Comments on: Lab Book Club: How technology built objectivity into newspapers

By: Lab Book Club: Some online lessons from the (fairly) recent past » Nieman Journalism Lab

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:39:36 +0000

[...] It is interesting to go back to what you had in Chapter 2 of the book, where you describe one of the reasons for the consolidation in the number of [...]

By: Jay Hamilton

Jay Hamilton — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:49:34 +0000

The data for my analysis of newspaper markets in the late 1800s came from a book called “American Newspaper Annual” by NW Ayer and Son. This book, published every year, was targeted at advertisers who were interested in deciding which newspapers in a town they should place their ads in. I thought it was interesting that advertisers wanted to know how newspapers identified themselves in the market. Depending on the area, the political label adopted by a paper was a rough proxy for the audience demographics of the readers.

By: Seth Lipsky

Seth Lipsky — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:42:24 +0000

For what it’s worth, I draw a distinction between being a right of center paper and a partisan paper. We actually didn’t conceive of The New York Sun as partisan. A reading of its editorials will show that it had many critical things to say about Republicans, locally and nationally, and praised many Democrats, locally and nationally. We tried to look at things through a prism of broad guiding principles — limited (and honest) and government, free markets, sound money — rather than through the prism of party. Dana, by the way, had a similar view, supporting Grant, say, when he thought he was right and criticizing him when he thought he was wrong.

By: Zach Seward

Zach Seward — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:02:26 +0000

Fair point. Partisan and non-partisan aren’t precise enough terms in this context. Hamilton defines partisan newspapers as those explicitly affiliated with a political party. Non-partisan — or in Hamilton’s phrasing, “independent” — newspapers are merely those without a party affiliation and encompasses papers that consider(ed) themselves “Independent Democratic” or “Independent Republican,” which would include the Sun. Independent newspapers with political leanings but not affiliations proliferated in the same way that straight-up independent newspapers did between 1870 and 1900, according to Hamilton. Thanks for helping me clarify.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:36:05 +0000

Should we really take the first Sun (or Hamilton) at its word in claiming to be non-Partisan? The Sun had a strong (partisan) position on the Civil War. Charles Dana, who owned the sun during the war and through the early part of Reconstruction, might not have agreed with this assessment. Dana was an opponent of slavery, Radical Republican, and may well have invented the useful neologism “Rutherfraud B. Hayes.”

By: Announcing the next Lab Book Club: “All the News That’s Fit to Sell” » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:43:23 +0000

[...] Reviews: — Chapter 1 — Chapter 2 [...]