Capitalism and Technology Devoured the Soul of Newspapers

The family-owned publishers that began disappearing in the early 1970s may not always have been high-minded, the author contends, but at least they were driven by principles not profits. An adaptation from the new book “Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers.”

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For me, Walter Lippmann said it all. The famous columnist’s words best defined the mission of a free press. There was something solid and sa cred in the idea of being “the beam of a searchlight that moved restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.”

Like generations of reporters before me, I had signed on to the legacy of old Joseph Pulitzer. Though wrestling in the gutter of yellow journalism with one hand, he had simultaneously raised the other in oath that newspapers existed solely to oppose the plunderers and predators of a free society.

Gathered around a corroded coffee urn in the city room of the Nashville Tennessean a quarter of a century ago, my fellow reporters and I danced to the music of Lippmann’s words, finding in them the anchor for our judgment that journalism was an oasis in the desert of capitalism, a business with a conscience and a higher purpose.

All American newspapers were, always had been, and always would be businesses. Successful survival in the marketplace was the key to their financial independence. It was what made them distinct from the rest of the world’s press. But newspapers were a different kind of business. My colleagues and I all knew, for instance, that if hard times ever hit the Tennessean, the young publisher, Amon Evans, had promised to sell his family stock in American Airlines and use the proceeds to subsidize the newspaper’s relentless quest for episodes in darkness that needed illuminating. None of us had actually heard him say that, of course. No one really knew if he even owned any airline stock. But we told one another the story anyway.

The newspapers were making money in the 1960s, but none of us knew how much, or cared. To the bliss-blinded ignoramus of the typewriter, the salient fact of newspaper economics was that the good ones profited less than the bad ones because good journalism costs more. Even the old journalist-proprietors agreed that the definition of “quality” journalism was journalism practiced selflessly in the public interest. Their elite huddled together in the front seats and at the newspaper publisher meetings and looked down their noses at the merely profit-minded.

When the numbers-oriented, professional profit makers began entering the temple of journalism in the early 1970s, they saw what people-oriented publishers had been blind to: four people doing the work of one machine. It took no genius to realize that a business being threatened by the first great technological invention--television--might be saved by the second--the computer. Together they would transform a business whose profitability had always depended on the quality of people into one whose survival depended on the efficiency of equipment.

Between 1975 and 1990, newspaper production work forces would be cut by 50% or more. Almost overnight, a loud linear world of words etched in hot lead by hot, sweaty and ink-stained people would become a place of digitized images and antiseptically clean, quietly humming air-conditioned machines. The transition would be both a boon to the profit seekers and a trauma for the protectors of tradition. Waste and redundancies that clogged newsrooms and production departments and threatened the economic health of the printed press would be eliminated. But so would a lot of other things, among them the free spirit that had been the soul of the American press since its inception.

1993 by James D. Squires. Reprinted by permission of

Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America’s Newspapers,” by James D. Squires, appears on Page 2 of the Book Review.