1.5 The Explosion of Print: A Newspaper for Each Political Party, and a Magazine for Every Need

It may seem like the partisan nature of some news organizations we live with today and the general public’s distrust of them is an outgrowth of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN competing for viewers. In reality, these party line divisions have existed from the very beginning of the newspaper era. American politics have carved up, created, and nurtured “conservative” and “liberal” alliances from the very founding of our Republic. As cities grew from the middle of the 19th century through the opening of the 20th, so did the political divide among papers and readers. Each major city had at least one newspaper that was favorable to one major political party and contemptuous of the other. This tribalism helped fuel the explosion of print media that grew to include multiple newspapers (dailies, weeklies, specialty papers) and dozens of new magazine titles that were introduced each year—each covering a wide variety of topics and interests.

The distinction between newspaper and magazine is a little less black-and-white than it would seem (that was a pun on the fact that color printing—while a staple in magazines today—didn’t appear for many years after magazines made their debut in the late 1600s). As printed publications became more numerous, they began to be differentiated based on content they contained and the audiences they served. Religious tracts were different from political papers, which were different from literary works, which were different from the news of the day.

By the 1700s, several of these longer form, general-interest periodicals were seen throughout Europe. They represented a middle ground between the more in-depth exposition found in books and the brief recaps seen in the newspapers. In 1731, an Englishman published a periodical called The Gentleman’s Magazine. The word magazine was derived from an Arabic word, makhazin (meaning “storehouse”). With the term coined, and populations growing in literacy and number, the stage was set for the modern magazine to emerge.

And emerge it did. Magazine advertising revenue, for example, grew from modest beginnings in the late 1800s to over $650,000,000 for the year 1955 with hundreds of titles reaching many hundreds of millions of subscribers.