Lamb, The Inland: A Short History of the Growth and Development of the Services of America's Oldest and Largest Regional Daily Newspaper Association (Chicago: Inland Daily Press Association, 1950), 49-50. The Inland, an association of Midwestern dailies, was and is the largest regional newspaper organization in the country.

32. South and Its Newspapers, 275; "ANPA Takes Stand for Price Decontrol," Editor & Publisher, 5 October 1946, 8.

33. L. Ethan Ellis, Newsprint: Producers, Publishers, Political Pressures (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), 230; Clara H. Friedman, Newsprint: Summary of a Report on Newsprint Supply and Distribution (New York: American Newspaper Guild, 1948), 9. Ellis' work is the best scholarly work on newspaper publishers' struggles with the newsprint issue. For his account of newsprint shortages in the early postwar years, see pp. 95-132.

34. "Way Out of the Woods," Time, 10 June 1946, 68.

35. Ibid.

36. James J. Butler, "Small Dailies' Case To Be Aired Two Days," Editor & Publisher, 4 January 1947, 34; Problems of American Small Business: Hearings Before the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, 2 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947) 1:1-5; "Urges Co-ops Finance Alaskan Paper Mills," New York Times, 24 January 1948, 24.

37. Final Report on Newsprint and Paper Supply, Select Committee on Newsprint and Paper Supply, House Report 2471, Eightieth Congress, Second Session (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948), 1-7.

38. Johnson, South and Its Newspapers, 277, 281.

39. Robert U. Brown, "Dailies' Costs Outrun Revenue Rise," Editor & Publisher, 4 October 1947, 7.

40. U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1:171.

41. "Press Seen Faced by Critical Period," New York Times, 28 September 1948, 38.

42. James E. Pollard, "Spiraling Newspaper Costs Outrun Revenues, 1939-1949," Journalism Quarterly 26 (1949): 270-276.

43. Johnson, South and Its Newspapers, 276; "Newspaper Prices Rise in Some Areas," New York Times, 31 August 1946, 20.

44. ANPA Convention Bulletin No. 4, 2 May 1946, 104-105; ANPA Convention Bulletin No. 3, 28 April 1948, 54. A perceptive account of the printers' union view of the postwar labor struggles is given in Harry Kelber and Carl Schlesinger, Union Printers and Controlled Automation (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 30-64.

45. ANPA Convention Bulletin No. 4, 6 May 1949, 74; ANPA Convention Bulletin No. 3, 28 April 1948, 55.

46. Joseph A. Loftus, "I.T.U. Closed Shop Declared Illegal; N.L.R.B. is Unanimous," New York Times, 29 October 1949, 1, 23.

47. John S. Knight, "Strike Spurs Advances in Newspaper Typography," Chicago Daily News, 6 December 1947, typescript in Eugene Mayer Papers, Box 92, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

48. Quoted in Millard B. Grimes, The Last Linotype: The Story of Georgia and Its Newspapers Since World War II (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press and the Georgia Press Association, 1985), 40.

49. William Reed, "Offset Printing Technique and Problems Discussed," Editor & Publisher, 12 January 1946, 9.

50. Johnson, South and Its Newspapers, 277. This was a new use for photoengraving, previously used only for illustrations.

51. "Dailies to Issue Again," New York Times, 11 August 1945, 15.

52. ANPA Convention Bulletin No. 4, 6 May 1949, 74.

53. St. Petersburg Times, 21 November 1945, 1, quoted in Pierce, A Sacred Trust, 175.

54. Ibid., 173, 175.

55. "Chicago Showdown," Time, 1 December 1947, 70; "New Look In Chicago," Time, 8 December 1947, 62.

56. "Revolution?" Time, 22 December 1947, 62.

57. Basil Walters quoted in ibid.

58. Quoted in ibid. The Chicago strike, which lasted twenty-two months, ended in September 1949.

59. John S. Knight, "Strike Spurs Advances in Newspaper Typography." ANPA general manager Cranston Williams was so impressed with Knight's arguments he sent a copy of the editorial to all ANPA members.

60. Carl R. Kesler, "Cold Type, Hot Feet and Gimmicks," Quill, December 1948, 8.

61. Quoted in George A. Brandenburg, "Teletype Found to Speed Composing Room Operation," Editor & Publisher, 13 July 1946, 10.

62. Alexander H. Washburn quoted in ibid.

63. W.W. Ward quoted in Jack Rutledge, "Teletypesetter Biggest News in Printing Trade," Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News, 2 March 1947, 9, clipping in Millard Cope papers, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.

64. "ITU Policies Held to Alter Printing," New York Times, 21 October 1948, 16. Boyd also noted, as did other contemporary observers, that ITU strike policies both contributed to the introduction of new printing methods and resulted from it. The ITU struggled with publishers to gain jurisdiction over the new technologies as they were introduced. Elmer Brown, an ITU vice president, noted in 1946 that ITU workers should be doing the work when new machines and methods are introduced. "Our immediate concern will be jurisdiction over these new processes," Brown said. (Quoted in Kelber, Union Printers and Controlled Automation, 32.)

65. Emery, ANPA - 75th Anniversary, 13-14.

66. Quoted in Johnson, South and Its Newspapers, 283.

67. J. Howard Rutledge, "New Machines Promise to Outdate Newspaper Methods, Simplify Jobs," Wall Street Journal, 13 January 1948, 1, 6.

68. Quoted in ibid.; Campbell Watson, "`Million for Research' Hailed as `Insurance,'" Editor & Publisher, 26 June 1948, 7.

69. Frank Gannett quoted in "Gannett Hints of Revolution in Printing," Editor & Publisher, 21 June 1947, 36.

70. Quoted in "Plenty of Business for Iowa Papers if They Can Handle It," Iowa Publisher, June 1946, 30.

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