Most of the elements we associate with modern American newspapers originated in the burgeoning cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bold headlines, muckraking exposes, and packed newsstands emerged during these years, as did sports sections, women's pages, and vivid advertising spreads. Metropolitan dailies supplied us with some of the stock figures of urban life: the cynical reporter, the imperious publisher, and the scrappy newsboy. This close association between newspapers and city life encourages us to think of metropolitan dailies as products of urbanization, a response to the challenges of communication and coordination created by industrialization and rapid, concentrated population growth.
In Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans, Julia Guarneri argues convincingly that lines of causation ran in the opposite direction as well. She acknowledges that the rise of big cities gave us major newspapers, but her book emphasizes the ways in which newspapers made cities. Between 1880 and 1930, she contends, urban dailies “facilitated an imaginative relationship to the city and region, conjuring the experiences, qualities, and commitments that supposedly bound readers to their metropolitan neighbors” (4). After 1920, as newspapers became reliant on nationally syndicated content and sought a regional audience, their influence on urban development waned. But during these transformative years, they provided readers with a sense of the city and their place within it.
Guarneri's argument rests on two theoretical contentions, both presented with a light touch. First, she follows scholars such as Benedict Anderson who stress the constitutive impact of print in forging “imagined communities,” as well as those who take their cue from Jurgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere as an arena where public opinion took shape. Second, she joins with other scholars of print-culture history in insisting on a central role for readers in her analysis. “Newspapers were not top-down enterprises run by benevolent and paternalistic reformers,” Guarneri writes. Rather, they were “utterly commercial media that evolved to appeal to readers while serving the needs of advertisers” (98–99).
The sheer volume of newsprint produced in American cities of this era makes a comprehensive account of their civic, social, and cultural influence difficult. Guarneri overcomes this challenge by adopting a case-study approach, a formula that enables her to present fine-grained analysis while still explicating broader patterns. An opening chapter details how technological changes made larger papers with more visual features possible, which in turn fueled advertising and made the pursuit of mass readerships essential. Chapters examining developments in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee follow, each keyed to an important facet of her argument.
The first of these recounts how Philadelphia newspapers taught their readers to navigate a socially segmented city. For a time, local dailies sorted their audience by class, with different publications targeting different groups and each providing its readers with the tools and knowledge necessary to advance or sustain their social position. By the 1910s, intense competition culled the number of papers in the city and forced them to seek broader audiences. Most dropped their class-specific focus, settling on an approach that counseled readers about middle-class styles and behaviors. Advice columns, advertisements, and even comic strips focused on the pleasures and frictions of domestic life, reinforcing gender roles and deemphasizing class differences, along with the political questions they raised.
The chapter on New York City illustrates how the press generated a shared vision of the city that was both inclusive and hierarchical. Investigations of civic corruption, charity drives, portraits of slum life, and sensational reports from the underworld cultivated a sense among readers that they belonged to a cosmopolitan community. Newspapers supplied for people who rarely strayed from their own neighborhoods a mental map of the city's elite enclaves, ghettos, and netherworlds. During the Progressive Era, dailies used such material to spur readers to political action, but by the 1920s, reformist zeal faded, succeeded by a complacent cosmopolitanism. Immigrants and the poor were a steady presence in the pages of local papers, but reporters presented them as exotic others. As Guarneri points out, “the foreign-born were always written about, not for,” implicitly positioning readers as members of the cultural mainstream (131). It was through such mechanisms that newspapers created an urban social order rather than merely reflecting it.
Guarneri's examination of the regional impact of the Chicago press offers a print-culture parallel to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. While Cronon recounted the city's economic command of its hinterland, Newsprint Metropolis documents the expanding reach, influence, and constitutive power of Chicago's newspapers, first in the suburbs and ultimately across much of the Midwest. The notion of a “Chicagoland” that by some definitions stretched into Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan would not have been conceivable absent the increasingly efficient distribution of the city's major newspapers, especially the Tribune and the Herald Examiner, across the region. These papers did not entirely erase rural, small-town, and suburban loyalties, but by providing shared reading experiences they helped forge a regional identity centered on Chicago.
The final case study gauges the nationalization of the news in Milwaukee. Although in the orbit of Chicago, the Wisconsin city was sufficiently large and, by virtue of its substantial German American population, culturally distinct enough to sustain Guarneri's argument. Economic and technological imperatives made the city's dailies increasingly dependent on syndicated material, first for features but ultimately for national and international reporting. These changes pushed local affairs off the front page, a shift that “decentered Milwaukee from readers’ universes” (204). It had an especially pronounced effect on the city's German-language press, which consolidated, stopped publishing in German, and became more reliant on material produced elsewhere. There was a limit to how much generic content readers would tolerate, forcing editors to strike a balance between local and national content. Nevertheless, the shift away from a local orientation redefined the community and its place in the wider world in subtle ways. Milwaukee, as understood through the pages of its daily papers, became a provincial place.
On the whole, Guarneri makes a compelling argument that urban newspapers were a creative force that helped forge a modern, metropolitan social order in the United States. Her emphasis on readers is especially welcome. In some cases, she makes creative use of circulation data, commentary, letters, and surveys. Her distillation of the national survey of newspaper readers undertaken by Collier's Weekly in 1911, which opens the book, is especially effective. In other instances, Guarneri shrewdly infers reading experiences from the way newspapers were organized and written. One might wish for more analysis of the ethnic press, which receives only modest attention outside of the chapter on Milwaukee, if only to test further her arguments about the emergence of common understandings of city life and urban identities. But that is perhaps too much to ask of what is already an ambitious, engaging, and persuasive history of this most quintessentially metropolitan institution.
