Penny Press - Journalists

Journalists

In the early 1800s, newspapers were largely for the elite and took two forms – mercantile sheets that were intended for the business community and contained ship schedules, wholesale product prices, advertisements and some stale foreign news, and political newspapers that were controlled by political parties or their editors as a means of sharing their views with elite stakeholders. Journalists reported the party line and editorialized in favor of party positions. The emergence of the penny press greatly influenced communication technologies by covering news outside those of government interests. The first penny paper, the Sun, was founded in New York in September 1833. After that time, newspapers became nonpartisan since they were not supported by political parties. Penny papers hired reporters and correspondents to seek out and write the news, while at the same time, started to sound more journalistic than editorial. Reporters were assigned to beats and were involved in the conduct of local interaction. The penny press contributed to changes regarding newspaper content and structure. New journalism practices resulted in the development of concepts such as news reporting, emphasizing the importance of timeliness, and appealing to wider audiences. These newspapers, though not completely uninfluenced by political parties and their views, were self-funded and not party-funded, which allowed them to quite easily shift allegiance on political issues that the paper dealt with, which also aided in its success and acceptance by the general public.

Since these newspapers were not politically funded, the core interests of the journalists themselves were obviously quite different from competing newspaper agencies that had heavy political influence. The largest portion of demand was from immigrants, traditional middle-class citizens, and nascent literate classes; journalists kept articles concise and engaging with real-life topics that the readers could relate to, and doing so with less sophisticated vocabulary that readers wouldn't require higher education to understand the articles. The Penny press formula is the combination of sensational news with mass market appeal, large-scale industrial production, and economies of scale used in combination with neutrality and objectivity to create a paper that gets its point across without taking sides. Also, journalist-incorporated advertisements treated readers as consumers instead of another market for demand, in effort to set the vibe of the relationship between paper and reader to be less about work and the economy but more about relaxation and reading for pleasure and relaxation.

The penny press newspapers became more widely read because journalists made the effort to keep their content understandable to even the less educated audiences. They also focused on investigating topics with more factual-based information rather than opinion-based articles which gave the paper a less biased form of news than the elite newspapers. News items and stories were also shorter than those found in elite papers. It was also believed that the working-class audiences would not have enough free time to read longer editorials, hence the shorter and more concise editorials. Human interest stories were also popular with the penny press audiences. Such items took up more space compared to earlier, more expensive papers that used human interest stories as filler content. The New York penny papers were particularly known for publishing stories about interesting personalities and covering different aspects of the human condition. To connect with the urban, mostly working-class readership, New York reporters wrote about ordinary people and their experiences. They also wrote about the stock market, entertainers, politics, sports, and weather, all of which became important news and are still held as absolute necessities in a newspaper thanks to the Penny Press. Reporters strove to deliver news in a timely manner and sometimes relied on the electric telegraph to gather and share information. Penny press journalists were the first people to report on crisis and crime news, something that has become a staple in newspapers since. Continuing reports on the same story were introduced in Penny Press papers and were read by thousands of people on the same day. This, in combination with the speed of news delivery and thoroughness in the coverage of local news, forever changed the direction of American journalism.

There were a number of different types of journalists during the time of the penny press, but one of the more interesting types was the muckraker. A muckraker was any American journalist who, in the first decade of the 20th century, attempted to expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics. Muckrakers, due to their specialization, did not write numerous types of articles but mostly wrote investigative journalism pieces for magazines. Most people consider Julius Chambers the original Muckraker. In 1872, Chambers undertook an journalistic investigation of Bloomingdale Asylum to obtain information about the alleged abuse of inmates. Thanks to his efforts, twelve patients who weren't mentally ill were released, the asylum was re-staffed, and lunacy laws were changed. Muckrakers still conformed to a neutral standpoint, but used their neutrality to dig deeper into the stories they were researching, which is why they ended up with as much information as they did. Muckrakers created a groundwork of public concern and set a standard for journalistic impact on political decision-making that hasn't been matched since.