During the 1920s and 1930s, the major developments in the American newspaper industry could be loosely described under the heading "ownership consolidation," which was achieved primarily through newspaper mergers, and the creation of newspaper chains. At the start of the nineteenth-century, the owner of a newspaper was usually also its publisher, editor, reporter, and printer. By the end of the century, newspapers were heavily capitalized, complex organizations, and roles like owner, publisher, editor, reporter, and printer had increasingly divergent interests. For the owner, the newspaper was usually a business first and foremost, and newspapers were bought and sold with considerable frequency.

Newspaper Mergers

Newspaper mergers were not a new phenomenon in the twenties and thirties, but the pace of market consolidation increased dramatically. You can spot the traces of mergers in hyphenated newspaper titles. For example, Champaign's local newspaper, the News-Gazette, was created in 1919 by the merger of the Champaign Daily Gazette, and the Champaign Daily News. The Chicago Sun-Times was created in 1948 by the merger of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Daily Times.

What motivated newspaper owners to buy multiple newspapers in the same city? Sometimes a newspaper owner would purchase a competing newspaper for the sole purpose of closing it, and in that way remove a competitor from the field. Intangible assets like subscriber lists were also of value to buyers. An evening paper might purchase a morning paper in order to increase its market penetration

Newspaper Chains

Newspaper chains began to form towards the end of the nineteenth-century, and became a major part of the newspaper publishing landscape in the twentieth. In the case of the chains, the owner was rarely identical with the publisher. If a chain bought a newspaper, it would often keep the existing publisher in place. As chains grew, they split into regional divisions–often these divisions had originally been smaller chains that the larger chain subsequently purchased, or else the chain formed divisions out of multiple, geographically contiguous newspapers. These divisions would be given their own names, and sometimes these names were substituted for the name of the publisher. Chains also sometimes spun these divisions off as completely separate companies. In short, the name of the publisher will commonly obscure the identity of the true owner. And, because newspapers were frequently bought and sold, it can be especially difficult to know who owned which newspapers, and when.

The largest chains of this era were Scripps (with its own, tortuously complicated organizational history) and Hearst.

Role of AP Membership

In the cases of both mergers and chains, it's difficult to overstate the importance of Associated Press (AP) membership as an impetus to consolidation. The AP was (and remains) an organization that facilitates the sharing of news among newspapers. This news sharing was attractive to newspaper owners because it also meant sharing the considerable costs of news reporting (news-gathering, writing, and copy editing). If a newspaper had an AP membership, then it had the right to print stories from other member newspapers, and the privilege was reciprocal. The AP and other similar organizations were called "wire services," because the sharing was done over telegraph wires.

Prior to 1950, AP bylaws effectively restricted memberships to a single newspaper within any given geographic market by giving member newspapers de facto power to block membership applications from competing papers. This technicality made AP memberships extremely valuable. A member newspaper, even an unprofitable one, might be worth a lot of money for the value of its AP membership alone, and a competing newspaper without an AP membership might buy that newspaper for its AP membership. This practice was fairly common prior to a 1945 Supreme Court ruling (United States v. Associated Press 326 U.S. 1) that found this AP bylaw to be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (26 Stat. 206).

In many cases, the above newspapers printed Sunday editions with circulations up to two and three times as high, so if you are looking at the Sunday edition of a daily, then you can safely assume it was read by far more people than the weekday edition would have been.

In 1925, there were 2,116 daily newspapers being published in the United States, with a combined circulation of 37,407,000. There were far more weekly newspapers (6,435), but the weeklies had a much smaller combined circulation (15,990,000).²

Today, few cities but the largest have more than one daily newspaper. Chicago still has two. In 1925 Chicago had over thirty dailies, about half of which were immigrant newspapers.

A daily newspaper would circulate well into its city's hinterlands, thirty miles out or even more:

Detail from an advertisement for the Cleveland Press in the January 30, 1926 issue of Editor & Publisher.

1. Jason Rogers, Fundamentals of Newspaper Building: A Brief Consideration of the General Business Principles Involved in Starting a Daily Newspaper or Turning a Moribund Property into a Successful One (New York: J. J. Little & Ives, 1922), 22-23.

2. Alexander J. Field, "Newspapers and Periodicals: Number and Circulation by Type, 1850–1967," in Historical Statistics of the United States, ed. Susan B. Carter, millennial ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4:1055.