FORCES AT PLAY AS NEWSPAPERS EVOLVED
By John Stang
Communications 546
Past- and present-oriented term paper
University of Washington
ABSTRACT: The theory of disruptive innovation was in play as
the newspaper world evolved from Gutenberg to the present.
Technological advances greatly influenced the growth of newspaper readership -- and
that readership's current decline.
The relationship with between laps in news technology and news readership have been
classical instances of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation -- cases of
technological advances favoring hungrier, nimbler operations rather than the stodgy
entrenched establishment that has less interest in upsetting the status quo.
This is just like the Biblical story of David and Goliath. The huge and heavily armored
Goliath could easily overwhelm any Israelite warrior who would challenge him in a
conventional duel of swords and shields. Small and without armor, David used a sling
and stone -- something that Goliath was not mentally prepared to deal with -- to kill the
giant one-on-one. David was the innovator. Goliath was complacent with no incentive to
adapt.
This paper will look how the theory of disruptive innovation played a major role in huge
changes in newspaper readerships. Beside the theory of innovative disruption, this
paper will also acknowledge that society had to be economically, sociologically and
psychologically ready to embrace an innovation before the new technology could take
off -- as theorized by Brian Winston.
This paper will look at only how technological advances have affected newspaper
readership -- with the caveat that other forces are also in play. This particular paper is
just the first of two parts -- the first part being a historical recap of how technological led
to today's readership, and the second part being an attempt to chart how newspapers
have begun to evolve in an increasingly online world.
Although the newspaper world gone through numerous technological changes, this
paper will address only a handful of leaps that dramatically helped increase or -- as the
21st century approached -- helped decrease circulation.
THEORY SECTION
Christensen’s theory of innovative disruption is that a small, low-cost innovative venture
has the potential to technically and financially leave a stodgie, less innovative
competitor in the dust – by reinventing the market or correctly reading how the market
will evolve.
Winston enters the picture with his theory that society has to be ready to adopt a new
technology before that technology can take off – a process that can happen quickly or
take centuries.
The start-and-stop nature of newspaper technology and newspaper readership growth
follows these theories.
DUAL HISTORY OF NEWS TECHNOLOGY AND NEWSPAPER GROWTH
Lets start at the beginning with the technological advance that made newspapers even
possible.
That's the Gutenberg printing press.
Johannes Gutenberg was a German goldsmith who created a functional version of
movable type by 1439 in Strasbourg before continuing to improve it with at least two
partners over the next several years. It took even more years before Gutenberg
advanced beyond pamphlets to printing a full-fledged book -- that being the Gutenberg
Bible believed to be first printed in 1454 or 1455. The earliest historical reference to a
Gutenberg Bible is a March 1455 letter from Catholic Bishop Enea Silvio Piccolomini,
who later became Pope Pius II.
But it took 150 years or more between printing the first Bible to the first regularly
published newspapers.
A handful of government- and Vatican-sanctioned news reports popped up in the 16th
century, but they were monthlies or one-time publications. (World Association of
Newspapers) Then private printed newspapers began to slowly surface in Europe in
the 17th century. The first was Relation in 1605, published by Johann Carolus inthe
then-German, now-French city of Strasbourg. The first English paper, Corante, came in
1621, and the first French paper, the Gazette, surfaced in 1631. The first American
paper, the intended-to-be-monthly Publick Occurrences, lasted one issue in Boston in
1690 before the government shut it down because the governor didn't like publications
he could not control. The world’s oldest paper still in circulation, Post-och Inrikes
Tidningar, showed up in Sweden in 1645.
Following Winston’s theory, the public had to catch up to the new printing technology for
it to become adopted enough to provide sufficient readership to justify publishing the
first newspapers.
Poverty and illiteracy were rampant in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries and later. For the
15th century, it can be argued that since only a few hand-copied books existed, only a
bare subsistence literacy -- recognizing a few words as symbols used in day-to-day life - was needed by most of the population. Since the Bible and other religious texts – the
main literature of 15th century Europe -- were in Latin which most people did not even
speak, the European world needed the Reformation and other splits from the Roman
Catholic Church to encourage translating the Bible into other languages than Latin.
I contend that the printing press contributed to its own growth. The press made the
creation of reading materials more prevalent, which in turn gave people more incentive
to become literate, which again increased the demand for more pamphlets, books and
eventually newspapers.
Meanwhile, travel among cities and nations was slow, causing most Europeans, Asians
and Africans to live in very small worlds sheltered from most that occurred beyond their
immediate borders.
I argue that the most 15th century people would be considered “non-consumers”
(Christensen, Anthony and Roth, 2004) in that they lacked the ability, wealth and easy
access to the early products of the printing press. Travel became more commonplace in
the 16th century. Trade grew, which boosted more people out of poverty. Blossoming
local and international trade required more and more information from other places to
flourish.
Winston's "supervening social necessities" (Winston, 1998) also came in play during
that 150-year gap between the first printed Bible and the first printed newspaper. In
simple terms, that meant the world had to socially, economically, politically and
psychologically ready to use a new technology in a significant degree measure -awaiting for a "perfect storm" of circumstances for the public to need and want
newspapers.
The disruptive innovations were not technological ones. Instead, they were cultural.
As trade flourished and the need for more information grew, merchants and craftsmen
also needed something better than religious and government proclamations to make
business decisions. The private sector -- nimbler than the governments -- stepped in to
create newspapers to fill a gap not covered by the stodgier church nor state, which did
not have to worry about those concerns. Capitalism, not the authorities, was needed to
fill those actual information needs of ordinary citizens
Meanwhile, the basic overall design of the printing press remained the same for almost
300 years, although it was also almost continuously tweaked. The model was that
human muscle pressed the paper flat against the inked type. While lithography – a
major technological advance – first surfaced in France in the 1790s, the newspaper
industry did not adopt it for common use in until the 1960s. By then, it had no major
direct effect on readership numbers, although it played a major role in cost effectiveness.
Still newspaper readership grew mostly because of non-technological reasons. More
people existed. Literacy increased. The number of presses and newspapers increased.
Reading news became normal for most.
Newspaper readership remained somewhat small – at least in England’s American
colonies in the 1700s, where a handful of estimates are available.
Hughes at the rarenewspapers.com Web site found some references to 1700s
circulation figures. (Hughes, 2009).
The oldest reference was the publisher of the Boston News-letter estimating in 1719
that he sold no more than 300 per press run. In 1754, another publisher wrote that
there were four newspapers in New England, with none exceeding a circulation of 600.
The New York Gazetteer in 1774 claimed a circulation of about 3,500. Meanwhile, the
Massachusetts Spy of Worcester dropped from 3,500 prior to the American Revolution
to 500 when it ended.
At the end of the 18th century, Hughes noted there were three American papers with
circulations of roughly 2,000, plus the Columbian Centinel (sic) being America’s
journalism superpower with a circulation of 4,000.
Newspaper publishers now faced a dilemma that their predecessors didn't. More
potential readers existed than the publishers had the capability to print for. Now,
publishers needed faster and nimbler technologies. The social pressure -- the
supervening necessity -- pushed the need for technological improvements.
As the 19th century unfolded, the steam-driven cylindrical press and the later rotary
cylindrical press gave newspaper publishers something they did not have before – the
speed to print a large number of papers in a much shorter period of time.
Bogart wrote: “The mass press emerged in the 19th century from the improvement of
papermaking machinery and the invention of the rotary press, but also from the spread
of literacy and the expansion of leisure.
If a newspaper invested in speedier presses -- an expensive disruptive innovation -- it
had a better chance of surviving. If a newspaper stuck with a traditional flat press, it
would lose the disruptive innovation battle to the publication that could print vastly
greater numbers of a single edition.
Here is a rundown of how printing presses improved in the 19th century.
During the Napoleonic Wars, a German engineer and printer, Friedrich Koenig
experimented with using steam power, gears and some cylinders to print newspapers
much faster than previously possible. He finally teamed up with another engineer
Andreas Bauer to replace the printing press's flat plates with more cylinders – all
powered by steam. At this invention’s real-world debut in 1814, The Times of London,
printed roughly 1,100 sheets an hour. Koenig, Bauer and others continued to modify this
redesign for many years.
As a comparison, Scharlott wrote that a flatbed hand press in 1850 Wisconsin -- where
the newer cylindrical technology had not yet reached -- could print 250 sheets an hour,
taking eight hours to print 1,000 copies of a four-page edition.
The 1840s brought two major technological advances that kicked newspaper readership
into overdrive – the long-evolving development of the telegraph that Samuel Morse
patented in 1844, plus Richard Hoe’s invention of the rotary press in 1846.
One invention transformed the speed of news. The other boosted the speed of printing –
increasing the numbers and pages of papers than could be printed in one shift – again
to previously unthought-of levels.
Hoe, a New York printer and inventor tinkered extensively with the steam-powered
cylinder press -- making it bigger with fewer cylinders. In 1847, he patented those
improvements, which greatly increased the press speed beyond the Koenig model. In
1870, Hoe finished another technological leap in that he built a rotary press that could
print on both sides of a page simultaneously.
The bottom line to these improvements was that a vastly greater number of newspapers
could be printed in a day. Consequently, readers’ interest in events, not a press' actual
machine limitations, became the dominating factor in the size of a press run.
However, 19th century journalism’s biggest technological leap came with the telegraph –
a classic case of disruptive innovation.
This was a case of a totally new technology redefining what readers demanded -- and
what publishers now had to provide.
Standage wrote that travel was slow and sporadic between regions in the early 19 th
century. (Standage, 1998) News often came in months-old letters from elsewhere.
News did not travel faster than a horse, carrier pigeon or ship could move. Today's getit-quick attitudes toward news did rarely existed prior to the telegraph, Standage wrote.
Newspapers and their readers changed their expectations about the speed of news
with the telegraph. Non-local news quickly funneled through telegraph offices. A
newspaper that could not afford to send a correspondent overseas no longer had to
worry about being at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, readers began to think of weeks-old
news as too slow -- now expecting their news to be printed within a day or two of it
happening. Businesses began to demand vital new information in the quickest manner
possible to keep up with their competitors.
The installation of an Albany-to-New York City telegraph line in 1848 led to some New
York Newspapers to band together to share New York City and Albany bureaus.
(Schwarzlose, 1980) A couple months later, that arrangement expanded to create the
New York Associated Press to share dispatches from the Mexican-American War in an
effort to get the news more quickly through a combination of ships, horses,
stagecoaches and the telegraph. Today, that coalition has grown to a cooperative of
about 1,700 papers, 5,000 radio and television stations, more than 200 bureaus – all
serving at least 120 nations. It is the backbone of most of today’s news coverage
provided by Google, Yahoo and other online services.
The bottom line: The telegraph helped create the world’s most influential newsgathering
operation.
Meanwhile, Prussian Paul von Reuter ran a translation and courier service forbusiness
news at roughly the same time -- jumping early onto the telegraph bandwagon. The
telegraph linked England and France in 1851, causing Reuters to transfer his
headquarters to the European financial center of London while beginning sell his
dispatches to newspapers, Standage wrote.
This contributed to more foreign news, accompanied by a demand for even more
foreign news, with that spiral continuing. Reuters’ courier and translation business
evolved into another newswire service. Readers again expected news to be
disseminated dramatically quicker than it was a couple decades earlier.
In 1854, British correspondent William Russell used the telegraph to tell the English
public about their army’s incompetence and hardships in the Crimean War, providing an
unofficial reality check to what the government was saying. If that didn't increase reader
numbers, it can be safely argued that it likely increased reader's interest in what the
papers were printing.
In another sign of growing reader interest, the short-lived first trans-Atlantic telegraph
cable in 1858 sent this message to Europe: “Pray give us some news for New York.
They are mad for news."
Standage quoted an unnamed 1859 journalist who made this observation about a
battle from the Second Italian War of Independence: "To the press, the electric
telegraph is an invention of immense value. It gives you the news before the
circumstances have had time to alter. The press is enabled to lay it fresh before the
reader like a steak hot from the gridiron instead of being cooled and rendered flavorless
by a slow journey from a distant kitchen . A battle is fought three thousand miles away,
and we have the particulars while they are taking the wounded to the hospital."
I could not find comprehensive newspaper readership statistics for the 19th century.
However, I believe we can extrapolate that readers became interested in more and
more news because publishers felt the market pressures to provide additional and much
quicker news.
And news dissemination became quicker. Brooker-Gross looked at the decreasing lag
times between news occurring and when that news was published in 15 western Ohio
newspapers from 1844 to 1899 -- the boom time of telegraph use. (Brooker-Gross, 1981)
In very rough broad terms, her study showed that the average time between a "local"
event occurring and then being published in those 15 papers dropped from three days
in 1844 to being published in the next day's paper by from 1899.
"Domestic" – presumably American -- news took an average of six days to being
published in those 15 papers in 1844 to being published the next day by 1899. "Foreign"
news took an average of 40 days from its occurrence to being published in those 15
papers in 1844.That lag time dropped to three days by 1899.
Brooker-Gross tried to analyze other facets, but too many statistical anomalies popped
up to reach any broad conclusions beyond those basic observations, she wrote.
Meanwhile, Scharlott looked for a statistical link between the telegraph boom and an
increase in the number of newspaper readers – and concluded the he could back that
assumption. In his statistical calculations, he concluded that Wisconsin’s population
growth did not account for all of the accompanying increases in newspaper readership.
(Scharlott, 1989)
Scharlott looked at the 10 largest cities in Wisconsin from 1844 to 1859 -- dividing them
into the biggest five and second-biggest five.
He noted that Wisconsin's use of telegraphs increased from almost nonexistent in
January 1848 to reaching all 10 test cities by late 1850.
In the five biggest cities, Scharlott wrote that the number of newspapers grew from
seven to 11 from 1844 to 1847, then jumped to 22 in 1850. Then those five cities added
10 more papers through 1859. Milwaukee went from one to seven papers -- including
six dailies -- from 1848 through 1850. At that time, it took one day for a telegram to
reach Milwaukee from Washington, D.C., compared to 12 days required by a letter.
Wisconsin's sixth through 10th largest cities did not see any similar jumps -- going from
zero papers in 1844 to four in 1847 to five in 1850 to eight in 1859.
Scharlott's conclusions: The telegraph's expansion likely led to the dramatic increase in
papers in the five largest cities, but did not have a direct effect on the sixth through 10th
largest towns.
"Thus, a surge in reader interests, precipitated by the telegraph, probably would have
brought about an increase in the number of Wisconsin newspapers. Why was the midcentury surge in the number of Wisconsin papers, which coincided with the spread of
the telegraph in the state, confined mainly to Wisconsin's five largest cities. Probably
because the larger cities had greater informational needs , especially the need for
commercial information. Perhaps smaller cities could not provide enough capital to
potential publishers to start or sustain papers," Scharlott wrote.
.
In the same article, Scharlott wrote: "Before the coming of the telegraph, most
information traveled only as fast as people did. Therefore, merchants, farmers, bankers
and others in Wisconsin had to wait days or even weeks for distant information they
needed, like the price of produce in Eastern markets, or how much out-of-state
banknotes should be discounted. After the coming of the telegraph, many Wisconsin
readers must have been eager to buy papers that carried such news,"
Scharlott argued that this relationship between booms of newspapers and of the
telegraph likely happened elsewhere in the United States at that time.
The telegraph became the internet of the 19th century, but began a long fade-out as
the 20th century unfolded. It was just industrial evolution. Radio and television surfaced,
and then grew and grew to replace the telegraph as the 20th century's dominant
electronic media.
But radio and television news apparently did not replace newspapers.
Newspapers had the advantages of much bigger staffs than radio and television, bigger
budgets, the abilities to go many places that the electronic media could not, the
capability of disseminating vastly more content -- all while generating huge amounts of
revenues.
This would remain the status quo until a new major technological advance would occur.
Newspapers were like the warrior Goliath -- as long as everyone played by his rules, he
had no incentive to change. Again, this is another textbook case of disruptive innovation.
The Newspaper Association of America has tracked the nation’s total number of
newspapers and their combined circulations – publishing those yearly numbers from
1940 through 2008. Those numbers show the nation’s total number of newspaper
copies published on a weekday growing from 1940 to a peak in 1987.
Then the total circulation began to drop, slowly at first while picking up speed as the 21 st
century unfolded. The decline started just before the 1990s when the Internet was still in
its infancy and the economy was doing well. However, the decline’s momentum picked
up in the past few years as the Internet has become a significant part of people’s lives.
Meanwhile, newspapers struggle with the poor economy, with a becoming-outdated
business model, and with their own stumblings in trying to adapt to the online world.
The newspaper association’s annual figures show these snapshots of the rise and fall
of American newspaper circulations.
Year
Number of papers
Total circulation on a weekday
1940
1,878
41.132 million
1960
1,763
58.882 million
1980
1,745
62.202 million
1987
1,645
62.826 million
1995
1,533
58.193 million
2000
1,480
55.773 million
2005
1,452
53.345 million
2008
1,408
48.597 million
The chart shows that less newspapers were being sold on a weekday in 2008 than in
1960.
Bogart noted that the United States’ growing population is far outrunning the sluggish
newspaper numbers. (Bogart, 1993)
“Most disturbingly, circulation – both daily and Sunday – has failed to keep up with
population growth, and daily readership is becoming more erratic,” Bogart wrote.
He blamed a combination of market forces, technological innovations, a changing
culture, “the explosion of video communications”, and other factors for newspapers’
circulation declines.
Like the printing press, the Internet took a while after its conception before becoming a
factor in changing newspapers and the rest of the media.
The federal government began serious brainstorming for a computer-linked network in
the 1960s. This led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency coordinating the
creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network -- the first-generation
Internet -- that went online in 1969 to connect computers at UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa
Barbara and the University of Utah.
Again, Christensen's "non-consumers" and Winston's "supervening social necessities"
come into play. All the economic and sociological pieces had to fall in place for the
Internet to transform newspapers.
And again, this was a gradual, incremental process -- at first.
Larry Pryor, executive editor of the Online journalism Review divided that incremental
process into three waves. (Prior, 2002)
Pryor's first wave took place from 1982 to 1986, in which the Times Mirror and Knight
Ridder newspaper chains unsuccessfully experimented with failed videotext services.
The services were subscription operations with inadequate applications and
management discouraging user innovations.
The so-called second wave ran from 1993 to 2001. Search engines, browsers, blogs
and Web sites gained their footholds and never lost them. News organizations began
posting on the new World Wide Web. This wave rode the dot.com boom and died with
the dot-com bust; stumbling over the riddle of how to get people to pay for what had
been free services while piling up debt..
Pryor's 2002 article -- modified in 2004 -- put the start of the third wave in
2001. Web site owners became more sophisticated, setting up complex
partnerships to make money. Users became huge factors in molding what
sites offered. Mobile platforms emerged. Software made huge leaps.
Pryor summarized that "In the first wave of online journalism, the owners controlled all,
and end-users had little say in how the product was developed. In the second, endusers fought for control, spurning ads and declaring the content be free. In the third
wave, control is being shared. Network owners see value in cooperating closely with
their audience; the audience is more willing to let the owners make a buck."
By 2006, online-only news media user had gained a foothold, which is still growing –
although traditional newspaper still have a shrinking lion’s share of the readership
(Ahlers, 2006).
Ahlers wrote in 2006 that online-only users made up 12 percent of the United
States’adult population. About 22 percent used both online and traditional news media.
And two-thirds of the nation’s adult used online news media infrequently or never. But
Ahlers’ models also predicted that another 25 percent of American adults will
significantly cut back on their use of offline news media in 2006’s near future.
CONCLUSIONS
So Americans appear to be slowly shifting from using newspapers to using online news
media.
One question is how fast will that occur. Another question is how this evolution will likely
take place. Right now, there are no likely firm answers. But the second segment of this
paper will try to make some educated guesses.
What all this does show is that Christensen's theory of diffusion innovation and
Winston's supervening necessities -- which had been on the back burner for much of
the 20th century newspaper universe, gradually came back into play with the
development of the internet.
And what happened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries reflect how these theories
can help explain how the newspaper readerships blossomed because of the printing
press, from its improvements, and from the telegraph.
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