As the consumer marketplace expanded during the Industrial Revolution, facts and news became marketable products. Throughout the mid-1800s, the more a newspaper appeared not to take sides on its front pages, the more its readership base grew (although, as they are today, editorial pages were still often partisan). In addition, wire service organizations were serving a variety of newspaper clients in different regions of the country. To satisfy all their clients and the wide range of political views, newspapers tried to appear more impartial.

Ochs and the New York Times

The ideal of an impartial, or purely informational, news model was championed by Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896. The son of immigrant German Jews, Ochs grew up in Ohio and Tennessee, where at age twenty-one he took over the Chattanooga Times in 1878. Known more for his business and organizational ability than for his writing and editing skills, he transformed the Tennessee paper. Seeking a national stage and business expansion, Ochs moved to New York and invested $75,000 in the struggling Times. Through strategic hiring, Ochs and his editors rebuilt the paper around substantial news coverage and provocative editorial pages. To distance his New York paper from the yellow press, the editors also downplayed sensational stories, favoring the documentation of major events or issues.

Partly as a marketing strategy, Ochs offered a distinct contrast to the more sensational Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers: an informational paper that provided stock and real estate reports to businesses, court reports to legal professionals, treaty summaries to political leaders, and theater and book reviews to educated general readers and intellectuals. Ochs’s promotional gimmicks took direct aim at yellow journalism, advertising the Times under the motto “It does not soil the breakfast cloth.” Ochs’s strategy is similar to today’s advertising tactic of targeting upscale viewers and readers who control a disproportionate share of consumer dollars.

With the Hearst and Pulitzer papers capturing the bulk of working-and middle-class readers, managers at the Times first tried to use their straightforward, “no frills” reporting to appeal to more affluent and educated readers. In 1898, however, Ochs lowered the paper’s price to a penny. He believed that people bought the World and the Journal primarily because they were cheap, not because of their stories. The Times began attracting middle-class readers who gravitated to the now affordable paper as a status marker for the educated and well informed. Between 1898 and 1899, its circulation rose from 25,000 to 75,000. By 1921, the Times had a daily circulation of 330,000, and 500,000 on Sunday. (For contemporary print and digital circulation figures, see Table 8.1 on the next page.)

“Just the Facts, Please”

Early in the twentieth century, with reporters adopting a more “scientific” attitude to news-and fact-gathering, the ideal of objectivity began to anchor journalism. In objective journalism, which distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns, modern reporters strive to maintain a neutral attitude toward the issue or event they cover; they also search out competing points of view among the sources for a story.

The story form for packaging and presenting this kind of reporting has been traditionally labeled the inverted-pyramid style. Civil War correspondents developed this style by imitating the terse, compact press releases (summarizing or imitating telegrams to generals) that came from President Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton.¹¹ Often stripped of adverbs and adjectives, inverted-pyramid reports began—as they do today—with the most dramatic or newsworthy information. They answered who, what, where, when (and, less frequently, why or how) questions at the top of the story and then narrowed down the story to presumably less significant details. If wars or natural disasters disrupted the telegraph transmission of these dispatches, the information the reporter led with had the best chance of getting through.

TABLE 8.1

THE NATION’S TEN LARGEST DAILY NEWSPAPERS, 2012 vs. 2013

Source: Alliance for Audited Media, March 31, 2013.

For much of the twentieth century, the inverted-pyramid style served as an efficient way to arrange a timely story. As one news critic pointed out, the wire services distributing stories to newspapers nationwide “had to deal with large numbers of newspapers with widely different political and regional interests. The news had to be ‘objective’ … to be accepted by such a heterogeneous group.”¹² Among other things, the importance of objectivity and the reliance on the inverted pyramid signaled journalism’s break from the partisan tradition. Although impossible to achieve (journalism is after all a literary practice, not a science), objectivity nonetheless became the guiding ideal of the modern press.

Despite the success of the New York Times and other modern papers, the more factual inverted-pyramid approach toward news has come under increasing scrutiny. As news critic and writing coach Roy Peter Clark has noted, “Some reporters let the pyramid control the content so that the news comes out homogenized. Traffic fatalities, three-alarm fires, and new city ordinances all begin to look alike. In extreme cases, reporters have been known to keep files of story forms. Fill in the blanks. Stick it in the paper.”¹³ Although the inverted-pyramid style has for years solved deadline problems for reporters and enabled editors to cut a story from the bottom to fit available space, it has also discouraged many readers from continuing beyond the key details in the opening paragraphs. Studies have demonstrated that the majority of readers do not follow a front-page story when it continues, or “jumps,” inside the paper.