CHAPTER ESSENTIALS

• The social impact of news—the process by which people gather and create information and reports to make sense of events surrounding them—accelerated with the invention of the printing press, leading to the creation of the first colonial newspapers in the late seventeenth century. Known as the partisan press, these papers critiqued government, spread the views of different political parties, and offered commercial information to businessmen of that era (pp. 64–65).
• Paper and production advances made during the Industrial Revolution as well as a rising middle class set the stage for a more inclusive press, leading to the creation of penny papers—priced at an affordable one cent—which enabled papers to become a mass medium. The first penny papers included Day’s New York Sun, which favored human-interest stories, and Bennett’s New York Morning Herald (pp. 65–67).
• The proliferation of penny papers caused many papers to begin accepting ads, which further expanded the industry and led six New York newspapers in 1848 to form the Associated Press, the first news wire service, a commercial and cooperative organization that relayed news stories and information around the country and the world using telegraph lines (pp. 67–68).
• In the late 1800s, a new brand of papers arose, ushering in an era of yellow journalism, which emphasized sensational stories and also established the foundation for investi-gative journalism (pp. 68–69).

• In the late 1800s, as readership expanded nationwide, many papers, such as the New York Times, began presenting so-called objective journalism, or factual, balanced coverage, via the inverted-pyramid style, a story form that packaged and presented reports based on answering who, what, when, and where (pp. 71, 74–75).
• Amid the complex national and global events of the early 1900s, interpretive journalism grew out of the public’s need to put events and issues in context. Later, by the 1960s, many Americans questioned traditional authority and key institutions, causing an exploration into new types of journalism such as literary journalism, which adapts fictional techniques to nonfiction material and reporting (pp. 71, 74).
• In the early 1980s, an emphasis on color printing and brevity of content (thanks to USA Today) as well as the digitization of news content ushered in a new brand of journalism (pp. 74–75).

• A variety of papers have arisen to meet different readers’ needs. Small local papers, mostly weeklies, feature consensus-oriented journalism by promoting social and economic harmony in the towns they serve. Larger regional papers, sometimes called metro dailies, and national papers focus on conflict-oriented journalism by featuring events or issues that often highlight experiences that deviate from social norms. Ethnic and minority newspapers feature interpretations of developments and events from the perspective of people outside of white, mainstream readers (pp. 76–78).
• Rising in the 1960s, the underground press refers to alternative newspapers that have often questioned mainstream political policies and conventional values (p. 79).]

• The majority of newspapers’ revenue comes from selling advertising space, which can take up as much as one-half to two-thirds of large newspapers’ pages. The newshole, which has shrunk in most newspapers today, refers to the space left over in a newspaper for news content after all the ads are placed (p. 81).
• Newspapers spend money on salaries and wages for their employees—from the publisher to various editors and reporters—and on wire services and feature syndicates, commercial outlets or brokers that contract with newspapers to provide work from well-known political writers, editorial cartoonists, comic-strip artists, and self-help columnists (pp. 81–83).

• Newspapers have been dealing with a decline in readership since the rise of television. In an effort to maintain competition, the government sanctioned joint operating agreements (JOAs) in the early 1970s, which permitted competing papers to operate separate editorial divisions while merging business and production units. But this has had limited success. The Internet and the economic crisis of 2008–09 have made matters much worse for newspapers. Furthermore, the formation and rise of newspaper chains, companies that own several papers throughout the country, left power over news in fewer hands. But many of these big media companies, some now in bankruptcy, have taken on too much debt and seen their stock prices drop (pp. 83–85).
• The digitization of news content has called the survival of print journalism into question as well as shifted advertising patterns. Some newspapers are experimenting with placing digital content behind a subscriber-only paywall in an attempt to raise online profitability. In addition, the rise of blogs has raised concerns among critics about the loss of reporting and documentation in journalism and the validity of some blogs as a reliable news source. Similarly, citizen journalism, where individual citizens, not professional journalists, use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information, has become an issue (pp. 85, 87–88).

• As the fate of print journalism is called into question, we must ask ourselves where we will get the best information, based on strong reporting, that we need to make informed choices and receive multiple points of view (p. 89).