Long overdue progress in printing technology made a little headway throughout the 1950s, enough to make it evident by decade's end that profound change was on the horizon. The coming technological revolution was one of several long-term trends that had become clearer to publishers by the late 1950s. These long-term trends were slowly changing the newspaper industry in myriad ways--especially in how newspapers were produced and where readers lived. Their effects were all the more significant for their interaction with other developments in newspapers' eventful decade, specifically the rapid rise of television and escalating costs. All of these long-term changes in the newspaper industry, as they matured in the 1960s and 1970s, would transform newspapers both in how they were produced and in the readership they served. Publishers and editors had begun to recognize the significance of these trends by the late 1950s and had also begun--albeit slowly--to adapt.

The first and most significant trend in the 1950s, one that drove much of the decade's developments in printing technology, was escalating costs. Throughout the 1950s, except for two years--1955 and 1959--the average yearly cost of publishing a newspaper had continued to climb faster than did revenues.⁽¹⁾ By the end of the 1950s, a decade of ever-rising advertising sales was finally coming to an end. Editor & Publisher's annual survey of newspaper costs in 1957, for example, found that nearly half of all newspapers in all circulation classes had suffered a decline in local revenues from the previous year. Three-quarters had experienced a loss in national advertising revenue. Expenses for the average daily had increased by 3.59 percent from 1956 to 1957, offset by a paltry 1.51 percent increase in revenues, due almost entirely to rising circulation rates.⁽²⁾ In 1958, an anonymous 50,000-circulation daily newspaper surveyed by Editor & Publisher reported its lowest profit--4.44 percent of total revenue--of any year since the end of World War II.⁽³⁾

Rising costs had been a concern throughout the decade. "The day of easy money is gone," declared American Newspaper Publishers Association President Richard W. Slocum of the Philadelphia Bulletin in a 1954 speech to fellow publishers. "Some newspapers have shrunk, and more have died than we like to talk about. More will shrink and die if we do not meet our present-day problems." The rising costs, Slocum said, were dominated by increases in labor rates and newsprint prices, which had continued their upward spiral begun immediately after the war.⁽⁴⁾ Between 1948 and 1959, hourly earnings of production workers increased from $1.98 to $2.98, and newsprint prices rose by half from $88.50 to $135 a ton.⁽⁵⁾ The newsprint prices--depressed by slack demand in previous decades but inflated in the booming postwar years--were particularly burdensome because newspapers were printing larger daily editions filled with advertising in the 1950s.⁽⁶⁾

Through the 1950s, publishers took a number of measures to solve the cost problem. Many newspapers trimmed the size of their pages by an inch or more to save money. By doing so, the New York Herald-Tribune saved an estimated $400,000 a year in newsprint. In Chicago, the tabloid Sun-Times added a sixth column to accommodate more news on less paper. Some broadsheet dailies switched from eight columns to nine for the same reason.⁽⁷⁾ Significantly, newspapers also ran proportionately more advertising to maintain profits as costs rose. In 1941, according to Media Records statistics compiled from newspapers in 118 cities, the average evening newspaper had contained 43.3 percent advertising. By 1952, that figure had reached 60.3 percent. Newspapers were getting bigger--an average of 32 broadsheet pages in evening newspapers in 1952--but the percentage of advertising was growing at the expense of editorial content.⁽⁸⁾ The proportion of advertising to editorial matter would hold at 60 percent to 40 percent throughout the 1950s.

But publishers were left with relatively few options for raising revenue. On the one hand, television competition inhibited publishers from raising advertising rates or newspaper subscription prices too substantially. Raising revenue through increased circulation, on the other hand, was both difficult and costly. Unlike other businesses with a product to sell, newspaper publishers could not easily make more money simply by manufacturing and selling more of their product. Selling more newspapers required expenses in promotion, newsprint, and wages. Facing so many difficulties in raising revenues in a decade of rising costs, many newspaper publishers looked to a more fundamental change--making newspapers cheaper to produce.

Newspapers had flirted with the new production methods in the late 1940s, when a wave of postwar strikes prompted publishers to try new printing methods. In Chicago, St. Petersburg, and other cities, publishers had used photoengraving to compose newspaper pages in the absence of striking printers. While such methods had quickly introduced many publishers to the potential benefits of printing innovations, few stuck with the new methods once the strikes ended. Traditional letterpress printing remained quicker and more attractive than photo-engraved newspapers. But publishers' experiences with the new methods had, at least, foreshadowed the printing revolution to come and had prompted initial forays into research, such as the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) research program begun in 1947.⁽⁹⁾

The short-lived experiments in the 1940s had also convinced many publishers that technical improvements in newspaper production were long overdue. The newspaper industry, as always, was slow to change, and innovation was coming far too slowly. "The press has done less to improve and modernize its product through research and consultation than any industry I know of," complained James S. Pope, managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, in 1947.⁽¹⁰⁾ In 1948, Northwestern University's Charles V. Kinter agreed, saying, "Not enough attention has been given in recent years to preventing conditions which would result in sharp increases in costs. The cost problem has become so critical it now seems clear that intensive research designed to reduce costs should have been initiated long ago." The lush sellers' market of the 1940s had made it easier to offset rising costs through increases in advertising and subscription rates than to undertake research that might have resulted in cheaper printing, Kinter wrote.⁽¹¹⁾

Newspapers' production methods had been static for half a century. In the early postwar years, the vast majority of American newspapers were using production methods that had been perfected in the nineteenth century. Letterpress technology had changed little for decades. The most recent far-reaching innovation had been the Linotype machine, invented in the 1880s. Newspaper production with hot metal--despite some fine-tuning over the years--remained a multiple-step, labor-intensive, high-cost process. Veteran journalists such as Robert W. Brown, who reported for newspapers in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and St. Petersburg, Fla., during and after World War II, saw little progress in newspaper printing until well after war's end.⁽¹²⁾

A pencil, a pad and a manual typewriter were the only tools of the reporter and the copy editors. Men with ink-stained muscles put metal type into page forms and passed them on to other muscled men called stereotypers who made heavy lead plates of the pages which were then placed on the press by more muscled men.⁽¹³⁾

"Our own trade is very much out of gear with the trend of the times," complained Editor & Publisher's Robert U. Brown in 1955. He said that newspapers, unlike other industries, had failed to show any substantial gains in productivity in the last generation. Production methods were being improved by degrees, but few radical advances were on the drawing boards. Other industries, meanwhile, had boosted productivity by 150 percent in recent years.⁽¹⁴⁾ In 1959, an Editor & Publisher editorial blamed newspapers' mechanical backwardness on the paltry sum that publishers spent on research. "What other $4.5 billion industry besides newspapers do you know that spends less than one-hundredth of one percent of its gross revenue on research to find new and cheaper methods of production?" asked the magazine's editors. Outside of research at ANPA's institute and at a few scattered newspapers, the bulk of pioneering work had been left to equipment manufacturers. "The combined impact of these research efforts has hardly been sufficient to provide completely new production techniques so badly needed by newspapers," the editors wrote. "It has made a few dents, however, in the armor-plated production heritage of half a century."⁽¹⁵⁾

But this growing realization that newspapers were lagging behind in updating their technology, combined with the pressures of steadily rising costs throughout the 1950s, led to increasing experimentation with printing innovations throughout the decade.⁽¹⁶⁾ The three most significant areas of development in the 1950s were offset printing, photocomposition, and the Teletypesetter. A refinement of a technique developed years earlier, Teletypesetting (TTS) made the most advances during the decade. But the slower-moving developments in offset printing and photocomposition promised, even in the 1950s, far greater benefits for the long term. This was primarily because both, to a greater extent than TTS, promised fundamental changes in how newspapers were produced.

In the earliest postwar years, offset printing had seemed to offer the best hope for cheaper printing. For one thing, offset was an old technology in wide use in print shops.⁽¹⁷⁾ Though it was primarily used for job printing, not for newspaper work, publishers recognized offset's potential, over time, for ready applicability to newspapers. The process seemed the brightest prospect for lowering production costs as early as the 1940s. "Innovations in printing are due in the postwar period, but the new processes will not engulf your composing room," Harry Loose of American Type Founders warned Iowa publishers in 1946. Loose predicted that publishers should expect orderly development, not radical change, but he said publishers should "keep both eyes on offset."⁽¹⁸⁾

Offset printing differs substantially from traditional letterpress printing. In letterpress, to put it simply, raised images in metal are inked and pressed against a blank page to leave an image. In newspaper production, letterpress printing is labor intensive because it requires Linotype operators to convert editorial and advertising into hot type, engravers to transform photographs and artwork into metal plates, stereotypers to convert the page forms into curved metal plates for the presses, and pressmen to operate the printing presses. In offset printing, a branch of lithography, printed matter--whether artwork or typewritten or printed pages--is "pasted up" on a page and then photographed to make a sensitized metal plate, which is then inked and pressed, or offset, to paper.⁽¹⁹⁾ Offset printing requires less labor because it eliminates some of the multiple steps of hot type.

The earliest leader in offset printing among daily newspapers was the Opelousas (La.) Daily World, which had first converted to offset in 1939. The Daily World's publisher, John R. Thistlethwaite, was offset printing's most widely known advocate through the 1950s. So many newspaper publishers sought him out for advice that he developed a folder of materials to mail out to inquiring publishers. Thistlethwaite said that offset technology was far superior to letterpress. "We find offset much more flexible in every respect," Thistlethwaite said in a 1956 letter to National Publisher magazine. "You are not tied to your typesetting capacity for production, for instance." Thistlethwaite said that offset's ability to reproduce anything pasted up on a page cleared the way for the Daily World to subscribe to filler services that supplied proofs to be pasted directly on the page, thus allowing production workers "to slap out pages like mad." Much advertising also arrived in proof form.⁽²⁰⁾ Moreover, offset required few technical skills, unlike letterpress methods. Workers could be quickly trained to make plates for the offset presses and to paste up pages. Thistlethwaite bragged that his wife could paste up an entire newspaper page in two minutes. "What floor man can match that?" he asked.⁽²¹⁾

The economics of offset printing limited its use to weeklies and small dailies at first. To small-town publishers, offset was attractive because of the rising costs of some elements of the letterpress process. Smaller newspapers printing by letterpress could not afford their own engraving departments for photoengraving photographs, illustrations, and artwork, requiring them to send such work to engraving shops, an expensive and time-consuming process. For these newspapers, the flexibility of offset printing provided a way to avoid such headaches. At the Montezuma (Iowa) Republican, for example, publisher Dave Sutherland switched from letterpress to offset in July 1956 and immediately saved $100 a month in engraving costs. After a few rocky months while Sutherland's printers learned the new offset process, the Republican had both speeded up production time and increased its profits. Moreover, the newspaper's use of photographs skyrocketed because of the affordability of offset. More than 150 publishers from ten states visited the Republican's printing plant to see the weekly's printing operation.⁽²²⁾ At the Republican and elsewhere, offset indeed had a few mechanical limitations--the printing plates could only be used for limited press runs and were time-consuming and expensive to make. But such problems were manageable for weeklies and small dailies, with fewer editions, more flexible deadlines, and smaller press runs than large dailies.⁽²³⁾

Success stories of publishers' experiences with offset filled the trade press in the middle and late 1950s. In Missouri, the Salisbury Press-Spectator switched from letterpress to offset in 1959 because the new method allowed for more varied makeup and for quicker and better production of pictures. The overall printing quality of newspapers improved with the new method, which proved to be cheaper, too. One part-time and two full-time printers were replaced by one full-time printer and two part-time female workers, all trained by the manufacturer of the newspaper's offset press. The newspaper's switch to offset cost about $10,000 plus the cost of the press. Jack Fidler, the publisher, said after the switchover, "We wouldn't change back to the old method for anything."⁽²⁴⁾

Scattered small dailies began switching to offset in the mid-1950s. In Gainesville, Ga., weekly newspaper publisher Charles L. Hardy, Sr., visited the Opelousas production plant and was so impressed with its potential he founded a daily newspaper in 1955, the Gainesville Morning News, printed by offset. "As far as we know," the Morning News proclaimed in an editorial printed in its debut issue, "there is nothing we cannot do with this photographic method of production."⁽²⁵⁾ Competition and a shortage of capital forced Hardy to close the paper after eight months, but he was nonetheless convinced of offset's potential. "This pioneering in a new field of printing," Hardy wrote in a farewell column in July 1956, "has been most fascinating, and it holds tremendous potentialities two to five years from now. I am still of the opinion that most weekly and small daily newspapers under 25,000 circulation will be published by this method fifteen to twenty-five years from now." Offset was held back, Hardy wrote, only by technical limitations that could have been easily solved with adequate research.⁽²⁶⁾

Even with its technical limitations, offset had established a firm foothold in the nation's newspapers by the end of the 1950s. By 1960, fifty of Georgia's 189 weeklies were printed by the process.⁽²⁷⁾ Nationally, offset printing grew rapidly enough in the late 1950s to prompt the National Editorial Association (NEA), the national organization of weekly and small daily newspapers, to organize an offset printing committee so that offset newspaper publishers could swap information. In late 1957, National Publisher, the NEA monthly magazine, counted 150 newspapers published by offset, the vast majority of them weeklies.⁽²⁸⁾ Offset began to grow substantially, however, in the early and mid-1960s as technical limitations were worked out. A 1960 survey by American Press magazine found that more than 100 dailies and 750 weeklies were considering switching to offset in the early 1960s.⁽²⁹⁾ By 1963, about 650 newspapers--forty of them dailies--had made the switch.⁽³⁰⁾ By 1967, about 170 small dailies and 1,500 weeklies were printed on offset presses.⁽³¹⁾ The increasing number of newspapers switching to offset prompted the University of Missouri to inaugurate a training program in the process in January 1964. The non-credit course was offered in eighteen-week or twelve-week increments.⁽³²⁾

By 1960, Prescott Low, publisher of the daily Quincy (Mass.) Patriot-Ledger, was predicting that offset printing was on the verge of a period of major growth. "There are only one or two problems left standing in the way of even the largest daily going to offset," Low said. "It is expected that these outstanding problems will be overcome in the next five to seven years."⁽³³⁾ "What is happening," wrote journalism professor John Tebbel in 1961, "is a quiet revolution in the composing room which may well have far-reaching and not wholly predictable consequences for the communications industry."⁽³⁴⁾ Allan Woods, longtime production manager of Newsday in suburban New York City, wrote in 1963 that offset printing was the most dramatic development in newspaper publishing since the nineteenth century. "The conversion of many newspapers to the offset process is the biggest and perhaps the most significant change to occur in the newspaper industry since the origin of the Linotype machine," Woods declared.⁽³⁵⁾

But, as Woods pointed out, it was the pairing of offset with another development of the 1950s that had such far-reaching implications for American newspapers. Offset combined with photocomposition--that is, the process of electronically setting type directly onto paper or metal without using line-casting machines--to give newspapers a way to completely bypass the hot-metal typesetting system. Photocomposition advanced slowly in the 1950s as publishers learned how it could be paired with offset to print newspapers much more economically. With photocomposition and offset, Woods said, "Theoretically, it would be possible to set, compose, and make up complete pages of type without recourse to the use of any hot metal slugs or the time-consuming composition of the traditional methods."⁽³⁶⁾

Photocomposition machines were first introduced in the mid-1950s. The Intertype Corporation's Fotosetter machine was marketed beginning in 1954. The Photon Corporation's Photon and the Mergenthaler Linotype Company's Linofilm were each introduced for field testing the same year. "The long-awaited `revolution in printing' appears to be drawing closer," said Editor & Publisher in announcing the manufacture of the new machines.⁽³⁷⁾ The process spread relatively slowly into newspapers, however. Only twenty to thirty newspapers were using photocomposition machines four years after their introduction.⁽³⁸⁾ By 1958, manufacturers had spent $8 million to develop cold type, but Martin M. Reed, the president of Mergenthaler, said the technology needed even more engineering work to make it feasible. "Photocomposition has passed its fledgling stage," Reed said. "Right now it needs to be shoved out of the nest and made to prove itself."⁽³⁹⁾

Even in its early development, however, photocomposition showed promise. Most of the newspapers using the technology found that it was best suited to set display advertising, which usually required long deadlines and complicated makeup. Most journals used the photocomposition machines to print ads onto paper or film, which was then used, depending upon the newspaper's presses, to make an offset plate or a photoengraving for letterpress. Among the newspapers using the photocomposition process in the 1950s were the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Milwaukee Journal, and the Washington Post, as well as smaller papers such as the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune and the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot-Ledger. "Its development," the Patriot-Ledger's R.D. Allen wrote in 1958 of photocomposition, "is blowing refreshing and stimulating breezes through some stuffy old composing rooms."⁽⁴⁰⁾

At the South Bend Tribune, managers marveled at the speed and cost-savings of photocomposition. Beginning in late 1958, the Tribune began setting all of its display advertising using four Photon machines that were used in place of six hot metal machines. Because the cold type process is less cumbersome than hot metal, with Photon the Tribune was able to set ads into type much more quickly without increased cost. The cold-type process allowed the Tribune to hold its overall engraving and composing costs steady even as the newspaper's ad lineage rose. "We decided to change completely to [the] cold-type method because we believed it would be best in the long run," explained Roy N. Walden, the newspaper's chief accountant, in 1959. "Results so far confirm our judgment."⁽⁴¹⁾

The speed, flexibility, and quality of cold type impressed the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review and Chronicle. "The savings in time required for make-up between the so-called hot metal and Photon plate metal can be fantastic," said Frederick H. Trantow, the journal's chief accountant, in 1960. For example, a food ad that required an hour and a half of composition time using hot metal could be set with a Photon machine in five minutes. A two-page supermarket ad that required seven hours to compose in hot metal could be assembled in only forty-five minutes with Photon. Some of the newspaper's advertisers had so appreciated the quality of ads set in cold type that they began to insist on Photon composition. "They like the appearance, the crispness of their ads," Trantow said.⁽⁴²⁾

While changes in printing processes were slowly gaining momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s, another technological development--Teletypesetting--exploded in the same period. Teletypesetting, known within the newspaper industry by the acronym TTS, was a process by which typesetting machines could be operated by remote control without the operation of Linotype operators. In the 1940s publishers had used TTS to thwart printers' strikes by using low-skill typists to type newspaper copy into special typewriters that produced perforated tape, which was then fed into a device that operated a Linotype machine. Beginning in the early 1950s, newspapers began to receive wire reports on TTS tape. TTS was actually a very old process--it was first used in the 1930s by chain newspapers--but the process grew most rapidly in the 1950s as a cost-cutting measure. Its adoption was boosted both by the manufacture of new TTS-capable linecasting machines and by concern over rising costs in the early 1950s. TTS saved newspapers money because it gave editors a way to get copy set into type without using their own Linotype operators.

Publishers welcomed the rapid growth of TTS with enthusiasm. "Transmission of press association news reports by Teletypesetter," said Claude S. Ramsey of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen and Times at the Associated Press Managing Editors' meeting in 1952, "is perhaps the greatest development in the newspaper business in the last fifteen or twenty years." J. Curtis Lyons of the Petersburg (Va.) Progress told APME colleagues that TTS had become "the salvation of the small newspapers."⁽⁴³⁾ TTS saved newspapers both time and money: The rapid transmission of news over TTS lines meant that wire copy was set into type quickly and with lower labor costs. TTS also speeded up production because TTS-operated linecasting machines could run full-time without the occasional interruptions required by human operators. Linecasting machines could set from seven to twelve lines of type a minute when driven by TTS tape, while manually operated linecasting machines averaged just three to four lines a minute.⁽⁴⁴⁾

The savings in costs were well worth the changes that newspapers had to make to adjust to the new system. Newspapers began to receive two sets of wire copy--one set in TTS tape and one typewritten copy transmitted over the traditional teletype. Some newspapers set all of their copy using the TTS tape and then edited the copy from proofs. Others monitored the wire copy closely and then decided what TTS tape would be set in type. The new system eliminated the need for Linotype operators to set wire copy, which was now often handled by low-skill tape operators. The Fort Wayne, Indiana, newspapers, for example, switched entirely to TTS wire copy in 1952 and reassigned all of their printers to setting advertising copy or to working on various jobs on the pressroom floor.⁽⁴⁵⁾

The first wire service TTS circuit was established in North Carolina in April 1951. In the next year and a half TTS circuits spread to virtually every state in the country. By late 1952, the Associated Press was using TTS to transmit day and night state wire reports, day and night national news, market reports, and sports scores. A 1952 Associated Press survey of 198 newspapers in twenty-two states found that the process had substantially speeded up production in three-quarters of the surveyed newspapers. TTS delivered wire reports quickly, thus allowing editors to include more state and national news in their newspapers and lessening the need for filler.⁽⁴⁶⁾ "Best of all," an Associated Press Managing Editors committee wrote of TTS in 1952, "it is coming at a time when newspapers are under the terrible compulsion of finding less costly methods or producing their issues."⁽⁴⁷⁾ At first, TTS was used primarily at smaller newspapers. A 1952 ANPA survey found that 76 percent of all newspapers using Teletypesetters were under 50,000 circulation. The new process caused some grumbling from the typesetters' union, which responded by seeking control over the process. As newspaper union contracts were renegotiated, the International Typographical Union usually won control over the process.⁽⁴⁸⁾

But if TTS offered newspapers tremendous advantages, it also posed some difficulties as the process became more widespread in the 1950s. Before TTS, the major wire services--Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service--each had similar styles that governed capitalization, spelling, punctuation, abbreviation, and the like. Newspapers receiving wire service reports usually edited wire copy to conform with their own local style. After the spread of TTS, however, many editors began dropping their own local style in favor of wire service style because editing copy from TTS tape was time-consuming and troublesome. Editors also pushed for improved wire service style books that would clear up any ambiguities about wire service style. In July 1953, the largest wire service, the Associated Press, issued a 100-page, 12,000-word style book that replaced an older, much smaller, and less comprehensive style guide.⁽⁴⁹⁾ "TTS brought about the new style book," C.P. (Gus) Winkler, the AP's TTS supervisor, who worked more than six months with an Associated Press Managing Editors committee to compile the style guide, said when the new book was unveiled. "Style whims for local conditions will prevail in some cases but basically the styles established in the composing rooms will prevail." The new style book governed the style used by both state AP circuits and the national wires. Editor & Publisher reported that the new rules and regulations of the style book "are expected to become gospel law in hundreds of composing rooms and on copy desks everywhere."⁽⁵⁰⁾

But while the new consistency in style required less editing of TTS-supplied copy, it also had another effect: It made newspaper articles more likely to be similar in newspapers across the country. Basil L. Walters, executive editor of Knight Newspapers, warned of the dangers of TTS even before the new AP style book was released. TTS threatened to be "a Frankenstein monster" to editors, Walters warned. Walters believed that the standardization of copy that would result from TTS would make newspapers resemble each other more and more, a considerable handicap in an era of increasing competition.⁽⁵¹⁾ Editor & Publisher's editors said Walters' timely warning should serve notice on editors that they "must never completely delegate or abrogate their duty to edit their own papers."⁽⁵²⁾ Still, TTS so diminished the need for local editing that many editors believed by the late 1950s that good copy editing was a thing of the past. As Hartford (Conn.) Times copy editor George K. Moriarty complained in 1957, "Copy editing was becoming a lost art when technology in the form of TTS came along and firmly closed the book."⁽⁵³⁾

Carl Lindstrom, longtime editor of American Editor and a former editor of the Hartford Times, wrote in 1960 that TTS had contributed to a sameness in American newspapers at the worst possible time--as newspapers were facing new competition from television. As Lindstrom summarized the situation in his 1960 book about American newspapers,

This is a practical, efficient, and in fairly general operation. The result calls, however, for serious attention because it also stereotypes the language of every line of telegraph news in the country, telling every story in identical words--including typographical errors. . . . It is a valuable agent in cutting costs and labor, but it should not be used and its effects should be carefully weighed.⁽⁵⁴⁾

TTS not only bred sameness but caused many papers to print more wire news at the expense of local content. An Indiana University researcher found in 1954 that of twenty-six United Press newspapers that used TTS, all used more wire coverage as a result. "Through use of TTS," one editor said, "we have almost doubled our wire coverage while holding the line on local."⁽⁵⁵⁾ University of Wisconsin researcher Scott M. Cutlip studied four non-metropolitan newspapers in 1954 and found that all used more wire news and less local after getting TTS. "If this trend becomes a widespread fact, it has serious implications for newspapers as they buck increased competition," Cutlip concluded.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Editor & Publisher's Robert U. Brown said the study was evidence that some editors were taking too much advantage of the "wonderful invention" of TTS. Brown said "it seems to us that many small newspapers have gone too far in relying on TTS to reduce costs not only in the composing room but in the news room."⁽⁵⁷⁾ Still, TTS continued to spread. In the late 1950s, the use of TTS spread from smaller papers to larger, metropolitan journals. By 1960, one-half of the Associated Press' 1,778 newspapers took some form of TTS service. The same year, about 600 United Press International clients received wire reports by TTS. United Press International was the combined news service formed in 1958 by the merger of United Press and International News Service.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Though TTS was spreading fast and printing technology was finally beginning to advance by the end of the 1950s, newspapers still seemed behind the times to many editors. Photocomposition and offset showed promise for the future but offered the vast majority of newspaper publishers little immediate relief from the steadily rising costs of the 1950s and early 1960s. Letterpress technology was far too entrenched. Many publishers had invested heavily in new presses after World War II and were in no hurry to switch to new processes not yet in wide use. Unions, particularly in large metropolitan newspapers, also resisted the new methods. Wayne V. Harsha, editor of Inland Printer magazine, proclaimed in 1960 that while offset and other developments were certainly promising, it would take years for the new technologies to spread to the large dailies in the slow-changing newspaper industry.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Indeed, offset presses constituted only a minute part of the $100 million that newspapers invested in capital expenditures in the late 1950s and early 1960s.⁽⁶⁰⁾

Many editors believed that the changes in printing technology were significant but were coming far too slowly to help newspapers in their cost squeeze. "Editors know, as well as publishers, that the often-predicted revolution has not taken place," American Editor magazine said in a 1960 editorial. "There have been a few revolutionary outbreaks, but most newspapers cling to conventional methods and changes are evolutionary. Efforts to increase efficiency in the use of hot metal are preceding adoption of cold metal."⁽⁶¹⁾ Many publishers blamed unions for impeding change. Indiana University journalism teacher Poynter McEvoy, reflecting sentiments often expressed by publishers, wrote in 1960 that union work policies had long kept productivity low despite technological improvements. He called for management to fight unions head-on by breaking up traditional composing room functions and by eliminating make-work rules that cost publishers time and money.⁽⁶²⁾ But even as publishers criticized unions for opposing change, they usually admitted that management had been equally slow to modernize. "I do not exonerate management of responsibility," declared Chicago Sun-Times executive editor Milburn P. Akers in 1958. "As a whole, management has not risen to the crisis any better than the unions."⁽⁶³⁾

The slow pace of updating newspaper printing technology was a frequent subject of discussion in trade journals in the late 1950s and early 1960s. "The effort to solve the problem of costs through these various methods is still in the early stages of an industry which has stood on dead center for two generations," wrote Allan Woods of Newsday in 1963. He said the nation's largest newspapers had made the fewest gains in productivity in recent years.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Washington Post editor J. Russell Wiggins was particularly downbeat about newspapers' prospects. "Problems darken the horizons of the American press," Wiggins wrote in 1959. Recent progress aside, he said, newspapers for decades had progressed far too slowly in both content and production. Newspaper productivity remained static or had declined while workers' strikes and wages increased. "Fifty years filled with revolutionary developments in the printing trades have really changed newspapers but very little," Wiggins said. "It grows harder and costlier to get and print the news for citizens who have less and less time to read it. What a challenging situation this is!"⁽⁶⁵⁾

The "challenging situation" described by Wiggins entailed far more than just impending technological change. In addition, a second, and equally important, trend was building throughout the 1950s that profoundly affected newspapers. America's population, beginning at the end of World War II, began to shift from urban areas to the suburbs. Myriad factors fueled the shift, including a shortage of housing and the slow decay of many central cities, improvements in transportation, and a burgeoning middle class. Newspapers' fortunes shifted along with the population. Metropolitan newspapers found that the core of their central city readership had left for the suburbs, where they were served by a newly energized suburban press of weeklies and small- and medium-sized dailies. The shift in population left newspapers in both metropolitan and suburban areas struggling to meet the challenges of a changing readership.⁽⁶⁶⁾

Nationwide demographic trends were evident in circulation figures from newspapers in the nation's ten major metropolitan areas--Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington. Between 1945 and 1962, according to a study prepared for the ANPA in 1963, circulation of weeklies and community dailies in the suburbs grew thirty times as fast as did that of the metropolitan dailies. In the seventeen-year period, weeklies grew by 94 percent, community dailies by 81 percent, and metropolitan dailies by just 3 percent. The largest percentage circulation gains in community dailies were in Washington, with 174 percent; Los Angeles, 163 percent; San Francisco, 152 percent; and Detroit, 115 percent. In New York, circulation of community dailies grew by 75 percent while large metropolitan dailies had grown by just 1 percent over the seventeen-year period. In 1945 the big metropolitan newspapers in the ten most populous areas had captured two-thirds of all newspaper circulation; by 1962 this had fallen to just half.⁽⁶⁷⁾

What was happening was that newspapers in large cities were gaining only slightly or even losing circulation as many of their readers moved to the suburbs. The cities were getting bigger, but some of the affluent population was shifting to the suburbs, and newspaper circulation reflected this population shift. Population in the ten metropolitan areas climbed by 45.2 percent in the seventeen-year period, the majority of it in the suburbs. As a result, community dailies grew by nearly twice the rate of population growth while metropolitan newspapers experienced little or no growth.⁽⁶⁸⁾

The shift in newspaper readership was clear by the mid-1950s. Business Week magazine perceptively described the trend in February 1955: "In the big-city downtown areas, more papers, struggling against higher costs, are combining their mechanical operations, merging, or being bought up by chains," the magazine noted. But in the suburbs, "more small-town papers are coming to life to take care of the population boom and the move to the suburbs. They may be new papers started from scratch, weeklies turned into dailies, or just old papers with a new zest for living. As some metropolitan areas began to have trouble with downtown decay, suburbia grew since the war into an unwieldy place, shouting for some form of community expression."⁽⁶⁹⁾

Both weeklies and small dailies benefited from the rush to the suburbs. The biggest beneficiary, of course, was Newsday, the tabloid daily founded on Long Island in 1940 by Alicia Patterson, a relative of the McCormick-Patterson publishing dynasty of Chicago and Washington. Newsday's circulation skyrocketed after World War II, reaching 345,000 in 1962 and even surpassing the circulation of the New York Herald-Tribune. Newsday was by far the country's largest suburban daily, benefiting immensely from the tremendous growth in the Long Island suburbs of New York City after World War II.⁽⁷⁰⁾ One reason for Newsday's success, Patterson said in 1959, was the newspaper's intense coverage of news in Long Island, a strength the metropolitan newspapers in New York were hard-pressed to compete with.⁽⁷¹⁾

Many other suburban newspapers also saw tremendous growth in the postwar years, including established dailies, weeklies converted to dailies, and those newspapers started from scratch. Between 1945 and 1963, for example, the Waukegan (Ill.) News-Sun north of Chicago gained 14,000 readers, almost doubling its circulation; the Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Mich., north of Detroit, increased from 16,000 to 50,000; and the Beaver County Times, northwest of Pittsburgh, jumped from 9,000 to 30,000 circulation. In suburban Los Angeles, The Palo Alto Times increased from 8,000 to 37,000 circulation in this period, while the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, founded in 1955, reached 55,000 circulation by 1962.⁽⁷²⁾ "The new suburbia has opened up a new frontier in American journalism: the suburban newspaper," declared Charles Hayes, managing editor of the Paddock Publications in Chicago, in 1960.⁽⁷³⁾

The Paddock Publications were indeed a success story all their own. A chain of weekly newspapers founded by Stuart Paddock in the suburbs surrounding Chicago, by 1959

-growing suburban newspaper chains in the country. The chain's fat weeklies, sometimes containing up to eighty pages, served readers in such northwest Chicago suburbs as Prospect Heights, Elk Grove, Addison, Hoffman, Rolling Meadows, and Arlington Heights.⁽⁷⁴⁾ The circulation of the chain's newspapers jumped from 9,000 at the end of World War II to 34,000 in 1959, ensuring the Paddocks a healthy profit, a goal explicit in the newspapers' slogan: "Tell the truth, fear God, and make money."⁽⁷⁵⁾

Suburban newspapers profited not only from population shifts but also from the spread of cheap offset printing. Offset presses--cheaper to buy and to operate than letterpress--enabled entrepreneurs in the growing suburbs to found newspapers with minimal investments. Publishers without the funds to buy offset presses could contract with other publishers to print their newspapers inexpensively.⁽⁷⁶⁾ "The drastic cost savings realized through new production techniques," as one scholar of the suburban press has observed, "made it possible for suburban newspapers with limited financial resources to stake out a narrowly defined, yet profitable, market niche by positioning themselves as their community's only local editorial voice."⁽⁷⁷⁾

With readers moving to the suburbs and circulations shifting, both metropolitan and suburban journals struggled to keep up with the changes. The metropolitan papers, for their part, tried frantically to keep up with a changing readership, both in circulation and in news coverage. For these newspapers, chasing readers into the suburbs would prove to be an expensive proposition. More reporters were required to cover the suburban areas, and delivering newspapers to communities distant from the central city was expensive. "Cost of servicing subscribers in Suburbia is much greater than servicing them in the city of publication," lamented Ralph E. Heckman of the Fort Wayne, Ind., newspapers in 1959.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Metropolitan and larger newspapers responded to the exodus in various ways. In circulation, newspapers initiated efforts to follow readers into the suburbs and to hire adults rather than children to deliver newspapers.⁽⁷⁹⁾ At the New York Times, for example, the newspaper recognized the growing suburban trend in 1951 and sent salesmen canvassing new subdivisions selling subscriptions. "The whole trend of suburban living makes it imperative that we pursue suburban circulation," said William M. Pike, the Times' suburban circulation manager, in 1959. Home delivery subscriptions were crucial, according to Pike, because housewives did not have access to newsstands and because commuters could not read while driving. "We must get them back at home, where they have reading time," Pike declared.⁽⁸⁰⁾ The Times effort was successful; daily suburban circulation grew by 50 percent, to 157,000, through the 1950s.⁽⁸¹⁾

In 1957, the Times appointed a suburban editor, Kalman Seigel, to direct the newspaper's suburban coverage. Seigel's assignment was to coordinate news coverage of the suburban areas newly added to the Times circulation area. The Times' suburban news stories were concentrated on a "second front page" inside the newspaper, though articles about suburban news also were scattered throughout each day's issue. The suburban reporters concentrated on news stories of particular interest to the growing suburban population--urban renewal, school and housing integration, population growth, medical care, business migration, education issues, and taxes.⁽⁸²⁾

Like Seigel at the Times, other editors across the country tried numerous ways to keep their newspapers relevant to a growing suburban readership increasingly disengaged from news of the city. Many papers began hiring suburban reporters in the 1950s, and some set up special neighborhood editions, newspapers containing news targeted to a particular community and delivered only to that area. The Cleveland Press, for example, in 1956 employed a staff of eight full-time suburban reporters, a photographer, and ten part-time "stringers," all to cover the suburbs.⁽⁸³⁾

The challenge of getting and keeping suburban readers was considerable, Angelo said. Suburban readers, he said, often continued taking the city paper immediately after their move to the hinterlands but then steadily lost interest in central city news as their attention to local affairs grew. As they become ensconced in their new communities, suburbanites often switched from the metropolitan newspaper to the suburban daily or weekly. "The concentrated drive for suburban news by the metropolitan papers simply is providing more `dope' for the reader to keep his wonderful habit of reading our papers going," Angelo said. Consequently, newspapers played up suburban news in the suburban editions. "Today," Angelo said, "it is coming to pass that a town meeting in Lathrup (in some editions) gets about as big a play as the Suez crisis. The battle is on for sure for suburban circulation."⁽⁸⁵⁾

The battle for circulation was often heated. In 1959, the Cleveland Press undertook a campaign to bolster suburban circulation by printing suburban editions. Suburban publishers, led by editor Harry Volk of the suburban Shaker Heights News Press, fought the Press' encroachment onto their circulation areas. In editorial columns, the suburban editors portrayed their competition with the Press as a David vs. Goliath battle, dubbing Press editor Louis Seltzer "King Louie." The editors appealed successfully to advertisers and readers to remain loyal to their community newspapers. "We urge you to buy a less greedy newspaper," Volk urged readers. The Press, after losing the public relations battle against the suburbans and suffering other business setbacks, lost 4,000 suburban readers in 1959 to the community newspapers. "Our fight as a team saved us," Volk concluded.⁽⁸⁶⁾

The suburban newspapers threatened larger newspapers for their advertisers as well as their readers. The suburban shopping districts and shopping centers that sprang up around the new housing developments emptied some downtown areas of their businesses and their patrons, depriving some metropolitan newspapers of their largest customers, the department stores. This "downtown problem," as Editor & Publisher's Robert U. Brown described it, was a substantial worry for both retailers and newspaper executives. "The simple truth has been that if the nation's downtown areas lost out in the competitive battle with the shopping centers for customers then the newspapers would suffer along with the retailers, who up to now spend 75 percent of the retail advertising dollar," Brown wrote in 1957.⁽⁸⁷⁾

Some newspapers tried to help downtown businesses save themselves. In Memphis, Phoenix, San Jose, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and other cities, newspapers coordinated advertising campaigns by downtown merchants to attract shoppers. Newspapers also undertook research with downtown merchants to explore ways to keep suburban customers shopping in their stores.⁽⁸⁸⁾

Some newspapers were slow to respond to the shift of businesses to the suburbs. As James Hoge, longtime publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, recalled years later, "We watched Chicago rot away right up to our loading bays before we realized what the death of the central city meant to us."⁽⁹⁰⁾

A second long-term population trend also faced newspapers. After strong circulation growth in the 1940s, newspapers continued to grow during the 1950s and early 1960s but not at a rate that matched the rapid growth in population in these years. "There is less tendency," researcher Jon G. Udell wrote in a study for the ANPA in 1965, "for a household to read more than one or two newspapers each day."⁽⁹²⁾ This decline in multiple readership, which dated to the end of World War II, was due to many factors: larger newspapers, growth of the suburban press, and competition from television chief among them. While the average United States household had read 1.33 newspapers a day in 1946, it read only 1.07 in 1963. Daily nationwide newspaper circulation had continued to hit new records almost every year after World War II, but the number of households had grown at an even faster pace. Daily newspaper circulation increased by 16 percent from 1946 to 1963, when it reached 58,905,251. The number of households, meanwhile, had grown by 44 percent in the same period, reaching 55,189,000 in 1963.⁽⁹³⁾

Newspaper publishers often discounted this trend, correctly pointing out that the Baby Boom generation would not reach young adulthood--newspaper reading age--until the 1960s. Still, publishers took notice of the population trend and took steps to entice young people into reading newspapers. Many newspapers began programs to encourage newspaper reading in elementary and secondary schools, arguing that newspaper reading would build both better citizens and healthier newspapers. "The learning child in school is really a junior citizen, and early development of newspaper reading habits will carry over into adulthood if young people are made aware early of the importance of the daily newspaper in our every-day lives," stated a 1955 ANPA report on newspapers' efforts to attract young readers.⁽⁹⁴⁾ Publishers were particularly eager for young readers to acquire the newspaper "habit" because of competition from television. Editors worried that children reaching maturity in the television era might be less inclined to turn to the printed word.

The ANPA inaugurated a Young Reading Program in the mid-1950s to increase readership among the younger generation. The program, ANPA general manager Stanford Smith proclaimed in 1960, "has cut across blockades never before breached in journalistic history." He said both teachers and editors had quickly become sold on the program, which organized workshops across the country to train teachers in methods of incorporating newspapers into their classroom work. Newspapers of all sizes were participating in the program, which had been founded by C.K. Jefferson of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register & Tribune in 1955 and had spread through the efforts of ANPA and the International Circulation Managers Association.⁽⁹⁵⁾

Newspapers across the country either participated in the ANPA's program or started their own youth-readership initiatives. At the La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune, managers undertook a "concentrated effort to get our newspaper into as many schools in our area as possible," reported circulation manager Ed Keefe in 1955. The newspaper sent sample subscriptions to 900 area schools and wrote letters to teachers suggesting ways to use the newspaper in the classroom, resulting in 300 school subscriptions.⁽⁹⁶⁾ At the Miami Herald, the newspaper assembled a two-week high school course outline on newspaper reading and provided it free of charge to Dade County schools. The text for the course was a booklet provided by the Herald called "How to Get the Most Out of Your Newspaper." Similar programs were organized by the New York Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, and other newspapers in the mid-1950s. Editor & Publisher columnist T.S. Irvin noted the growth in such programs in 1956 and recommended that all newspapers use them "unless we are to sit by and watch reading becoming a fading and secondary if not an altogether lost art."⁽⁹⁷⁾

In population trends as in other long-term trends in printing technology and suburbanization, editors and publishers recognized the potential threat to newspapers and had begun to take steps to adjust. But there was little sense that newspapers' very existence was threatened by any of these long-term changes. While many editors agreed that newspapers were indeed lagging behind in updating their technology, they also agreed that newspapers were otherwise confronting their problems head-on and with some success. While some newspapers had closed or merged in the nation's largest cities through the 1950s, overall the newspaper industry seemed healthy at decade's end. This perception would not last long into the 1960s, however, when a host of these and other long-term trends would combine and push the newspaper industry into crisis.

1. Robert U. Brown, "Revenue Outpaces Expense," Editor & Publisher, 16 April 1960, 11.

2. Robert U. Brown, "Small Gain in Revenue Makes Profit Margin Tight Squeeze," Editor & Publisher, 5 April 1958, 9, 10.

3. Robert U. Brown, "50,000-Daily's Profit Was Lowest Since 1945," Editor & Publisher, 19 April 1958, 24.

4. Richard W. Slocum quoted in "The High Cost of Publishing," Time, 21 June 1954, 79-80.

5. "Why Newspapers are in Trouble," U.S. News & World Report, 16 January 1959, 75.

6. Soaring newsprint prices cannot be overstated as a root cause of newspapers' financial difficulties in the booming 1950s. Publishers had long relied, as Fortune magazine put it in 1951, upon a "formula" of cheap newsprint and circulation rate increases to remain profitable. In the postwar years, due to soaring paper prices and competition from television, the formula no longer worked. See "Newspaper Business: The Death of a Formula," Fortune, September 1951, 118-119, and L. Ethan Ellis, Newsprint: Producers, Publishers, Political Pressures (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), 133-227.

7. "The High Cost of Publishing," 79-80.

8. Media Records statistics quoted in "Average Paper in 1952 Had 59 Percent Ad Content," Editor & Publisher, 18 April 1953, 128.

9. See Chapter 2 of this dissertation.

10. James S. Pope, "A Managing Editor Discusses Need for Higher Standards," Journalism Quarterly 24 (March 1947): 30.

11. Charles V. Kinter, "Economic Problems in Private Ownership of Communications," in Communications in Modern Society, ed. Wilbur Schramm (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1948), 24-25.

12. Interview with Robert W. Brown, 3 November 1973, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Miss.

13. 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), 3.

14. Robert U. Brown, "Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor & Publisher, 9 July 1955, 76.

15. "It's Not Enough," Editor & Publisher, 2 May 1959, 6.

16. For an explanation of how higher costs of producing newspapers contributed to an increase in the use of offset printing, see James Neil Woodruff, "An Economic Analysis of Letterpress and Offset Printing Techniques in Daily Newspapers in the Mid-South," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1971, 1-39.

17. Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word (New York: Knopf, 1970), 224. The first rotary offset press had been marketed in 1904, but the lithographic process upon which offset printing was based had been invented in 1798. See Olin E. Hinkle, "The Re-Birth of Lithographic Printing," Journalism Quarterly 32 (1955): 441-448, 513.

18. Harry Loose, "Watch New Printing Devices But Don't Let Them Worry You," Iowa Publisher, February 1946, 3.

19. The process is, to be sure, more complicated than the oversimplification that suffices here. In more technical terms, the offset process uses "grained metal plates covered with a film of light-sensitive gelatin," according to one printing textbook. "The image to be printed is transferred to the plate by the photographic method. Where bright light has fallen in the plate, it repels water and receives the greasy printing ink. The image on the plate is printed on a rubber roller. From this roller the image is printed [or offset] on paper." (Hartley E. Jackson, Printing: A Practical Introduction to the Graphic Arts [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957], 127.) An often-cited analogy for explaining the two major printing processes is a woman's kiss on a gentleman's cheek: The lipstick on the man's cheek is left by letterpress; the lipstick wiped away by his handkerchief is offset.

20. John R. Thistlethwaite, "Louisiana Daily Has Been Offset Paper 17 Years," National Publisher, March 1956, 35.

21. Ibid.

22. Robert L. Norberg, "`Nothing But Advantages in Switching to Offset Method,' Weekly Publisher States," American Press, February 1958, 15, 24.

23. Allan Woods, Modern Newspaper Production (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 181.

24. Jack Fidler quoted in Fred Troutman, "From Letterpress to Offset," Missouri Press News, April 1960, 8-9, 19. For another success story of a newspaper's conversion to offset, see Walt Rummel, "`Oh's' and `Ah's' Over His Pictures Make Rummel Proud to Use Offset," American Press, August 1959, 14-15.

25. Editorial, 22 November 1955, Gainesville (Ga.) Morning News, quoted in Grimes, Last Linotype, 45.

26. Charles L. Hardy, Sr., column, Morning News, 31 July 1956, quoted in Grimes, Last Linotype, 46.

27. Grimes, Last Linotype, 65.

28. "Thayer Named to Head New Committee on Offset Printing," National Publisher, January 1956, 29; National Publisher, December 1957, 28.

29. "Equipment Buying Spree Foreseen For Weeklies and Small Dailies," American Press, October 1960, 9.

30. Woods, Modern Newspaper Production, 181.

31. R. Randolph Karch and Edward J. Buber, Graphic Arts Procedures: The Offset Processes (Chicago: American Technical Society, 1967), 5.

32. "Offset Printing: The Door to Your Future," University of Missouri Bulletin 65:31, Journalism Series No. 159, 6 November 1964.

33. Prescott Low quoted in Robert U. Brown, "More Daily Papers?" Editor & Publisher, 1 October 1960, 68.

34. John Tebbel, "The Quiet Offset Revolution," Saturday Review, 9 December 1961, 60-61.

35. Woods, Modern Newspaper Production, 178-179.

36. Ibid., 179-180.

37. Linofilm advertisement, Editor & Publisher, 17 April 1954, 58-59; "Printing Revolution," ibid., 78.

38. "Survey Tells Editors' View of Cold Type," Editor & Publisher, 31 May 1958, 61; R.D. Allen, "New Typographical Techniques," Nieman Reports, July 1958, 19.

39. Martin M. Reed, "Cold Type at the Crossroads After Ten Years, $8,000,000," Editor & Publisher, 18 January 1958, 11.

40. Allen, "New Typographical Techniques," 20.

41. Roy N. Walden, "Hot Metal vs. Cold Type--A Cost Comparison," Publication Management, September 1959, 11.

42. Frederick H. Trantow, "Photon Machines--Their Use in the `Cold Type' Process," Publication Management, February 1960, 20-21.

43. APME Red Book, 1952, 104.

44. Clifton E. Wilson, "Impact of Teletypesetter on Publishing Media," Journalism Quarterly 30 (1953): 372-373.

45. George A. Brandenburg, "TTS Advantages Told Inland News Editors," Editor & Publisher, 19 April 1952, 104.

46. "Teletypesetter Committee Report," APME Red Book, 1952, 111-114.

47. Ibid., 111.

48. Wilson, "Impact of Teletypesetter," 373.

49. Ray Erwin, "New AP Style Book Changes Newspaper Copy Very Soon," Editor & Publisher, 6 June 1953, 9.

50. Ibid.

51. "Walters Warns Tape Can Be Frankenstein," Editor & Publisher, 2 February 1952, 20.

52. "Timely Warning," ibid., 28.

53. George K. Moriarty, "Story Structure and the News Desk," American Editor, April 1957, 23.

54. Carl Lindstrom, The Fading American Newspaper (1960; reprint ed., Glouchester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 112-113.

55. "New High Speed TTS System Sends 600 Words a Minute," Editor & Publisher, 24 July 1954, 9.

56. Quoted in Robert U. Brown, "Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor & Publisher, 30 October 1954, 72.

57. Ibid. Most studies of TTS agreed that it had caused newspapers to print more wire news, though a few concluded that it had held the amount of local copy constant, not diminished it. See, for example, Walter Gieber, "Tape Critics Wrong: `Local' Undiminished," Editor & Publisher, 28 May 1955, 11.

58. "Automation Boom Spreads TTS Operation in Papers," Editor & Publisher, 18 June 1960, 9, 66; "UP and INS Merge to Form United Press International," ibid., 31 May 1958, 9-10.

59. Wayne V. Harsha, "Printing Industry Spurred by Late Developments," Quill, March 1960, 12.

60. U.S. Department of Commerce statistics, quoted in Jon G. Udell, "Economic Trends in the Daily Newspaper Business, 1946 to 1970," Wisconsin Projects Reports 4:6 (December 1970): 10.

61. "Higher Quality, Lower Costs," American Editor, January 1960, 40.

62. Poynter McEvoy, "Right Now the Battle of Production Costs," American Editor, July 1960, 40-45.

63. Quoted in "Editor Calls for Greater Production," Editor & Publisher, 29 November 1958, 52.

64. Woods, Modern Newspaper Production, 184.

65. J. Russell Wiggins, "Journalism Faces Challenges," Quill, November 1959, 12-13.

66. James Homer Buckley, "Suburban Evangel: Trade Associations and the Emergence of the Suburban Newspaper Industry, 1945-1970," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1986, 58-79. Buckley's study is one of the few scholarly examinations of the explosive postwar growth in the suburban press.

67. Circulation figures using N.W. Ayer and Sons statistics, excluding the religious, racial, and trade press, compiled in Kenneth R. Byerly, "Supplementary (Final) Report on Community Newspapers (Daily and Weekly) and Metropolitan Dailies in the Nation's Ten Most Populous Metropolitan Areas," 30 July 1963, photocopy in Newspaper Association of America files, Reston, Va.

68. Ibid. See also Kenneth R. Byerly, "Circulation Growth Thirty Times Greater for Community Papers than Big Dailies," Quill, July 1963, 8-11.

69. "Newspapers: Lagging Downtown, New Life in Suburbs," Business Week, 5 February 1955, 134.

70. "Suburb and City," Columbia Journalism Review, Summer 1963, 13-14.

71. ASNE Proceedings, 1959, 2.

72. "Suburb and City," 15-21.

73. Charles Hayes, "The Exploding Suburban Press," Grassroots Editor, July 1960, 7.

74. Stuart Paddock quoted in "The Need to Holler," Newsweek, 22 June 1959, 88-89.

75. Jerrold Lee Werthimer, "The Community Press of Suburbia: A Case Study of Paddock Newspapers," Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1960, 81, 96, 112.

76. David R. Bowers, "The Impact of Centralized Printing on the Community Press," Journalism Quarterly 46 (1969): 43-46, 52; Rick Friedman, "Starting a Weekly," Editor & Publisher, 15 December 1962, 46-47.

77. Buckley, "Suburban Evangel," 69.

78. Ralph E. Heckman, "Where is This Place Called Suburbia?" Publication Management, September 1959, 13.

79. Ibid.

80. William M. Pike quoted in "Suburbia's Challenge Seized by N.Y. Times," Editor & Publisher, 7 March 1959, 52, 54.

81. Ibid.

82. Turner Catledge to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, 9 September 1957; Kalman Seigel to Turner Catledge, 11 October 1962, Turner Catledge papers, Series 2-C, Box 34, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University.

83. "Cleveland Press," ASNE Bulletin, 1 January 1957, 7. See also "Flight to the Suburbs: What Major Newspapers Are Doing About It," ibid., 7-11.

84. "Newark News," ibid., 9; "Detroit Free Press," ibid., 8.

85. Ibid.

86. Werthimer, "Community Press of Suburbia," 365-367.

87. Robert U. Brown, "Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor & Publisher, 25 May 1957, 100.

88. "Downtown vs. Suburban Areas: Effect of Decentralization on Newspapers," 2 February 1955, American Newspaper Publishers Association, photocopied report in Newspaper Association of America files, Reston, Va.

89. Campbell Watson, "Shopping Centers Forcing Broadened Linage Areas," Editor & Publisher, 13 June 1953, 9.

90. James Hoge quoted in Anthony Smith, Goodbye Gutenburg: The Newspaper Revolution in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 71-72.

91. Quoted in Raymond A. Schroth, The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841-1955 (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 249-250.

92. Jon G. Udell, "The Growth of the American Daily Newspaper: An Economic Analysis," Wisconsin Project Reports 3 (1965): 4.

93. Bureau of the Census population statistics, Editor & Publisher Yearbook circulation figures, quoted in ibid., 15.

94. "What Newspapers Are Doing to Develop Young Readers," November 1955, photocopied report in Newspaper Association of America files, Reston, Va.

95. Stanford Smith, "Teaching Johnny How to Read Newspapers in the Classroom," Quill, August 1960, 15-16; "Newspapers in the Classroom: A Report on Results of University Workshops," ASNE Bulletin, 1 February 1960, 1-2.

96. Ed Keefe, "How to Insure Future Readers With Promotion to Young People," Circulation Management, April 1955, 12.

97. T.S. Irvin, "Miami Herald Sparks Reading in High School," Editor & Publisher, 10 March 1956, 48; C. R. Conlee, "Newspapers Go to School," Circulation Management, March 1954, 16.