I wonder how much it was the much greater newspaper competition in that era. As late as 1963, New York had 7 competing newspapers (down to just three in 1967). And if there isn’t anything happening on that day, why not pump an insignificant story into a mini soap opera?
Lots of detail doesn’t necessarily mean quality when it comes to reporting. Even today a lot of long-form stories I read in the New Yorker, Atlantic etc. have more detail than they really need. It’s clear that the writer has done a lot of legwork and talked to a lot of people but has put much less work in organizing that material and presenting only what is really important. I think the podcast Serial suffered from a similar problem. Obviously there is often an economic incentive to pad stories if you are being paid by the word but I think the deeper problem is a lack of intellectual discipline and analytical ability on the part of even highly regarded journalists.
A couple of the points raised above are also valid. Fact checking standards were much weaker 80 years ago so I would be skeptical about whether all those details are actually accurate. Also people had fewer entertainment alternatives so reading long newspaper stories was probably a reasonable way to pass your time even if they weren’t all that interesting. That would explain why stories were already getting less detailed by the 60’s and 70’s.
There were 2 papers per day in many places. That’s a lot of inches to fill!
I don’t happen to believe that’s true, and would need to see some sort of evidence to believe it. It is quite contrary to, well, any evidence I can find on the subject.
What’s much more logical to believe is simply that people used to read newspapers more. But that does not mean people read less, any more than the fact people ride horses less nowadays means they travel less often. People read a lot now, but newspapers are a bit out of fashion. It’s cheaper now than it used to be to read books - my sister reads four or five novels a week despite being perpetually hard up for cash, but books are cheap at the Value Village - and of course you can read stuff (including books) off the Internet. (How that indicates attention spans are shorter now I don’t understand; even a long newspaper article is a pretty fast read.) Quality material can be found online. If you read, say, all the news articles in one day at four or five favourite websites, plus one news site, you’ve consumed at least the equivalent of a reasonably good newspaper. I read five or six articles while drinking coffee with my fiancee before I left for work today and never touched a piece of paper.
In 1925, the local papers were the cheapest, easiest way anyone could read something fresh, as well as being the primary source of news. If you liked reading and you weren’t rich, the papers were the best way to get your fix.
TL;DR version: The stories that bring in ad revenue that created the record profitability of newspapers from the 'Sixties to the late 'Nineties did not translate into support for in-depth investigative journalism, while television undermined public interest in following long stories, even prior to the rise of clit-bait Internet journalism.
Although much is made about how social media, tabloid-style reporting, and amateur reportage has cut the belly out of print media, the fact is that the kind of in depth journalism and the amount of time it takes for a reader to spend understanding the news story has been undercut by competition with television journalism. In the television medium, even a “long” story has to be broken up into digestible clips, which themselves have to be distillled to an essential point because the viewer only had one exposure to absorb the information, and there is rarely a followup story.
It should be noted that the purchase cost of a newspaper has barely covered production and distribution even at the best of times, and the profitability of newspapers has always been predicated on advertising. In the 'Sixties and 'Seventies the amount and positioning of advertising became more aggressive, again in competition with television and radio, which led to greater profitability but not necessarily better reporting. Print advertising was looked at as being less expensive, both to purchase in quantity and produce, so newspapers with large distribution could get a large income from advertising, but of course only by filling their papers with more ads and less news. At the same time, the in-depth reporting takes both time and resources for both investigation and fact checking, and generally requires dedicating a reporter away from a ‘beat’ so it requires having a bullpen of reporters able to provide backcover. This was actually great for journalism as a profession because it meant that you had a mix of experienced journalists and younger reporters working together, the former providing mentoring to the latter.
However, the demand and even interest for long, multi-part stories has wained since the advent of television news, and the editorial support has reduced accordingly. This kind of in-depth investigative journalism is largely supported for vanity purposes to compete for awards rather than the readership it would theoretically bring in, and has migrated to the magazine format with publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The new Republic, and Mother Jones, and while these magazines support more long-form stories in journalism with supporting investigation, they have their own political bents and editorial motivations, and also suffer from the problem of not doing followup stories or series. There are still a handful of papers doing this kind of reportage, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Denver Post, Boston Globe, and a few others, and their in-depth investigative journalism was distributed by syndicates like UPI and AP, but there has been an erosion of the kind of experience and support from investigative journalism long before social media and online “news” sites gutted traditional news offices. Investigative journalism isn’t dead but both the publisher support and interest in detailed reporting has declined steadily over the decades. There are still some stalwarts (some of the papers listed above as well as the non-profit investigative digital news organizations like NPR and ProPublica.com) but that kind of reporting in daily print news has little financial support as papers pressure their journalists to participate in social media and multimedia venues as part of their standard workload.
Small city and local newspapers served as both reporting on the local politics where corruption is often rife and transparency is even less guaranteed than it is at major city, state, and federal levels. It also served as a farm league resource for the major papers and magazines, both on local stories with a wider impact and the reporters doing the investigative journalism. While a lot of the content of local papers is filler by nature because there just isn’t that much volume of news, it can often provide the germ of larger stories that would otherwise be missed. On the other hand, the standards for verification have gone up considerably as has the liability for printing false information, so there is even more pressure against printing a story which is not fully verifiable. (Bear that in mind while Trump rails against newspapers saying “nasty things” about him and threatening to “open up our [non-existent] federal libel laws”.)
This is not to say that there isn’t a bias to view the halcyon days of journalism (and anyone who has seen Citizen Kane should be well aware that many of the same concerns we have about the integrity and depth of journalism today existed even then in many of the same words) but with newsroom budgets contracting while reporter job duties are increaseing, it is more difficult to even obtain support to do in-depth investigation, and a lot of pressure to publish what they can verify rather than a more comprehensive story that most readers will not follow anyway.
Stranger
An excellent synopsis. Thanks.
This is all completely correct in my professional experience.
To how many news sources to do you subscribe?
Believe it or not, there was a time when even the most modest of homes had newspaper subscriptions.
In some circles, it was expected that, in addition to the local (in all senses of the word) paper, one had a subscription to the New York Times (NYT), Washington Post (WaPo) or other National and World coverage.
Even the smallest of papers had a subscription to UPI and/or AP. How many of you know what those are?
(I have a NYT subscription)
My point is that lacking any scholarly study of the issue, everyone is working from personal bias and anecdotes. That is all. My personal bias and anecdote, which is every bit as good or bad as the OP’s, is that I subscribe to the NYT, and it does lots of in-depth reporting. As does the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. I think the OP is confusing nostalgia with data. But the, this forum is IMHO, so there’s that.
I think this is a major reason. When you only had access to local news, and you had two editions a day to fill, the problem was getting enough copy to fill the paper. So you wrote a lot.
Then it became easy to wire stories, and suddenly instead of struggling to fill the paper, you can fill it easily, with tasty little bite sized chunks from all over.
There’s also the fact at least one person in this thread is actually an experienced journalist, so that’s a bit more than “personal bias and anecdote” IMHO.