 The Press and the City Life
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Newspaper delivery teams
Cities bred newspapers, and made possible the mass distribution of a daily press. From 1906 the residents of London suburbs could have their papers delivered.
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With the first post-war boom in the 1860's, observers began to note that New York society was becoming entirely based upon wealth, social prestige being won by those who had the most splendid carriages, drawing-rooms, and opera boxes.
Concentrating large numbers of people into smalI and tightly defined geographical areas, American cities provided the mass readership that made the distribution of a daily press practical. Many of the new city dwellers had immigrated from smalI country towns or from other countries or continents, and their sense of dislocatian provided a context for the rise of newspaper reading.
Through the wire services and news agencies, newspapers provided word from the migrants' homes. At the turn of the century there were more than a thousand foreign-language daily newspapers published in the United States. Immigrants were many times more likely to read a paper in New York than they had been in their native Minsk or Naples, whether that paper was written in their own language or in the English they were learning as part of their process of Americanization.
Even more importantly, newspapers offered their readers explanations of city life. In their exposes of government corruption, their gossip about the metropolitan elite, and in their scandalmongering pursuit of "human interest" stories as William Randolph Hearst put it, stories about "crime and underwear" - they gave substance and form to the anxieties of metropolitan existence. The newspapers proclaimed themselves the people' s guardians, in smalI matters as well as large.
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1900 - 1914
