I was looking up newspaper history online when I found these interesting facts:
Why were evening newspapers much more popular than morning papers in the past? What caused their numbers to decline? What are the largest cities that still have evening papers? When does an evening newspaper typically “hit the streets”?
In a word: Sports. Once sports like baseball and basketball started being played at night, the morning papers often didn’t have the complete box scores for the games the night before. Add in West Coast games and East Coast papers had a difficult time with this.
Other things would happen in the evenings that also didn’t make it into the morning newspapers until 2 editions later.
Of course some of the big city papers had multiple editions so that the later editions would have the latest sports.
I grew up in the Cincinnati area which had the morning Enquirer and evening Post. We subscribed to the Post as we were all sports fans. The post was delivered around 4 PM.
The evening network news programs are one reason that evening papers declined, as they were another way that people could find out the events of the day.
Where I grew up, we had a regional paper that was an afternoon paper. Delivered by 4ish. (among my siblings, I’m the only one who never delivered it as a paperboy)
Evening newspapers were aimed for the working class to read when they got home. Most households had little time in the morning to set aside for reading for any kind and timing a newspaper for when dad got home at night created the maximum audience.
Evening newspapers began to die after WWII because the population began to spread out over too large an area for efficient delivery. Even if the absolute number of subscribers went up, their lower density meant that delivery took far longer. Many suburban routes couldn’t be handled by a boy (later including girls) on a bike. Much more expensive adults with cars needed to be hired, still the current solution even for morning papers. In addition, the trucks needed to supply the routes with papers now were fighting afternoon traffic instead of going the opposite way from commuters since virtually all papers had their printing presses in a downtown area suitable to pre-war cities.
I found an article about this from 1991. It goes into more detail. No hindsight is needed on this; everybody understood the problem as it occurred. Sports, of course, is not mentioned. It wasn’t a factor.
There are no evening papers left in the U.S.
Actually, I’m surprised there were still that many evening newspapers. Their decline was due to a combination of factors.
Evening papers thrived when people lived in cities and/or took mass transit. The papers could print relatively late in the afternoon because they only had to deliver them to news stands downtown. Commuters could buy a paper on the street and read it on the bus or train. Once people started moving to the suburbs and commuting by car, they expected their paper to be delivered to their homes. That required the paper to go to press earlier, and the delivery trucks to fight the rush hour.
At the same time radio, then TV began to deliver more news, and more timely news. So once your typical suburbanite got home, he’d want to read more on that news story, sporting event or stock report he’d heard about, but the afternoon paper wouldn’t have it, because it had been printed at 2:00 pm.
As TV developed, it started siphoning off advertising that had formerly gone to newspapers (and magazines, but that’s another story.)
Meanwhile, because there wasn’t that much happening between midnight (when the morning papers went to press) and dawn (when they were delivered) so except for a few late breaking stories and late sports they could compete in news delivery.
And readers rapidly decided they didn’t need an afternoon paper like they used to. Advertisers figured out that most afternoon paper readers also read the morning paper, and cut their advertising back to one or the other – usually the morning paper.
Further, afternoon papers were not very good on covering sports, even when there were nothing but day games. The paper went to press before most baseball games finished (some would have the line score of in-progress games, updated until the time the newspaper went to press.
In the 20s, afternoon papers would have multiple editions; the final edition might have all the local baseball scores, but it was useless for most other sports. Boxing, basketball, and hockey were all played at night, so an afternoon paper couldn’t cover that, and horse racing had the same problems as baseball (the feature race might go off too late). Football was played during the day, but afternoon papers generally didn’t have Sunday editions.
The sports section of the paper I mentioned was best at HS sports. (in fact stopped reading it once I graduated)
Evening newspapers began their huge general decline no later than the 1960s. I’d guesstimate that sports were probably 5% as important nationally then as they are today. The NFL first went over 3 million attendance in 1958; today its 17 million. The NBA took until 1967-68 to hit 3 million; today’s its 21 million. Baseball spent the supposed glory years of the 1950s dying horribly, with 16 teams averaging about a million each; today 30 teams average 2.5 million each. And those 16 teams were in 10 cities, the rest of the country didn’t care the same way. The leagues are far more national and far more visible and take in much higher percentages of the entertainment dollar. And there are many more leagues and many more sports and dozens of 24 television channels to promote them.
I’d say that nothing in the news industry would surprise people 50 years ago than how big sports are today. That’s why I don’t see sports coverage as anything that by itself could drive the industry. It was the tail on the dog.
When I was growing up in Green Bay in the late 70s and early 80s, the main paper in town (the Press-Gazette) was an evening paper. We had it delivered, and it usually made it to the house between 4 and 4:30 – our delivery person was always a neighborhood kid, who did the paper route after getting home from school, which was pretty much the standard for the Press-Gazette. There was a second paper in Green Bay in those days, the News-Chronicle, which was a morning paper (and had been started in the early 70s by a group of P-G workers who had left the paper after a labor dispute), but it had a much smaller circulation.
At some point during the mid-to-late 80s, after I left home to go to college, the Press-Gazette switched to morning delivery. Some time after that, Gannett (which owns the P-G) also bought the News-Chronicle, and shut it down.
When I started working in Chicago in the late 80s, there was an evening edition, after a fashion, of the Chicago Tribune – they would print up a “wrap”, with a few pages of late news, but primarily the closing numbers from the financial markets, and stick that “wrap” around issues of the paper from that morning. About the only places that edition would be sold would be at the train stations, and other locations where evening commuters could buy them. The Trib no longer offers this, of course – availability of the closing market numbers online killed the market for it.
My hometown paper, the Rochester (Minnesota) Post-Bulletin is an afternoon paper. I think that’s largely because the closest large metropolitan paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, is a morning paper. Lots of people end up reading both, very often someone else’s copy. The morning paper lacks up-to-date sports while the afternoon paper lacks late-breaking news of the day.
All fairly good, but I take issue with the notion that delivery trucks needed to fight evening traffic. These were done in the very early afternoon, so the paper-boys would have the papers to deliver right after they got home from school. The fact that school let out a couple hours before most businesses closed worked out conveniently to use cheap child (well, teen anyway) labor.
Also worth noting that many “afternoon” papers went to morning for the Sunday edition. The Denver Post even went to a Saturday morning edition in 1973.
Also, in Denver anyway, the Afternoon paper could have market closing prices for stocks, and you could place orders to be executed at market opening the next day. If you based this off the morning paper, your information would be stale by the time you placed the order with your broker.
Yup; the Green Bay Press-Gazette was a Sunday morning paper when I was a kid.
EEEeeeng STENNA!
Ahem. I do beg your pardon, I came over all newsboy. The Evening Standard, founded in the 1820s if memory serves and still published every weekday (as the free London Evening Standard). I don’t take it any more, for political reasons, so I don’t know if it’s still true, but there used to be three editions every day with sometimes significant differences as stories broke or developed. If I was going home to see my parents I would get the latest copy I could (West End final not bad, on the streets at about 5pm, Late Night Final better, got out at about 7 I think) to read on the train and give to my father.
Evening papers are still pretty common in the UK. Yorkshire Evening Press, Oldham Evening Chronicle, etc.
When George V was dying, his doctor “sped him along” a bit, so that his death would first be announced in the more respectable morning papers like the Times, rather than the evening rags.
People also got very worried about the liability involved in having children deliver papers, especially after dark.
I checked online and saw what I thought were authoritative sites claiming there were none. Thanks for the real-world info.
When I was a kid we got both The State and the Columbia Record, which was the evening paper. This was in the 80’s, and at that time the Record had sort of niche-marketed itself into having more community-oriented news, which was why a lot of people read both.
I probably should have said “That required the paper to go to press earlier, OR the delivery trucks to fight the rush hour.”
But that only worked in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, when the stock market closed at 12:00/1:00 pm. In the far more populous Eastern and Central time zones, getting the closing market prices in (particularly in the pre-computer days, when typesetters had to enter all those numbers in manually) was a huge problem.
The Boston Globe had morning and evening editions until about 1980, at which point it went to mornings-only. At least that was so for week days. I don’t recall for sure, but weekends may have been mornings-only all along.
The Globe is slowly turning into a mid-day newspaper, at least for anyone with the same delivery person we have. It’s supposed to be here by 6 but it is more like 6:30-7 and sometimes 8. Weekends can be as late as 10 or even a little later.