Polling for Peace

Reflecting on British public response to Italy’s incursion into Abyssinia in 1935, journalist F.W. Deedes argued that the 1934 Peace Ballot, a widespread national referendum evincing public support for the League of Nations, had successfully turned public opinion against interventionism. Completed by over eleven million people, the Peace Ballot was the most influential public opinion survey of the 1930s. It was also a press sensation, drawing praise by League advocates and disdain from conservative papers, which referred to it as a “Ballot of Blood.” This chapter traces both optimism and skepticism over polling when it first entered public discourse via the newspapers. While Waugh’s Scoop (1938) details the hapless efforts of the aesthete and nature-writer William Boot to provide honest reporting of the Abyssinian Crisis, the overwhelming powers of press magnates and their financial interests undermine his work by manipulating and capitalizing on public opinion. Waugh’s skeptical vision of public opinion in Scoop mirrored his public critiques of the research organization Mass-Observation, whose practices of public observation he likened to the actions of “keyhole-observers and envelope-steamers,” and whose methods, he argued, would empower authoritarians seeking to control public opinion. Mirroring similar themes of Storm Jameson’s novel None Turn Back (1936), Scoop not only critiques the newspaper trade, but also denounces institutionalized public opinion and its imbrication in the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Like other skeptics, Waugh challenges the utopian notion that polling fosters unmediated exposure to public thought; the mediation of polling through the political morass of newspapers elicited fears that polling would become just one more media cudgel with which to shape and manipulate public sentiment.

Spillovers from Online Engagement: How a Newspaper Subscriber’s Activation of Digital Paywall Access Affects Her Retention and Subscription Revenue

Newspapers are increasingly reliant on subscription revenue as advertising spend shifts to online platforms. Many newspapers have implemented paywalls in an attempt to boost subscription revenue. We study whether and how paywalls can help newspapers boost subscription revenue by retaining existing subscribers. Most major newspapers offer free access to paywalled content to subscribers to the print edition, which may help the newspaper retain subscribers by making their subscriptions more valuable. We leverage variation in whether and when existing subscribers activated access to the paywall of a top 30 North American newspaper. Our identification strategy accounts for self-selection in subscribers’ decisions to activate paywall access. We find that a subscriber’s activation of digital access decreases the risk of her canceling her subscription by about 31% and increases her subscription revenue by 7%–12%. In other words, digital activation improves subscriber retention and the associated subscription revenue. This suggests a crosschannel spillover in which the online product (the paywalled website) increases customers’ valuation for the offline product (the printed newspaper). Our results have implications not only for the newspaper industry but also for firms in other industries that offer subscribers to one product free or subsidized access to a complementary product. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems.

Where Have All the Stories and Voices Gone in Local Newspapers? The Effect Falling Advertising Revenues and the Rise of the Web Have Had on English Regional Newspapers

The regional newspaper industry in the UK is in freefall with sales down more than 60 percent in 10 years. With this decline has come cost-cutting. This study looks at how these cuts have manifested themselves in terms of the number of news stories now being printed in newspapers and the number of local people being quoted in the newspapers. The study has looked at a number of regional newspapers across 30 years to show the effect of the changing face of the newspaper business as the audience and advertising have moved online. The research includes interviews with experts on whether story count mattered and if fewer stories and local voices have damaged the product. This paper finds that generally newspaper companies with a web-first culture have been forced to reduce their local news content in their printed products as they concentrate their resources online. While fewer stories and voices cannot be blamed for the complete demise of the newspapers, it is a consequence of cost-cutting and disadvantages the product. Opinions do vary on the needs for high story count, but this paper shows that most experts believe it is important and that without it, printed newspapers have been damaged. Keywords: newspapers, regional, decline, stories, quotes

The Conservative Press and the Interwar Origins of First Amendment Lochnerism

In the 1930s and 1940s, the conservative newspaper industry argued that the First Amendment should shield them from New Deal economic regulations. This article uses these forgotten clashes about freedom of the press to provide a new history of the origins and trajectory of the anti-regulatory First Amendment. It shows that conservative newspaper attorneys were at the forefront of efforts to use civil liberties to protect their economic interests in the New Deal. But it argues that these efforts were only partially successful. The courts rejected these maximalist First Amendment claims, distinguishing between economic liberties and civil liberties. But maximalist claims were more successful in the political culture, where conservative newspapers helped legitimize a belief that a laissez-faire “marketplace of ideas“ was a liberal principle with deep roots in the past. The origins of First Amendment Lochnerism thus lie not in judicial precedent, but in contestation in the political culture. A clearer understanding of the dynamics of this long-running effort to deploy civil liberties claims for conservative purposes, the article concludes, will help us better navigate the contemporary crises of the First Amendment.

Conclusion

After World War II, transformations in the newspaper industry, in mainstream gender values, and in the nature of popular discourse again reshaped Americans’ experience with advice. The rise in the 1950s of a new generation of advice columns, led by Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, also marked the decline of local, participatory columns like the Detroit News’ “Experience” and the Chicago Defender’s “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise.” Yet early twentieth-century advice columns set key precedents of collective communication that continue to shape the digital communities that serve as our primary modes of personal interaction today.

Newspaper Confessions

Newspaper Confessions chronicles the history of the newspaper advice column, a genre that has shaped Americans’ relationships with media, their experiences with popular therapy, and their virtual interactions across generations. Emerging in the 1890s, advice columns became unprecedented virtual forums where readers could debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day with strangers in an anonymous yet public forum. The columns are important—and overlooked—precursors to today’s digital culture: forums, social media groups, chat rooms, and other online communities that define how present-day American communicate with each other. This book charts the rise of the advice column and its impact on the newspaper industry. It analyzes the advice given in a diverse sample of columns across several decades, emphasizing the ways that advice columnists framed their counsel as modern, yet upheld the racial and gendered status quo of the day. It shows how advice columnists were forerunners to the modern celebrity journalist, while also serving as educators to audience of millions. This book includes in-depth case studies of specific columns, demonstrating how these forums transformed into active and participatory virtual communities of confession, advice, debate, and empathy.

Newspapers in Peril: Rationalizing the Economic Challenges of Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) upon Regional Journalists in Hyderabad, Sindh, Pakistan

Mass media play a decisive role in distributing health knowledge and awareness about health diseases. Covid-19 has been measured as the most dangerous health hazard of the 21st century that has constituted social, environmental and financial perils for humanity, including the media outlets. However, the Pakistani newspaper industry was already witnessing a decline in its readership and coronavirus has further deteriorated the situation for journalists working in regional newspapers. The methodological design using indepth interviews seeks to discover the financial difficulties faced by journalists employed in local or regional newspapers in Hyderabad city of Sindh province, Pakistan. The distress of unpaid salaries, financial security and paid leave were recognized as dominant elements that emerged during the present investigation as the extension to studies conducted concerning health communication. Therefore, this research suggests that government and business tycoons should financially collaborate with each other to consider challenges encountered by journalists for the survival of the newspaper industry in Pakistan.