Passage Four Natural History of the Newspaper  

Author: Robert E. Park

The newspaper has a history; but it has, likewise, a natural history. The press,as it exists, is not, as our moralists sometimes seem to assume, the wilful product of any little group of living men. On the contrary,it is the outcome of a historic process in which many individuals participated without foreseeing what the ultimate product of their labors was to be.

The newspaper, like the modern city, is not wholly a rational product. No one sought to make it just what it is. In spite of all the efforts of individual men and generations of men to control it and to make it something after their own heart, it has continued to grow and change in its own incalculable ways.

The type of newspaper that exists is the type that has survived under the conditions of modern life.The men who may be said to have made the modern newspaper-James Gordon Bennett, Charles A.Dana,Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst are the men who discovered the kind of paper s men and women would read and had the courage to publish it.

The natural history ofthe press is the history of this surviving species. In an account of the conditions under which the existing newspaper has grown. and taken form.

A newspaper is not merely printed. It is circulated and read. Otherwise it is not a newspaper. The struggle for existence, in the case of a newspaper, has been a struggle for circulation. The news—paper that is not read ceases to be an influence in the community. The power of the press may be roughly measured the number of people who read it.

The growth of great cities has enormously increased the size of the reading public. Reading, which was a luxury in the country, has become a necessity in the city. In the urban environment literacy is almost as much as necessity as speech itself. That is one reason there are so many foreign-language newspapers.

Mark Villchur, editor of the Russkoye Slovo,New York City, asked his readers how many of them had read newspapers in the old country. He found that out of 312 correspondents only 16 had regularly read newspapers in Russia; to others from time to time read newspapers in the Volast, the village administration center, and 12 were subscribers to weekly magazines. In America all of them were subscribers or readers of Russian newspapers.

This is interesting because the immigrant has had, first and last, a profound influence on the character of our native newspapers.How to bring the immigrant and his descendants into the circle of newspaper readers has been one of the problems of modern journalism.

The immigrant who has, perhaps, acquired the newspaper habit from reading a foreign-language newspaper is eventually attracted to the native American newspapers. They are for him a window looking out into the larger world outside the narrow circle of the immigrant community in which he has bee compelled to live. The newspapers have discovered that even men who can perhaps read no more than the headlines in the daily press will buy a Sunday paper to look at the pictures.

It is said that the most successful of the Hearst papersthe New York Evening Journal, gains a new body of subscribers every six years.Apparently it gets its readers mainly from immigrants.They graduate into Mr.Hearst's papers from the foreign-language press, and when the sensationalism of these papers begins to pall, they acquire a taste for some of the soberer journals. At any rate, Mr. Hearst has been a great Americanizer.

In their efforts to make the newspaper readable to the least-instructed reader, to find in the daily news material that would thrill the crudest intelligence, publishers have made one important discovery. They have found that the difference between the high-brow and the low-brow,which once seemed so profound, is largely a difference in vocabularies. In short,if the press can make itself intelligible to the common man, it will have even less difficulty in being understood by the intellectual.The character of present-day newspapers has been profoundly influenced by this fact.