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American Journalism, 31:3, 378–399, 2014Copyright C© American Journalism Historians AssociationISSN: 0882-1127 print / 2326-2486 onlineDOI: 10.1080/08821127.2014.936732

Will Mari is a doctoralcandidate in the Departmentof Communication,University of Washington,Seattle, WA 98105,wtm@uw.edu.

“Bright and Inviolate”: Editorial–BusinessDivides in Early Twentieth-CenturyJournalism Textbooks

By Will Mari

Journalism in the United States, even in the midst of great change, con-tinues a traditional separation between news and business operations. Theorigin of this divide and the metaphors used to describe it emerge fromlate nineteenth-century criticism of the press, as well as the consolidationof large metropolitan newspapers during that same era. In response to thatcriticism and inspired by new ideas of business efficiency and industrializedjournalism, specialized business-management textbooks discussed a literaland figurative “wall” between business and news departments at newspa-pers. This study examines twelve of these texts, published between 1901 and1955, for their extended discussion of this divide, in an effort to better under-stand how descriptions of an editorial–business barrier developed amongjournalists during this period of industrialized journalism. Some of the prac-tical effects of the adoption of this metaphor, on both management and newsworkers, also are discussed.

In October 2012, David Boardman, the executive editor of the SeattleTimes, insisted that there was an impenetrable and persistent divisionbetween the news and business operations at his newspaper. As he

put it, “The line between our advertising and journalism functions is brightand inviolate.”1 Boardman was responding to a controversial advertisingcampaign at the Times’s parent company on behalf of Rob McKenna, then–Republican candidate for governor.2

In the United States, the insistence of the significance of this literal andfigurative “wall” has long been implicit in debates about media ownership.3

1David Boardman, “A Vow to Continue Impartial Reporting,”Seattle Times, October 20, 2012.

2Jim Brunner and Andrew Garber, “Times Co. Criticized for Mc-Kenna, Gay-Marriage Ad Campaigns,” Seattle Times, October 17, 2012.

3Dennis McDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Riseand Fall of the LA Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001),436–437.

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American Journalism 31:3 � 379

The contradictions of this protracted metaphor are just as enduring. In thelate 1990s, for example, Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes, in aneffort to enhance profit margins, encouraged closer cooperation between hisadvertising and editorial staffs. He assigned sales managers to each sectionof the newspaper. Many among the paper’s staff were troubled by Willes’sattempt at “tearing down” the figurative “constitutional separation betweenchurch and state” that characterized American newsroom culture. Also trou-bling was a profit-sharing arrangement between the paper’s corporate ownersand the Staples Center sports arena related to a Times supplement. The staffthat created the supplement, for which the downtown arena was the solefocus, had been unaware of the agreement. They later signed a petition inprotest, arguing that the arrangement undermined the newspaper’s editorialintegrity.4 More recently, media observers expressed concern with the po-tential sale of Tribune Company newspapers to the politically conservativebillionaire brothers David and Charles Koch. “It would be such a cultureclash . . . between them and the newsroom,” one critic told NPR. “It wouldbe . . . open conflict there for a long time.”5 These anxieties further evidencea persistent belief in the importance of partitioning newsrooms from thebusiness operations of media corporations.

But where does this mentality originate, at least in the United States?Newspapers (and news organizations more broadly) endeavor to serve thepublic and to make a profit—concurrently. The normative dividing wall thatsustains this enterprise is deeply ingrained in the worldview of news workersin the United States; the “newsroom”—that hallowed space where journalistscome together to produce the news—is physically set apart from the rest ofthe newspaper. How that came to be in occupational reality will be exploredin this study. The formation of the ideology behind the editorial–business di-vide can be seen in this analysis of twelve specialized business-managementtextbooks published between 1901 and 1955.6 Of the twelve, five were

4Terence Smith, “Trouble at the LA Times,” PBS NewsHour, December 16, 1999; DavidShaw, “Crossing the Line,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1999; McDougal, PrivilegedSon, 443, 445–447.

5David Folkenflik, “Koch Brothers’ Newspaper Takeover Could Cause ‘Culture Clash,”’NPR, April 26, 2013, npr.org. Also see Amy Chozick, “Conservative Koch Brothers TurningFocus to Newspapers,” New York Times, April 20, 2013. The Koch brothers ultimately declinedto buy the newspapers but said they remain interested in the media business.

6The texts examined in this study are O. F. Byxbee, Establishing a Newspaper: A Hand-book for the Prospective Publisher, Including Suggestions for the Financial Advancement ofExisting Daily and Weekly Journals (Chicago: Inland Printer, 1901); John L. Given, Makinga Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907); Don Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916); Phil C. Bing, The Country Weekly: A Manual for theRural Journalist and for Students of the Country Field (New York: D. Appleton, 1917); JasonRogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Editing, to Mechanical Production,to Circulation and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918); Emerson P. Harrisand Florence H. Hooke, The Community Newspaper: Its Promise and Development (New

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written for those working at midsized and smaller newspapers (with circula-tions under 100,000) or interested in starting one. In both cases, a reading ofthe entire text was followed by several closer, comparative readings of anysections of the text dealing with the internal life of the newsroom, editorial–business conflict, hiring practices, advertising, and other intersections ofprofit-making and journalism. In addition, several dozen more general report-ing texts from the same era, not concerned primarily with the managementof newspapers, were read to give the more specialized, management-centrictexts further context. The specialized management texts come out of a largerbody of general-reporting textbooks and were written specifically for jour-nalism students and junior-level business executives enrolled in a burgeoningnumber of college journalism programs.7 They were also written for workingjournalists or those already employed in management positions within thejournalism industry. By “textbooks,” I am referring to those training textsdescribed by their publishers and authors as meant for the academic or con-tinuing education of journalism practitioners, both within and beyond thenewsroom.

The Wall as Internal Journalistic Metaphor

This extended metaphor of divides, halves, and sides, and of a wall sepa-rating them, came from a desire to balance competing priorities in Americanjournalism during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The exam-ination of this metaphor in the management-oriented journalism textbooksduring the period does not fall strictly under the larger domain of metaphorstudies, but it is informed by this field and thus by the cognitive metaphor

York: D. Appleton, 1923); Buford O. Brown, Problems of Newspaper Publishing: With Spe-cial Reference to the Country Field, Including Weekly and Daily Newspapers (New York:Harper & Brothers, 1929); Thomas F. Barnhart, Weekly Newspaper Management (New York:D. Appleton-Century, 1936); James E. Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1937); Frank Thayer, Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938); Robert M. Neal, Editing the Small City Daily (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946);Frank W. Rucker and Herbert Lee Williams, Newspaper Organization and Management (Ames:Iowa State College Press, 1955).

7For the purposes of this study, a “specialized text” refers to a journalism textbookwith a focus on management issues. These items were identified as part of a larger projectthat examined sixty-nine textbooks from the 1890s through the 1960s, using comprehensivebibliographies as well as the author’s crosschecks with the books’ bibliographies. See JosephMirando, Journalism by the Book: An Interpretive Analysis of News Writing and ReportingTextbooks, 1867–1987 (PhD dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1992); LindaSteiner, Construction of Gender in Newsreporting Textbooks, 1890–1990 (Columbia, SC:Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 1992). On the growthof journalism education, see Betty Medsger, “The Evolution of Journalism Education in theUnited States,” in Making Journalists, ed. Hugo de Burgh (New York: Routledge, 2005), 205–226; Joseph Mirando, “Objectivity Early On: Journalism Textbooks of the 1800s,” Journal ofMass Media Ethics 16, no. 1 (2001): 23–32.

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theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.8 Lakoff and Johnson arguedthat metaphors can help individuals navigate unknown or ethically fraughtsituations. As applied to journalism by scholars such as Gitte Gravengaard,metaphors are “linguistic expressions for interpretative strategies sociallyshared in a group to such an extent that they can be used to give a sim-ple explanation of something that can often be very complex.”9 FollowingGravengaard, this study looks at how linguistic metaphors were used in a“naturally occurring workplace discourse in a particular community of prac-tice.”10 The use of metaphors by journalists to describe their occupationalenvironment helps them to form communities of work, complete with so-cialized norms.11 This is a study of the past use of metaphors, as embeddedin representative texts. Textbook authors were not creating an artificial set ofnorms and the metaphors used to signify them but were instead reflecting anexisting set of values.12 Although Gravengaard was looking at contempora-neous Danish journalists, long-running parallels exist to US journalists andjournalism and the enduring metaphors that grew up in the industrialized,corporate journalism of the early twentieth century. The textbooks, in turn,echo this lingering debate.

A Brief Note on Textbooks

Specialized management textbooks were intended to transmit journalis-tic norms. Often written by former reporters and editors, textbooks have beenone of the ways journalists have passed down their institutional knowledgeand beliefs about their social role. This was especially true in an age whenthe number of journalism programs grew from a handful in 1900 to severalhundred by the 1930s.13 With course offerings on the mechanics of news pro-duction quickly standardized, classes on advertising, circulation, editing, and

8George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980).

9Gitte Gravengaard, “The Metaphors Journalists Live By: Journalists’ Conceptualizationof Newswork,” Journalism 13, no. 8 (2012): 1067.

10Ibid., 1066.11Warren Breed, The Newspaperman, News, and Society (PhD dissertation, Columbia

University, 1952).12Gravengaard found that the metaphorical work speech used by journalists can represent

conflicting role perceptions and values, such as the need for career positioning versus thepublic’s need to know. Their conceptual metaphors can also be traced to the business modelsthat fund journalism. Gravengaard, “The Metaphors Journalists Live By,” 1074, 1076.

13Bonnie Brennen, “What the Hacks Say: The Ideological Prism of US Journalism Texts,”Journalism 1, no. 1 (2000): 106–113; Beate Josephi, “Journalism Education,” in The Handbookof Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (New York: Routledge,2008), 42–56; Albert Alton Sutton, Education for Journalism in the United States from ItsBeginning to 1940 (New York: AMS Press, 1968).

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other management-related skills followed as journalism programs appealedto both students and to industry.

Since then, textbooks have inculcated the desired virtues and idealizedpractices that define what it means to function as a professional reporter.14

Sociologist Andrew Abbott called textbooks a “perfected abstract knowl-edge system” that transmits institutional knowledge.15 Handbooks and writ-ten records were concrete, standardized substitutes for the more esoteric,individualized oral records of craftsmen.16

The specialized management textbooks in particular functioned as aspi-rational texts for how newspapers should be run as both businesses and ascommunity trusts. As historical evidence, they illuminate some of the strug-gles and tensions between the different functions of a newspaper and theways that their operating principles either advanced or conflicted with oneanother. They also demonstrate how discrete, yet sometimes overlapping,missions of the newspaper divisions were explained to new generations ofjournalists. A study of these texts bolsters the work of other scholars whoseresearch has examined the porous boundary between news workers and theirbusiness brethren.

The Reality of Editorial–Business Divides

The readers of newspaper-management textbooks in the early twentiethcentury were entering the field when the complexity and size of news orga-nizations had already led to a more commercialized and organized press.17

This industry was organized along corporate lines, driven by a “businessmentality” that emphasized the importance of keeping operating expenseslow and the “product” (the daily or weekly editions of newspapers) consis-tent.18 Studies of reporters’ working lives at the turn of the last century showthat publishers minimized salaries, for example, to keep editorial budgets as

14Or, as Joseph Mirando explains, “The textbooks were intended to provide journalismwith a set of ideals—not just the way journalism ‘should be’ practiced.” Mirando, Journalismby the Book, 10.

15Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 56. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

16In other industries during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentiethcentury, as JoAnne Yates reminds us, a fascination with efficiency led to a corresponding moveto write down and systematize work processes in texts. In this case, textbooks written by and forjournalists reflected existing journalistic practices and values. They weaved ethical discussionsinto their sections on how to manage advertising and how to best market newspapers to differentaudiences. JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in AmericanManagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12.

17Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 81–112.

18Ibid., 81, 88.

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lean as possible.19 Reporters, especially greenhorns, were paid by “space,”and beats were developed to provide steady sources of news at police de-partments and other information-collection points.20 Journalists coped bypooling resources, agreeing on the details of stories beforehand, or cover-ing for each other when they were unable to attend an event.21 It is hardlysurprising that the American Newspaper Guild formed at the end of thisera and locked horns with the American Newspaper Publisher Associationover the occupational status of the reporter.22 The shift from a largely po-litical to an informational orientation in the newspaper industry by the firsttwo decades of the twentieth century suited a “business model, based onachieving high circulation,” one that avoided controversies that might offendreaders.23

Worries about a press constrained by “business rules” were driven, inturn, by concerns over the influence of advertisers and publishers.24 Theseconcerns were especially prominent during the Progressive Era, a periodmarked by increasing awareness of the commingling of business and pol-itics and the importance of the press in rooting out the pernicious influ-ence of one on the other. Will Irwin’s 1911 muckraking series in Collier’smagazine focused on “how the social and financial struggles of the pro-prietor” affected the “freedom and truth of metropolitan newspapers.”25

The increase in annual ad sales to newspapers—$27.5 million in 1880to more than $95 million by 1900—fueled debate over just how muchthese sales were affecting the nature and presentation of news.26 Jour-nalism education and emerging journalistic values (along with codes ofethics) emphasizing independence and objectivity were seen as bulwarksagainst undue influence from advertisers.27 Press critics such as Walter Lipp-mann argued for increased training for journalists.28 A more pessimistic

19Ted Curtis Smythe, “The Reporter, 1880–1900: Working Conditions and Their Influenceon the News,” Journalism History 7, no. 1 (1980): 1–10.

20Baldasty, The Commercialization of News, 88–96.21Randal Sumpter, “‘Practical Reporting’: Late Nineteenth-Century Journalistic Stan-

dards and Rule Breaking,” American Journalism 30, no. 1 (2013): 44–64.22Daniel J. Leab, A Union of Individuals: The Formation of the American Newspaper

Guild, 1933–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).23Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 229.24Ibid., 209, 215–216.25Will Irwin, Clifford F. Weigle, and David G. Clark, The American Newspaper (Ames:

Iowa State University Press, 1969); see Irwin’s part 12, “The Foe from Within,” but also part10, “The Unhealthy Alliance”; part 11, “Our Kind of People”; and part 12, “The New Era.”

26Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 215.27Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 217–221; Daniel C. Hallin, “Commercialism

and Professionalism in the American News Media,” in Mass Media and Society, ed. JamesCurran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), 242–260.

28Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Dover, 2010).

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view, represented by Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, saw the entire sys-tem of newspaper chains and publishers as corrupt and in need of urgentreform.29

At the same time, the rhetoric of objectivity in reporting textbooks rein-forced the Progressive idea that professionalism should be equated withcommercialism.30 Commercialism fortified the press against governmentmeddling, the logic went. If the independent press (meaning press thatwas free from overt local or national governmental interference) had adiverse array of strong advertisers to offer support, it would be an en-tity beholden only to its readers and peers.31 “Objectivity” coupled withthe notion of political independence could help to professionalize journal-ism and to “tame the undue commercialization of the press,” as Tim Vospointed out.32 The focus was on an “undue” amount of commercializa-tion, since American journalists generally regarded capitalism itself as agood.

In the textbooks, the wall of separation between journalists and thosewho worked to keep their newspapers solvent—the circulation, advertising,and marketing staffs—helped to maintain the belief that objectivity in re-porting could temper the baser elements of the capitalistic impulse.33 Asportrayed in the textbooks, news organizations and their publishers couldthrive as businesses and also, ostensibly, serve the public interest. Withinthe textbooks, the insistence on the separation of money-making and news-gathering was explicit—but when it was proffered, the means to make ithappen were often left unspecified.34 The notable exception to this criti-cism, besides the likes of Sinclair and Lippmann, was Edward W. Scripps,whose newspaper chain eschewed large department-store advertising, mini-mized the influence of other advertisers, and placed newsroom staff in posi-tions of authority over advertising and other business personnel.35 Scripps’spolicies, however, were the exception, as was his view that the Ameri-can press was being manipulated by big business through corporate in-sistence on “puff” pieces and other favorable coverage, the suppression ofunflattering news, and the presence of unlabeled product placements buried

29Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 2003). Sinclair’s position was perhaps in the minority, but his concerns aboutcorporate control of journalism resonate today.

30Tim Vos, “‘Homo Journalisticus’: Journalism Education’s Role in Articulating theObjectivity Norm,” Journalism 13, no. 4 (2011): 435–449.

31The author thanks Richard Kielbowicz for this and other helpful suggestions.32Vos, “‘Homo Journalisticus,”’ 440.33Ibid., 443.34Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards, 221–222.35Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1999), 89–90, 94–95, 100.

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in news columns.36 Honesty and transparency in maintaining high-profitmargins was the preferred way to fight against this subtle yet nefariousinfluence.

Editorial–business divides were loose in practice but inspired exciteddebate among practicing journalists about limits on the business side of jour-nalism.37 This study is less concerned with the external debate of this issue,vis-a-vis the newspaper industry and its readers, and is more interested in theinternal debate within the industry, and thus in the language of news work-ers, as well as the educators who were beginning to train reporters in collegejournalism programs in increasing numbers. The rise of millionaire publish-ers and entrepreneurs such as Scripps heralded more internal changes forAmerican newspapers and highlighted the new roles managers were fillingin corporatized newsrooms.38 Newspapers were becoming expensive prop-erties; even in then-smaller cities such as Dallas, they were worth millions ofdollars by the 1920s and 1930s.39 Tim Vos and You Li, examining trade liter-ature and early reporting textbooks from the 1870s through the 1910s, foundthat reporters and editors struggled to define among themselves just how,exactly, they could operate independently of advertiser and other businessinterests. In response, some journalists embraced the profit-focused conse-quences of the “newspaper business.”40 If newspapers had to make money tosurvive, so be it.41

But others, led by Joseph Pulitzer and Walter Williams, disagreed. Jour-nalism transcended the business models that funded it, and editorial staffmembers should determine what constitutes ethical business practices, theyinsisted.42 The men acknowledged that journalism was an enterprise de-pendent on profits but argued that was solely the concern of “the businessside of the newspaper,” not the newsroom.43 Pulitzer and Williams, alongwith other journalists and commentators writing about the ideal newsroom,were comfortable describing journalistic practices as independent of finan-cial operations. Both men had been working journalists. Pulitzer now wasdetermined that his legacy be associated with a more ennobled journalism

36Ibid., 89; Oliver Knight, ed., I Protest: Selected Disquisitions of E. W. Scripps (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 198–214.

37Tim Vos and You Li, “The Business Side of Journalism: A History of an OccupationalNorm,” forthcoming. This study owes a debt to these authors’ work on the earlier developmentof a business–newsroom divide in American journalism.

38Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 83. While fears about the“corporatization” of US newsrooms experienced a resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s, theseconcerns have long gripped the field, especially during periods of financial uncertainty.

39Leo Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 290.40Vos and Li, “The Business Side of Journalism,” 11–12.41Ibid., 11.42Ibid., 13.43Ibid., 15.

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than the yellow variety of his New York World. Williams, a pioneering edu-cator, advocated for disinterested professionalism that would raise the statusof journalism practitioners.44

Discourse about the “business side” thus presumed a practical as wellas an ideological separation, with this division “a sign of newspaper profes-sionalism.”45 The actual working relationship between these halves, and eventheir supposed ability to coexist without conflict, was unarticulated. Even as“advocates constructed a legitimizing discourse that made the separation ofnews judgments from business pressures a sensible and moral necessity,” the“how”—the day-to-day application of this normative judgment—relied on anascent professional identity, an uncertain level of autonomy for reporters,and the priorities of volatile publishers and editors.46 It also depended on thesize of the newspaper in question.

Making and Managing the Wall

The authors of management textbooks, in most cases former editorsand business-managers-turned-journalism instructors, had a vested interestin keeping advertisers and other business interests from influencing newscontent. The market for their texts included rising staff members in busi-ness departments at newspapers. In turn, their academic programs dependedon the newspaper industry for jobs and other resources for students. Theseinterests formed a kind of pragmatic, symbiotic loop. When they spoke ofa wall or a divide, they did so in a way that contrasted the newsroom’svalues with those expressed by the advertising, circulation, and promo-tional sides of the journalistic venture. They addressed questions about themission of a newspaper and whether it existed primarily to make moneyor to serve the public or both. They provide insight into how such de-cisions worked themselves out in the daily operations of a newsroom’shierarchy.

It is difficult to determine the influence of these texts on the journalismindustry. But the desire for a separation between the business and editorialparts of a newspaper was present in conversations about journalism ethicsby the 1920s and 1930s and joined a larger chorus of worry over businessinterests’ expectations of special treatment. Thus perhaps they did not somuch change industry standards as they inscribed them with ideals emergingfrom professional practices.

44Walter Williams and Frank L. Martin, The Practice of Journalism: A Treatise on News-paper Making (Columbia, MO: Lucas Brothers, 1924), 17; Don Seitz, Joseph Pulitzer: HisLife and Letters (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishers, 1924), 443–444.

45Vos and Li, “The Business Side of Journalism,” 15.46Ibid., 23–25.

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American Journalism 31:3 � 387

The passage of the Newspaper Publicity Act in 1912 required papers tolist their owners and investors and label advertising content that resemblednews stories.47 Newspapers were not the only industry to face Progressive-Era regulation, but in the interwar period, when the financial pressure onnewspapers to retain their advertisers was particularly acute, the loss ofan important advertiser could threaten a paper’s solvency. Sociologist LeoRosten argued that advertiser influence, the most acute threat to newspapers’financial independence, had been mitigated in the largest papers by the late1930s, but that it remained a real issue for smaller papers.48 During theDepression, national advertisers could still pull together a powerful lobby toresist any attempts to call out advertising disguised as news.49 This was partof what Rosten called the “well-known feud [that] exists between the cityroom and the business office.”50

These same tensions existed before the Depression. In a comparativestudy of journalism codes of ethics in the late 1920s, publishers and ed-itors repeatedly avowed the importance of a divide between business andnews operations.51 An examination of newspapers’ ethical codes showedthat larger newspapers and state press associations were aware of and madestrong stands against advertiser influence. The Illinois Press Association, forinstance, stated that the “scrupulous separation of the business from the pro-fessional departments of the paper are necessary” in order to adhere to “thebest standards of journalism.”52 The Wisconsin Press Association similarlybelieved that “neither the business interests of a newspaper nor any outsideinfluence should interfere with the publication of the truth in news or editori-als.” Newspapers should strive to be profitable because by doing so they couldavoid being targeted by unscrupulous advertisers. This was the aim; but inreality, “control by moneyed interests, big advertisers, and other influences”could “‘make or break’ a newspaper financially.”53 The ethical codes, as pro-mulgated by the state press associations and individual newspapers, mirrorwhat can be found in the textbooks. When a wall was not perceived as beingpresent or was not sufficiently reinforced, press critics and journalists grewconcerned.

47Linda Lawson, Truth in Publishing Federal Regulation of the Press’s Business Practices,1880–1920 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

48Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 286.49Ibid., 287.50Ibid., 286.51Susan M. Kingsbury and Hornell Hart et al., Newspapers and the News: An Objective

Measurement of Ethical and Unethical Behavior by Representative Newspapers (New York:G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937).

52Ibid.53Kingsbury and Hart, Newspapers and the News, 116.

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Control over Content

Writing in 1916, Don Seitz, the former business manager for Pulitzer’sNew York World and himself the author of a journalism-business textbook, pit-ted editors against others in a newspaper’s command structure. “The editorshave always been contemptuous of the business office,” he wrote, “regardingit only a place where the salaries are paid, but with very little respect forthe struggle to gather in the wherewithal to pay them.”54 While “the editorloves a ‘clean page’ where he can let his ‘story’ run,” Seitz went on, “thebusiness office regards a page as a place for intensive cultivation, and themore high-priced position advertising it can tuck away the better the balancesheet looks.” The advertising manager, in particular, was in a tough position,trying to keep advertisers happy, avoid the ire of editors, and make enoughmoney to keep the books balanced.55 It is not clear in Seitz’s telling if thebalance of power resides on the business or on the editorial end:

The distance between “upstairs” and “downstairs” is far greaterthan the physical measurement implies. To the force assigned totake care of the material side of a newspaper establishment “thepeople upstairs” are a strange and inexplicable lot. The academiccritic is often heard with acute accusations against “business office”control. . . . “Controlling” an editor is about as easy as picking liveeels out of a puddle of water. . . . His hunting instincts are so keenlydeveloped as to leave no place in his mind for any considerationsother than getting out the very best paper he can.56

The assignment of newsroom resources was often a source of conflictbetween news editors and their composing staffs. Robert Neal, writing ageneration later about this relationship among news workers on smaller pa-pers, compared the news editor to the “captain of a liner,” complete withultimate responsibility for both success and failure. Neal’s text was aimed atsmaller organizations, where the line between editorial and business roles wasfuzzier. An associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri’sSchool of Journalism and desk chief for the Columbia Missourian, Neal wasinterested primarily in addressing the problems of small-town newsrooms.Knowing how and when to push the staff, whether acting as an editor or ad-vertising manager (or both, on the smallest papers) could make the differencebetween a financially solvent operation and a bankrupt one.57

54Don Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916), 99.55Ibid., 98–99.56Ibid., 96–97.57Robert M. Neal, Editing the Small City Daily (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946), 106,

302–316.

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But at larger newspapers, contact between news and business depart-ments was minimal unless there was a major concern. While “the paper israrely big enough for the editor or small enough for the business end,” asSeitz put it, the fact remained that “there is amazingly little acquaintancebetween the rank and file of the two departments.”58 On a day-to-day basis,reporters and their immediate supervisors did not engage in conversationswith business managers and advertising agents. There was a difference intemperament and mission between these groups, and neither was convincedof the utility of the other—a fact that could work in the paper’s favor:

The usual editorial view is that there is something nefarious aboutthe business office. It is just as mysterious as the editorial room isto the boys downstairs. The editor never can understand why thebusiness office sells a page which he could use to better advantagefor news or a feature. The business office folks cannot comprehendwhy the editors are always accumulating libel suits, or printingthings offensive to advertisers; why a reporter can never explainhis expense account . . . it is this wholesome variance that ensuresindependence and reliable editing. Nothing could be more fatal to anewspaper than supine obedience on the part of “upstairs.”59

Seitz does say that experience on the editorial side can reduce the learningcurve on the business side, if and when staff was to commingle. He, likeNeal, uses a nautical metaphor for a compartmentalized news operation. Thebusiness manager at a larger newspaper should be “in sympathy with theeditorial impulse” and act “a good deal like the captain of a ship . . . ready tomeet anything that comes along” if he was to avoid becoming frustrated inworking with his editorial colleagues.60

Writing a decade before Seitz, John Given was less forgiving in hisportrayal of the relationship of the business manager to the rest of the news-paper’s hierarchy. “In an actual newspaper office and not in a mere descriptionof one, the business manager would never be found bringing up the tail endof the procession.”61 On the other hand,

Outside of the editorial room, from cellar to roof, [the businessmanager’s] word is law. And inside, while he does not, as manypersons would have it supposed, dictate the paper’s policy nor spendhalf his time suppressing news, his word is law, subject to the courtof last resort.62

58Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade, 97–98.59Ibid., 103–104.60Ibid., 105–106.61John Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 305.62Ibid., 305.

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The publisher had the final say. But by 1900, publishers would increasinglydelegate some of their day-to-day authority to their business managers. Andby the end of that decade, the business staff members who reported to thebusiness manager were not usually recruited from the editorial side, at leastnot at the level of management, according to Given, who had worked invarious capacities for the New York Evening Sun (itself a paper subjected tothe ravages of consolidating, profit-driven publisher Frank Munsey). Whilethey usually did not dictate what could or could not be covered by thenews staff, business managers had the authority to set news budgets at somenewspapers.63

This was a key consideration. In an era when reporters were encouragedor ordered to walk instead of take taxis, were paid “on space,” and generallywere not compensated or treated well, the budget available to spend on newsgathering was minimal. The asymmetrical setting of budgets would seemto show who held the real power at a newspaper. It is still true, however,that the editorial staff could hire and fire at its discretion.64 This acted as acounterbalance to the bottom-line authority from the business office. Givenwrote that editors and business managers operated in their own worlds, unlessbudgeting concerns caused clashes.65

Other authors were equally forthright. “Newspaper success is the resultof selling our manufactured product at a loss until . . . the sale of a by-productovercomes all losses incurred and yields a profit,” wrote Jason Rogers in his1918 textbook.66 A former business manager, Rogers had worked in thecomposing and circulation offices of smaller newspapers before runningthe business office of the ill-fated New York Daily Mercury in the early1890s.

Rogers, who founded the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1914, waswriting for the benefit of the entrepreneur, not the aspiring reporter.67 Whenhe argued that big department stores needed newspaper ad space as muchas newspapers needed advertisers, surely he had the investor in mind ratherthan the cub reporter or editor.68 Rogers would have been personally familiarwith the sometimes-prickly encounters between reporters and business-officestaff. “No one who has not been through the mill . . . is in a position tojudge how seriously the average advertising manager is handicapped by

63Ibid., 305–306, 310–311.64Ibid., 257–258; Given comments on the health consequences for underpaid and over-

worked reporters, 259–260; and on editors’ ability to fire and hire at will, even as moreexperienced reporters were less susceptible to sudden dismissals, 261–262.

65Ibid., 305.66Rogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Editing, to Mechanical Pro-

duction, to Circulation, and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 77.67“Jason Rogers Passes at 61,” Rochester Evening Journal, April 27, 1932.68Rogers, Newspaper Building, 206–207, 230.

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his superiors,” Rogers wrote. “I mean by editors, publishers, and businessmanagers. Instead of gladly doing what they can to make it easier for him tosell the space that helps pay all salaries, there is too often a slap in the facethrough implied disdain of the salesman.”69 Thus, Rogers advocates for thebusiness staff. Editors and reporters who resisted the wishes of the businessside of the house had different priorities. They were on the other side of thedivide in what he called the “newspaper factory,” where the focus was onincreasing “manufacturing efficiency.”70

Lamenting the lowly state of the advertising manager, Rogers was quickwith a caveat: “The closer he is taken to the hearts of editors . . . the betterhe can do the work he is expected to do.”71 In his opinion (perhaps be-cause he had been one), a circulation manager was often looked down on,viewed as a “sort of over-grown newsboy, or a grossly inferior subordinate,”by publishers, business managers, and editors, when, in fact, he best under-stood what was selling newspapers effectively.72 Rogers’s descriptions of anidealized newspaper’s layout suggest a perspective colored by his businessbackground. In his quest for “the factory idea,” the goal was to “hold theentire force as close to the smell of printer’s ink as possible. Somehow whenmen get out of touch and sympathy they lose efficiency.”73

By the 1920s, and in the wake of postwar anxieties about how propagandahad distorted the news, discussions about control of the newsroom empha-sized the complicated realities that could be found in individual newspapers.A study of the authority structures of more than two hundred newspapers byDonald Hornberger and Douglass Miller, a professor of business administra-tion and an associate professor of English, respectively, found that only fivepapers had organizational charts or other schema on the books.74 Their studyis helpful because it provides insight into the contemporaneous ideal of news-paper structure and the ways that it was often contradicted by reality. Theauthors speak of differing “business and editorial functions” within newspa-per organizations, and to the “business end,” as opposed to the “editorial andnews side,” of even the most ideal newspaper’s setup.75

Most newspapers had informal relationships between their departmentalheads. The Kansas City (Missouri) Star was a case in point. Hornbergerand Miller quote George B. Longan, the general manager: “The editor, themanaging editor and the general manager . . . sit within twenty feet of one

69Ibid., 231.70Ibid., 166, 168.71Ibid., 232.72Ibid., 252.73Ibid., 169.74Donald Hornberger and Douglass Miller, Newspaper Organization (Delaware, OH:

Bureau of Business Service, Ohio Wesleyan University, 1930), 3–4, 7–9.75Ibid., 11.

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another [and] are in what you might call continuous conference.”76 Theauthors are quick to point out that such casual and close hierarchies, atleast at the top of the command structures of newspapers, were common,even in an era noted for its integration of assembly-line and “scientific”manufacturing principles. Yet even if this casual approach prevailed, theyinsisted that newspapers should be more organized, not less, if they wantedto be efficient.77

In stark contrast to this model was the personality-driven paper, with theFort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram a prime example. According to J. M. NorthJr., the paper’s editor-in-chief, “Each executive operates his own departmentor those under his jurisdiction, more or less independently.”78 The positionof “news editor” entailed different types and degrees of authority at differentnewspapers, Hornberger and Miller found.79 The textbooks in this study alsoindicate that the duties of news managers varied widely.

While they were still somewhat relaxed in their hierarchies, newspapersof both larger and smaller circulations tended to lean toward being profit-or news-driven based on a variety of factors, including their history, finan-cial solvency, competition with rival papers, and the loyalty of their readers.Hornberger and Miller held up the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republicanas an example of a news-driven paper. “Writing of the present organizationof the paper, S. H. Bowles, its general manager, declares, ‘The editors areresponsible to themselves only. They are the czars. The management worksfor the editors. We capitalize Editors.”’80 The authors, echoing other com-mentators, observed that editors at newspapers in the Scripps-Howard chainhad more authority than their business managers did. The opposite was trueat Hearst-owned papers, where “the paper is likely to be, as in any industrialconcern, a profit-making organization with news and editorial matter only ameans to that end.”81

At Smaller Papers, a Permeable Wall

At newspapers with circulations below 100,000, the publisher was alsooften the editor and the business manager. As a result, the roles were less

76Ibid., 9.77“The newspaper must be organized to perform similar functions [to a manufacturing

company]. It obtains raw materials in the form of news, features and editorial ideas. This rawmaterial is then processed, if you please, by adding ink and paper so that it becomes the finishedproduct, the printed newspaper. The company must have a sales force to distribute its productand also to dispose of its advertising space.” Hornberger and Miller, Newspaper Organization,13.

78Ibid., 8–9.79Ibid., 17–18.80Ibid., 16; italics in the original text.81Ibid., 16.

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distinct, and the separation between business and news was minimal. Thetextbooks examined in this study (notably those aimed at smaller publica-tions, including those written by Bing, Harris, Barnhart, Brown, and Neal)do not dwell on the challenges posed by this blending of roles but insteadfocus on the proper role of news as government watchdog. Textbook authorswriting for smaller publications were reluctant to address possible conflicts,or perhaps they viewed the separation of news and business as a nonstarter.

Thomas Barnhart, who at the time of his 1936 textbook’s publicationwas an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota anda former staff member at the small Snohomish (Washington) Tribune, is acase in point. He wrote for the publishers of small weekly newspapers withthe conviction that “knowledge of ‘both sides of the fence’ is invaluable.”82

There were “close relations” between the “editorial and management func-tions,” but even at smaller newspapers the challenges of either one shouldbe approached in different ways.83 From his perspective, there were threeproblems facing the one or two people managing a small newspaper having todo with advertising, circulation, and office administration—issues “equallyas important as those relating to content and presentation.”84 A newspaperwas a business enterprise, and the newspaper owner-operator a businessper-son, Barnhart insisted. “The traditional combination of publisher-politicianis giving way steadily to a throng of publisher-managers. These, unlike theirpredecessors, employ gross volume of profitable business rather than po-litical power as a measure of success.”85 The publisher-manager served apivotal, centralizing role in his community, according to Barnhart. The re-lationship of the newspaper to “special groupings such as business men’sorganizations, community leaders, and advertisers” would help it succeed orfail, depending on how they were managed.86 Barnhart, a graduate of theUniversity of Washington’s journalism program, worked for the WashingtonPress Association as well as the Everett Daily Herald and the Seattle Timesbefore joining the University of Minnesota, where he became an expert onsmall newspapers.87 He was thus in a position to know how differently sizednewspapers and their staff members confronted ethical dilemmas.

82Barnhart, Weekly Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936),7–8; this and other management textbooks were often written with the assistance of otherjournalists and journalism professors—in this instance, Ralph Casey, a general-reporting text-book author and a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, who “not onlyread a large share of the manuscript and gave many useful suggestions but also gave constantencouragement for which the author is most grateful,” vi.

83Ibid., 8.84Ibid., v.85Ibid., 11.86Ibid., 429–430.87Beth H. Garfrerick, “A History of Weekly Community Newspapers in the United States,

1900 to 1980” (PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 2009), 137.

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Similarly, Buford Brown, in his 1929 Problems of Newspaper Publish-ing, was convinced that small newspapers were blends of profit and civicpromotion. A graduate of Missouri’s School of Journalism and a veteranpublisher and editor of several small Texas papers, Brown went on to workas a journalism instructor at the University of Texas and then Stanford Uni-versity, where he taught courses on managing small newspapers. “The truthabout the newspaper business is—it is a business, plus vital elements thatare wholly unbusinesslike,” Brown cited an article in Editor & Publisher. Asfar as conflict between editors and accounting, circulation, and advertisingstaff went, “Good business men have sense enough to let good editors havetheir way. That system works—always has, and always shall.”88 “That sys-tem,” however, was nebulous, left to be worked out among editors and otherstaff.89 Culling from the trade literature and his own interviews with editorsand business managers, Brown discusses joint ownership, coordination ofdepartments, and the ideal physical arrangement of the divisions of a smallnewspaper.90 The focus is on bringing a modified factory model to the news-room, not on tackling the conflicts between advertisers and reporters. Herefers to each section of the paper as having its own jurisdiction and purpose.The “business office” and “business organization” (which includes adver-tising, auditing, bookkeeping, circulation, and their respective managers),while ideally located near the “editorial department,” occupied a separatespace.91

Frank Thayer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin’sSchool of Journalism at the time of his textbook’s publication in 1938, sharedthe other textbook authors’ faith in financial solvency and service to com-munity.92 He was more prescriptive than Brown however, perhaps becausehis text was aimed at undergraduates. Still caught in the uncertain wakeof the Depression, it was even more important, Thayer argued, that editorsand managers know how to avoid debt and that journalism students learnthe importance of the “business side of the newspaper.”93 Thayer, who hadworked for newspapers in Chicago and Illinois, and taught at Northwestern’sMedill School of Journalism, saw no contradiction between advertiser ap-peal and good journalism—ads supported the paper by bringing in revenue,while editorial and news columns were the “principal reasons for the paper’s

88Buford O. Brown, Problems of Newspaper Publishing: With Special Reference to theCountry Field, Including Weekly and Daily Newspapers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929),3.

89Ibid., vii. Brown’s editor, H. F. Harrington, himself a prominent journalism educator andtextbook author, described it as “short on theoretical hokum . . . strong on practical shoptalk.”It was a “work-desk manual of instructions,” ix–x.

90Ibid., 66–67, 69–70, 75.91Ibid., 69.92Frank Thayer, Newspaper Management (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938).93Ibid., xi, xiii.

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existence, especially from the public’s point of view.”94 Thayer described the“editorial and business sides” as working in harmony.95

Factors Affecting the Editorial–Business Divide

In James Pollard’s 1937 Principles of Newspaper Management, theScripps-Howard newspaper chain, with its editors and not its business man-agers in charge of payroll, was held up as one way to separate news frombusiness concerns.96 But for most other papers, the extent of conflicts be-tween business managers and editors depended on the local situation, in-cluding the paper’s size and if it was owned by a corporation or a family.Indeed, the whole character of the paper depended on whether the editorialor the business office was “predominant” or whether they were “on a par.”97

Newspapers were unique in this regard. Pollard described “limitations . . . tothe resemblance between the incorporated newspaper and the incorporatedbusinesses.”98 One of these limitations was the personal nature of newspapermanagement. “While the organization of all newspapers breaks down intotwo subdivisions—the editorial and the business departments—the news-paper conforms less to fixed rules of organization than almost any otherbusiness of similar size and importance.”99

In his chapter on retail advertising, Pollard, like Thayer, encouragedoutreach and assistance for advertisers. Pollard, a former Associated Pressreporter and an associate professor of journalism at Ohio State Universitywhen his textbook was published, added a cautionary note, however. Thereshould be limits as to how far a newspaper would go to help place adsand promote the companies behind them; these are left largely unspecified.“The publisher will be guided by experience, by common sense, and byeconomic factors.”100 One exception was rates for ads. Under pressure tomake concessions, newspaper staff should not do so unless there was apressing reason. Just what constituted “pressing” was left unexplained.101

Discussed at greater length by Pollard is “the publicity evil,” namely,the combination of news content with advertising material in “puff” pieces.Newspapers at this time were bombarded with press releases promoting

94Ibid., 11–12.95Ibid., 27.96James Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937),

26. Pollard’s working life spans the majority of the time of this study (1894–1979). Scripps’smodel seems to have been respected by many reporters and reporters-turned-journalism-academics.

97Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management, 19.98Ibid., 17.99Ibid., 17.100Ibid., 144–145, 222.101Ibid., 149.

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products and events, such as plays and the launches of new cars. “Much of itcomes direct to the editorial rooms, but an unduly large proportion, it must beconfessed, clears through the newspaper business office,” Pollard remarked.It was marked, unhelpfully, as “B.O.M,” or “business office must” and couldbe especially hard to ignore as a habit-forming source of material in smallerpapers, which had more space and more need for the money, especially asthe effects of the Depression lingered.102 Efforts to combat rampant pufferyincluded more cooperation among newspapers but also more training foraspiring journalists. Rosten, whose study of Washington correspondents waspublished the same year as Pollard’s text, confirms the practice of “B.O.M.”recommendations (which could range from mere suggestions to implicitorders, depending on who issued them). He was less concerned than Pollard,however, about their deleterious effects on news gathering and presentation,describing them as “about as harmful as the free publicity given to churchpicnics or club outings.” More ominously, however, they reflected the realpressure some newspaper staff felt to keep bad news about advertisers out oftheir stories.103

In Pollard’s time, the business department and its concerns had beenon the ascent for a generation, and “while it would be misleading and un-true to say that the American newspaper has been commercialized, the factremains that the business and economic aspects of publishing have been rev-olutionized since 1900,” he wrote.104 In the future, Pollard predicted, moretraining would be necessary for specialized business staffs, and by that hemeant “manufacturing (production), sales (advertising and circulation), anddistribution (circulation).”105 This could be provided at business schools orin journalism programs. He argued that “too much of the emphasis . . . is onthe editorial functions,” due to the fact that “the great majority of studentsare interested mainly in writing or editing and only incidentally in businesssubjects.” That could change if publishers required business training for theirnew hires.106 Indeed, the debate between more vocational and more theo-retically oriented journalism-education programs was still unfolding, withsupporters of the former calling for more “practical” business education forjournalism students.107

Writing in the November 1937 issue of the Quill, the monthly publi-cation of Sigma Delta Chi (later the Society of Professional Journalists),Pollard noted that the Depression had “broken down” departmental barriers

102Ibid., 153–154.103Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 286.104Pollard, Principles of Newspaper Management, 19.105Ibid., 430.106Ibid., 432.107Brad Asher, “The Professional Vision: Conflicts over Journalism Education, 1900–

1955,” American Journalism 11, no. 4 (1994): 304–320.

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at many newspapers. “It is unlikely that there will ever again be a time whenthe editorial department can pursue its course without regard for what thebusiness office or the circulation department is doing.”108 Proceeding as ifthe “various subdivisions” were “watertight compartments” was no longerfeasible, if it had ever been.109

A Metaphor’s Legacy

What a difference a century makes. The 2013 sale of the WashingtonPost to technology entrepreneur Jeff Bezos was hailed as a saving grace forthe financially troubled newspaper.110 And when Facebook cofounder ChrisHughes scooped up the struggling New Republic, he articulated a businessplan in which editorial and business operations would be intertwined.111

Even the New York Times is rethinking the internal configuration that has his-torically kept its business and newsroom operations separate.112 In addition,some journalism schools have adopted or are considering name changes to in-corporate a broader focus on media studies or cozier affiliation with industry,and some schools have introduced (or resurrected) courses that emphasizebusiness practices and more profit-focused pursuits. The abandonment of thewall metaphor appears well underway in journalism education and practice.

Marc Andreessen, writing about the future of the news business, applaudssuch changes. “No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off thehook on how the business works,” he wrote.113 With calls such as this to teardown the walls, or what is left of them, between the editorial and businesscomponents of news organizations, the practices that solidified the wall inthe first half of the twentieth century have a fresh relevancy.

Despite their many detailed charts and discussions of the problems ofcirculation, advertising, and newsroom management, recommendations inbusiness-management textbooks for how to make money and practice goodjournalism, beyond a clear delineation of authority in newsrooms, were scant.

108James E. Pollard, “Who’s a Journalist? Writers No Longer Have Sole Claim to TitleMany Have Scorned in Past,” Quill, November 1937, 9, 20.

109Ibid., 28.110Brad Stone, “Why Jeff Bezos Bought the Washington Post,” Bloomberg Businessweek,

August 8, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013–08–08/why-jeff-bezos-bought-the-em-washington-post-em.

111Justin Ellis, “Chris Hughes on Turning the New Republic into a Technology CompanyThat Adapts to Its Readers,” Nieman Journalism Lab, February 5, 2013, www.niemanlab.org.

112Ryan Tate, “Marc Andreessen Thinks the News Business Is About to Grow 1,000Percent,” Wired, February 27, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/02/big-boom-news-change-read; Joshua Benton, “The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report Is One of the KeyDocuments of This Media Age,” Nieman Journalism Lab, May 15, 2014, www.niemanlab.org.

113Marc Andreessen, “The Future of the News Business: A Monumental Twitter StreamAll in One Place,” http://a16z.com/2014/02/25/future-of-news-business.

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What was new was the incorporation of these ideas into textbooks for newgenerations of managers and editors. And what was left unresolved was howto pay for newspapers without compromising content. The wall metaphorwas built from a conflicting desire to balance these concerns.

Although described in a variety of ways, including that of a “ship,”“fence,” “cellar” versus “roof,” “upstairs and downstairs,” “end,” “office,”“department,” and “side,” business and news operations were portrayed inthese textbooks as distinct in both mission and function. They were parallelprocesses, made possible through an adherence to efficiency. The ease withwhich the textbook authors deployed this metaphor is telling.

When it came to balancing the need to make a profit with their roleas facilitators in the public sphere, American newspapers have been in aunique position since at least the end of the nineteenth century. There are fewcomparable cases to American journalism’s business model in the twentiethcentury. Newspapers endeavored to make a profit and remain independentof political and business influences while also sealing off, however imper-fectly, their editorial and business operations. Daniel Hallin argues that theincreasing distance between the owners of newspapers and their newsroomstaffs granted reporters more agency and the professional norms to reinforceit. This independence gradually led to a “provisional resolution” betweenbusiness departments, publishers, and owners that gave journalists a fairlyhigh degree of vocational autonomy by the 1940s.114 This space to developoccupationally was important for American journalists. The end of the De-pression and the conclusion of the Second World War, with its gradual returnto prosperity, helped with this process.

Outside the management textbooks and, in some cases, even withinthem, the wall separating business and newsroom operations was only asimpenetrable as a publisher wanted it to be or editors were willing to fightfor. Smaller newspapers with fewer staff had less flexibility when it cameto partitioning business influences and news reporting. As one Midwesternpublisher-owner complained in 1920, many of his peers “must give fully 90per cent of his attention to handling business affairs and only 10 per cent toeditorial details.”115 For smaller newspapers, the wall was an extravagancethey could ill afford. With limited financial resources, these papers were moresusceptible to influence from local commercial interests, despite admonitionsto the contrary. Greater barriers were present at larger papers, if only becauseeditorial staffs had more power and vested interest in maintaining their in-dependence within the news organization. Hallin’s “provisional resolution”was stronger in these larger newspapers, yet its strength could ebb and flow.

114Hallin, “Commercialism and Professionalism,” 245–246.115John F. Redmond, “Newsprint and Costs Occupy IDPA [Inland Daily Press Associa-

tion],” Editor & Publisher, February 19, 1920, 8.

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American Journalism 31:3 � 399

Emerging from the Depression, the authors of the textbooks in thisstudy did not see a contradiction between differentiating business and newspriorities. All of the authors had worked at newspapers, whether in editorial orbusiness departments, and their workplace discourse reflects their communityof practice much the way that Gravengaard’s Danish journalists spoke ina manner that reinforced occupational boundaries. The metaphors used todescribe their work environments were thus not foreign, forced, or otherwisedragooned into service—they were organic to the newsroom and to thebusiness office alike. The idea of a wall was perhaps unrealistic in practice,but it remained a guiding notion. As an ideal, it helped publishers to balancetheir twin missions. Influence flowed more from those interested in profittoward those interested in doing good journalism, but the aspiration remainedthat there should be a barrier between them. Both Herbert Gans and GayeTuchman, in their classic newsroom ethnographies, picked up on this idealdecades later.116 The enduring value of “responsible capitalism,” as notedby Gans, had as one of its origins the journalistic organization itself, inthe early twentieth-century United States.117 The prescription offered bytextbook authors in this study for separating the news and business divisionsreinforced journalists’ belief that their public role was intrinsically linked todemocracy. The belief in the necessity of keeping business influences awayfrom the newsroom stems from the way newspapers ordered their operationsand vice versa.

The wall metaphor may have no place in modern newsrooms, and yetnews organizations (along with their new owners and business models) willconfront a historical dilemma: how to practice effective journalism and makemoney.

116Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: FreePress, 1978).

117Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC NightlyNews, Newsweek, and Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 46–48. Alsosee Matthew Powers, “What’s New in the Sociology of News? Connecting Current JournalismResearch to the Classic Newsroom Studies” (paper, International Communication Associationannual meeting, Boston, May 2011).

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2014