Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
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
that men and women would read and had the courage to publish it.
The natural history of the press is the history of this surviving
species. It is an account of the conditions under which the existing
newspaper has grown up 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 the
newspaper, has been a struggle for circulation. The newspaper that is
not read ceases to be an influence in the community. The power of the
press may be roughly measured by 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 a 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; 10 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 been 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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