Advertising and Media

As America recovered from the Civil War (1861-1865), commerce and newspapers once again took their place in the society. In the 1860s and 1870s, the forerunners of modern advertising agents came in to act. Two of the earliest agencies were N. W. Ayer in Philadelphia and J. Walter Thompson in New York. These agencies collected circulation figures of newspapers and magazines and based their commissions on readership.

James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, keyed onto the idea of raising the cost of advertisements to lower the cost of newspapers, a practice that continues into the present. He put an end to the endless repetition of ads from issue to issue that had characterized American newspapers from the colonial period well into the 19th century. Lacking radio and TV and having only a few magazines, a newspaper would have been valued and considered over. Bennett and other newspapermen were developing the newspaper in Eastern cities as a mass medium for advertising. It was a short step from media placement to another service that marked the beginnings of modern advertising, marking the beginnings of a shift away from direct sales techniques to mass-communicated advertising.

Around the turn of the 20th century, public dissatisfaction with fraud and unregulated advertising increased. Letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers and occasional articles challenged the false promises directly and called for regulation and change in marketing practices.

World War I accelerated the technological developments that led to its becoming a medium of mass communication. Radio stations were up and running in the world's major cities by the late 1920s. Few innovations transformed the nature of advertising as fundamentally as radio. Only television and the Internet would prove so revolutionary.

Radio released advertising from its relationship to literacy by communicating through music, jingles, and the spoken word. Advertising agencies were skeptical at first, but soon radio became their newest medium. Early radio stars frequently delivered the commercial messages during their shows. This merger of programming and advertising has reemerged more recently in the form of product placement in television, movies, and sporting events.

Commercial television developed after World War II. By the late 1940s, cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had functioning local television stations. By the early 1950s, three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) supplied national programming.

American advertising took an international turn around in 1900 when American businesses looked to advertising agencies to sell their products abroad. Both N.W. Ayer and J. Walter Thompson had Spanish-language departments that translated English-language ads and sent them off to newspapers and magazines in Latin America. The Internet became an essential part of American society in the 1990s. Computers replaced typewriters and email established itself as a necessity.

Viewing options were limited until the arrival of cable television in the 1970s and audiences were broad. Ads on cable, because of the increased specialized programming, created more targeted groups of viewers with more narrowly defined interests. Broadcasting became narrow-casting, and advertising became more focused as well. The Internet narrows the aim further, not reaching households but targeting individuals. Marketers use Internet surfing habits to establish the interests and buying habits of individuals, making advertising more efficient.

Advertising has been very innovative in the past in finding ways to communicate promotional messages. As technology has evolved, it has revolutionized advertising techniques as well as changing the social landscape. There is no reason to suspect that advertising will not continue to reinvent itself, discover new media, and develop new techniques. 

Radio and Media

The mass media had already been around for many years mainly through print--newspapers and magazines; but what happened in the 1920' was the rise of radio. This made a major impact on American mass Media. Thanks to the growth of radio broadcasting, entertainment, news, sports, and politics could now hear in the comfort of anyone's home. Listeners who were poor and could not afford tickets, or listeners who were black and lived in segregated states, or anyone who lived far from a center of population, or anyone else for that matter, could now have access to the most famous performers or hear the best-known political figures. This helped the nation become more informed, and it also helped entertainers gain larger audiences than ever before. It also affected politicians: now, candidates were judged not only by what they said to the newspapers, but how they sounded when speaking over the radio.

Increased radio broadcasting made small towns and big cities similar in the opportunity to entertain and inform the public. Unknown local performers were able to be heard for the first time. Similarly, the public heard speakers from a number of points of view, and were exposed to a variety of political issues. Some stations offered college-level courses or gave educational debates. Various sects of Christianity and also Reform Judaism offered live broadcasts of religious services. Sports fans were especially pleased, because now the most important events were available to them, and there were even some interviews with the athletes. And finally, there was a new interest in public speaking, as many listeners decided they wanted to be on the radio like the people they were hearing.

Radios were less expensive and widely available by the 1920s, it especially had the exceptional ability of allowing a vast number of people to listen to the same event at the same time. (In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s pre-election speech reached more than 20 million people). Radio was a blessing for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience.

The reach of radio also further helped forge an American culture. It was able to soften regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle. Culture and communication became centralized and standardized. The modern radio cultures threatened overpower individuals, leaving them with little control either in their own lives or in the wider world.

Many found radio could enable them to gain a sense of autonomy in their own lives by helping them understand an encroaching mass world in familiar, personal terms. To some, radio also offered the prospect of speaking meaningfully in that world, through a newly viable hope of communication with a mass audience. As Americans determined what radio meant to them, they used the mass medium itself to gain a measure of control and perhaps a voice within the disempowering mass world that radio helped to create. And this process, in turn, helped to shape that modern mass media.

With the rise of broadcasting, as the possibility of speaking to the whole of a nation at once became more and more real, the meaning of communication changed. Audiences seeking access to influential voices welcomed this development. Broadcasting made it possible for a single powerful speaker to move a large part of the country at once.

In the broadcasting age, listeners came to imagine they could enter the public world in private terms. Radio brought far off voices and events into the home in a familiar way. This eroded lines between the public and private spheres, making it more difficult to differentiate public and private and to determine separate priorities and behaviors for each.

Muckrakers and Magazine

American journalists, novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the 20^th century were named as the Muckrakers, and they attempted to expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics. The term came from the word “muckrake” used by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech in 1906, in which he agreed with many of the charges of the muckrakers but stressed that some of their methods were irresponsible and dramatic. He compared these journalists to the “man with the muckrake” (a character in one of John Bunyan’s books) who “raked up filth.”

Since the 1870s there had been continuing efforts at reform in government, politics, and business, but it was not until the beginning of the national mass-circulation magazines such as McClure's, Everybody's, and Collier's that the muckrakers were provided with funds for their investigations and with a large enough audience to stimulate nationwide concern.

Muckraking was launched as new innovations in the publication realm advanced. Essays and articles that offered political and societal reviews were originally found in magazines. By the time, magazines were expensive (35 cents per issue), and were only purchased and read by more educated, wealthier people. Newspapers were cheaper (due to the “penny press”), and reached a significantly larger audience, covering stories ranging from crime to politics.  However, the Industrial Revolution’s technologies enabled magazines to compete with newspapers, mainly through the reduced price of paper and the discovery of halftone photoengraving. As a result, the price of magazines dropped, and thus attracted a significantly larger readership. Magazines competed more aggressively with newspapers, and released successful issues. Even though society was already aware of the hardship the Industrial Revolution brought, they now had cheaper and easier access to specific stories that hit home. 

Muckrakers gained inspiration for their articles from personal experiences and wrote about what they saw with their own eyes. All aspects of American life interested the muckrakers, the most famous of whom are Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, David Graham Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, Samuel Hopkins Adams and Upton Sinclair.

In the early 1900s magazine articles that attacked trusts, including those of Charles E. Russell on the beef trust, Thomas Lawson on Amalgamated Copper, and Burton J. Hendrick on life insurance companies, did much to create public demand for regulation of the great combines. Ray Stannard Baker reported on the hardship of life of the unemployed people. Ida Tarbell wrote about oil regions, including explosions and accidental deaths. Jacob Riis believed pictures would most effectively drive his messages home, published pieces of photo journalism (such as How the Other Half Lives) to display to the middle and upper class how the lower class was forced to struggle in the slums. Upton Sinclair wrote a fictional novel, The Jungle, in order to shed light on the awful working conditions found in meat factories and inescapable poverty-stricken life immigrants faced after entering America during the Industrial Revolution.

With the combination of a large-scope, booming readership and urgent, hot-button topics on society, muckraking pictures, articles, essays and magazines were read far and wide across the country, reaching farmers and city-goers alike. People of diverse social background read the same literature and saw the same pictures, indicating a new shape in American culture and politics. 




Progressive Era Muckrakers

Cheap at Just a Penny

A little more than 175 years ago in 1833, New Yorkers woke up with “The Sun” -- a newspaper peddling a new idea: Common news for common folks, cheap at just a penny.

September 1833, Benjamin H. Day launched the first penny newspaper, the New York Sun which was affordable for the mass public for the first time. Its circulation reached 5,000 within six months, and within a year, rose up to 10,000. The paper surpassed all the daily papers of the time by reaching 19,000 by 1835. Within the next five years, about a dozen new penny papers were launched. The biggest competitor to the Sun was The New York Herald launched in May 1835 by James G. Bennett.

While historians debate the origins of the Penny Press, there is no doubt it had a significant impact on journalism. Penny Press papers changed the content, journalistic standards, and financing. For these reasons, the Penny Press was a significant period for journalism and made significant contributions to the newspaper industry.

In early 1800s cost of the most newspapers was six cents. In those days economy it was a hard to affordable amount for the lower class citizens. Circulation and regulation of news heavily depended on the people who has the power to do so. With the emergence of one cent newspapers news became available for more than just upper class society. More and more people were able to read and reach the news, hence the demand and circulation increased and news became more and more important.

Printer Benjamin Day’s way of human-interest stories, tall tales and shocking crimes helped to attract average readers to a medium that was once enjoyed largely by the upper class. Method of sale was another innovation, “newsboys” from street corners was the cheapest and easiest way to catch up.

Penny papers succeeded based on increased circulation and concentrated importance on advertising. The penny papers did not rely on annual subscriptions or subsidies from political parties unlike their predecessors. Advertising targeted the working class circulation needs. Past papers did not print advertisements they did not agree with but unlike them the penny papers relinquished their "authority" on moral judgment, leaving it to readers. With the cheap press it has been identified the technological improvements and the importance of news as a device for advertising the paper. The advertisements were made available to more people, to a new economic class, thereby expanding the market for manufactured goods.

The writing in these papers was another brand new concept that added a new dimension to journalism as we know it today. In the beginning, the stories were startling and were often detailed and included brutal accounts of murders and household disputes. Along with this, came an importance on local and human interest stories. This broke the old-style writing and began reporting "interesting" stories regardless of their relevance. As it relied on sales and advertising, the penny press was free to publish whatever stories it thought interesting or pertinent, but ultimately selection was based on what would garner more advertisement revenues. But it also resulted in the fact that the mass public could now not only afford to buy the newspaper, but its needs were being taken into consideration.

It can be identified that the penny papers were favorable in expanding America’s newspaper readership. In his book, American Journalism, Mott cites from the Public Leger, a penny newspaper in Philadelphia in 1936:

In the cities of New York and Brooklyn, containing a population of 30,000, the daily circulation of the penny papers is not less than 70,000. This is nearly sufficient to place a newspaper in the hands of every man in the two cities, and even of every boy old enough to read (Mott, 1978, p. 241).

The penny press played an important role in upgrading the literacy level, at a faster rate. Since the penny newspapers were simply written, and affordable, they may have encouraged more people to read daily, allowing them to improve their own literacy. It should be noted that as literacy level rises the quality of the writing in the penny press also improved. Furthermore, the penny newspaper always came up with a new awareness and new ideas. This had a reflective impact on the society on the verge of literacy. Suddenly an average person with access to a newspaper became a far more important person on a societal and political level, and could no longer be looked down by the upper classes. Their voice, their opinions and soon their votes could no longer be ignored.

The penny papers gave life and importance to the voice of the common people, and often published that people should be provided with a realistic view of present-day life; abuses by authority should be exposed; and that the newspaper has a duty to give readers the news and not to support the powerful. The penny press was instrumental in increasing literacy levels in a practical society that was technologically ready to move forward.

They brought innovations, changes in the way news is gathered and reported and pushed the newspaper into a place as the “trusted” source of information.  This position is again being tested today as Internet and other media blur the lines of trust.  But we can thank the penny press for setting the stage that brought journalism into the forefront of American society.

Beginner of the World Communication

Mass communication is the distribution of information to large units of communities by individuals or entities using mass media. This has evolved from printing press to today’s internet-based social networks. Mass media as a whole consist of newspapers, magazines, books, radio, television, internet, and films these means are used for circulate information and news.

People have been communicating with each other since 31000 BC. Sumerians invented numerals, developed pictographs and advanced it to phonetic writing.

China began the print media by inventing the movable clay type (1041 BC). But mass media really started with the invention of the mechanical printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, which allowed mass production of books. Still the mass production of books began in early 1600 BC and continued becoming advance and popular day by day.

The invention of the printing press has made a huge impact on mass communication, various types of topics and ideas came in to the society through books. Circulation of information and ideas threatened the governments, so they began to control the production and distribution of books. However as literacy increased new technological inventions were developed in order to cater the demand.

Printing process helped to fulfill the desire of authors to reach a mass number of readers. Increased books circulation and improved people’s interest in reading created a new trend of regular publication within the next hundred years. The concept of regular publication of newspapers came up after almost two hundred years. The Courant, was the first titled newspaper published in London in 1621.

1880 – 1920 time period often known as the rise of mass communication. Mass distribution of market newspapers, magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal began to circulate and they contained fashion pages, women’s pages, sports and comics. Advertising became popular and at the same time, a need to educate students about mass communication methods was identified.

As the flow of news and information increases new social, religious, cultural, economic, technological and political changes started to happen in almost every nation. With the increasing knowledge of new technological inventions and advancements, new means of media started to pop up. Photography, Radio, and Movies were introduced to the media. Marconi’s invention of wireless communication led to radio broadcasting in 1920 and television broadcasts in 1939.

Lately communication have expanded to include the Internet, social media, blogs, RSS feeds, mobile media and online video. This happened with the launch of the first commercial communication satellite in 1960.

As a long been awaited invention, printing process was a reinforcement to communication at the level of masses, it unlocked gates for creation and innovations of many valuable means in mass distribution of messages which, had a far reaching impression on the development of cultures, societies, habits, disputes and organizations which allow people live in a world close to each other.