Ask Marshall Field
Enough capital to start a paper is only the beginning. Marshall Field, who inherited $164,000,000, found that all his millions could buy him only a curiously limited area of press freedom. His Chicago Sun, set up to combat the ultra-reactionary Chicago Tribune, had to fight for its very life—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Field’s conclusion as the result of his own experience is that it is easier to buy an established daily newspaper than to launch a new one.
Do you want to buy a newspaper? There is probably not a daily in America that can be bought for less than $2,000,000! The Philadelphia Inquirer was sold in 1930 for a reported $18,000,000. The New York Times has no price. It boasted a gross annual business of $20,000,000 as much as twenty-five years ago. Since then, the bulk of its constantly mounting profits has been ploughed back into the business year after year until the paper, considered purely as a business, represents a fabulous investment. Naturally, money will not buy it.
Very well, you can’t buy a paper. Try to establish a new one. Field found out what that meant. The local news-gathering service, in Chicago, was barred to him. He had to set up his own reportorial staff on a scale to overcome this handicap. But for national and worldwide news, no such solution was possible. Not even his fortune could finance an adequate global news service.
There are only three such American news agencies, Associated Press, United Press and International News Service. Associated Press is a professedly “cooperative” membership association embracing some 1,300 of America’s 1,744 English-language dailies. United Press, controlled by Roy Howard, is based on his newspaper chain. I.N.S. rests on the Hearst chain. Major newspapers try to have as many of these services as they can get. The Howard-owned papers, for instance, are by no means content with their own U.P. service, but seek also the A.P. “report.” The Hearst papers never operate with I.N.S. alone; almost all have A.P. franchises and several boast that they alone, in their respective areas, have all three services. For a variety of reasons, however, A.P. is the decisive agency. It is rather hopeless to try to compete with a major paper on the basis of U.P. or I.N.S. service.
Field could not get A.P. The by-laws of the “cooperative” permitted the Chicago Tribune to blackball his application for membership. He could not get I.N.S. because it is available only to the Hearst paper in Chicago, the Herald-American. He had no choice but to publish on the basis of United Press service only. That cost him $110,000 in 1942 against an estimated $50,000 he would have paid for the superior A.P. report.
Regimentation
News agency coverage was only the beginning of the problem. Look at your daily newspaper, wherever you live. It is the same paper as the one I read. There is, in effect, only one American newspaper, or let us say three or four papers which are parts of one pattern. Your paper and mine print exactly the same news, the same pictures, the same columnists, the same features ranging from comics through recipes, and often the same canned editorials supplied by the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Moreover, these canned features, together with new mechanical inventions, make for standardized typography and appearance. Even grammatical style, width of column, size of type, must be uniform. The standardization reaches its ridiculous peak in the Hearst papers where “The Chief,” octogenarian William Randolph Hearst, dictates by teletype the manner and form in which his “publishers” must display many important items.
There is no escaping this regimentation. If you want readers, you must meet the competition. Field had to have features, pictures and so on. He struggled to create his own comics and after three years felt he had achieved some readable ones, though by no means as successful as those controlled by the rival press. But news pictures can’t be invented. Without photographs, successful newspaper publication is impossible. Pictures, however, are as tightly controlled as news services. Even the Communist Daily Worker, the outstanding labor daily newspaper in the country, has to buy from the syndicates as they are. Field couldn’t buy any!
Associated Press owns A.P. Wirephotos and the Wideworld newsphoto service. The Tribune barred sale of these pictures to Field. Acme, the Howard-dominated picture service, was likewise denied him through an “exclusive contract” between Acme and the Tribune. Hearst’s International News Photos were not available in Chicago because they went to the Herald-American.