Crashing the Gates

Atlantic subscribers can read this entire tour of the magazine's coverage of media debates over the past 130 years, and you really should subscribe, but let me just break you off one paragraph of F. B. Sandborn defending the newspaper business against its detractors and sounding an awful lot like a blogger:

Journalism in America is something, has been nothing, and aspires to be everything. There are no limits, in the ambitions of enterprising editors, to the future power of the American newspaper. It is not only to make and unmake presidents and parties, institutions and reputations; but it must regulate the minutest details of our daily lives, and be school-master, preacher, lawgiver, judge, jury, executioner, and policeman in one grand combination.

Of course, newspapers back in the day were in many ways closer to blogs than are contemporary newspapers. They operated in highly competitive markets, were full of a feisty spirit of partisanship, weren't particularly professionalized, etc.

Comments

Interesting stuff...but the number one reason to subscribe is the Puzzler.

Posted by Tom Hilton | August 31, 2007 11:28 AM

Also, in the era when most cities had an evening newspaper, news was much more hurried.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | August 31, 2007 11:56 AM

weren't particularly professionalized

And we no longer want this mid-20th-century development in journalism because?

It's a question that continues to puzzle me. I am especially puzzled by those who laud the possibility of takeover of journalism by amateurs in ma's basement and laud Edward R. Murrow types at the very same breath. Either your with 19th-century Fleet Street (with Murdoch as heir) or your agin them. Wasn't there some kind of hubbub about the WSJ in danger of losing its professionalism recently?

Posted by artappraiser | August 31, 2007 2:33 PM