Today, a history lesson from some research I’ve been doing for my new book, because if you want to see the road ahead, take a look at the road behind.
More than 100 years ago, the newspaper industry was dealing with technological change on a scale comparable to today. In the 1890s, telephone service revolutionized reporting, while “one linotype operator could do the work of five men,†according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism, dramatically increasing the speed of printing.
This led to an explosion of newspapers – and newspaper readers – that I see as emblematic of what we’re seeing today with online journalism startups and mainstream news organizations.
Just look at the landscape of the Progressive Era, according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism:
* The number of English-language daily newspapers grew from 850 in 1880 to 1,967 in 1900 to 2,200 in 1910. An additional 400 of other types were also published that year.
* Daily circulation totals grew from 3.1 million in 1880 to 15.1 million in 1900 to 22.1 million in 1910.
* Chicago and Boston each had eight newspapers in 1900. New York had nine.
* Newspapers began charging (one cent) per issue in 1833 and it wasn’t until the 1880s when advertising slowly began to replace sales and subscriptions as the chief source of newspaper revenue so that by 1914, 66 percent of newspapers revenue came from advertising.
* By 1911, some newspaper critics began to fear the influence of advertising on journalism, “One proposed solution, which had little success, was to create an ‘adless’ newspaper supported by subscribers. Another was to create a non-partisan, adless newspaper funded by city government.
If journalism and the business that supports journalism can evolve that quickly before, what makes you think it won’t happen again? The technology that allowed the number of newspapers to grow 123% in 20 years is similar to what we’ve seen this decade with the Internet and free publishing platforms like WordPress.
In January 2009, the Los Angeles Times announced it was making enough money from online advertising to cover its entire editorial workforce (though drastically reduced it was).
Five years from now we will look back on this development as the beginning of the new era, when news organizations made the switch from print to online ad dollars for financial support.
Mark Briggs 
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