By Phil Roberts
More than a century and a quarter ago in 1895, editors of leading newspapers gave their predictions about what how the 20th century newspapers would look. Some of their predictions fit the model of newspapering today and some tarry in the realm of fiction.
Editors from 13 leading newspapers responded to the question. The Tacoma Weekly News reported that the leading journalists of 1895 took a “retrospective glance into the past in order to draw conclusions as to the future.” All of the journalists “pointed out how great have been the advancements in the art of newspaper making-from the Washington hand press to the perfecting press; from the stage coach to the telegraph; from paper at 10 cents to good paper at 2 cents a point; from hand set to marvelous typesetting machines, etc.”
New technologies were important for them but, so was newspaper content and effects on readers. Felix Agnus editor of the Baltimore American wrote, “It seems to me that the limits of mere bulk are about reached. The people are already getting tired of it. They will demand better writing and better selection of news. Sensationalism is also on the decline. The demand is for quality and the newspaper that lives will live by its deserts.” He added, “We only know that it will be a very wonderful century.”
It would be only a mere seven years later (January 1903) that Lincoln Stephens in The Shame of Minneapolis introduced muckraking journalism. Although, they avoided bias, exaggeration and other negative attributes of sensationalism, the muckrakers enhanced sensationalism, but now sensationalism took a different form — investigative reporting. Using this new technique, they revealed corruption in big business and government. Thus, investigative reporting, albeit with sensational effects, was used periodically in the twentieth century press to ferret out national scandals.
What Agnus did not predict was the creation and success of the national tabloid presses. With millions of readers, this genre of newspapering proved economically successful if dubious in content. The number of loyal readers of the 20th century tabloids signify that readers’ insatiable appetite for gossip was not just a 19th century phenomenon but is an inherent characteristic of human nature.
A. G. Boynton, editor of the Detroit Free Press, believed that women would play a larger role in the newspaper industry.
“One thing more we may confidently expect — the larger participation of women in the business of moulding or expressing the public through to which the press is committed. Already she has entered upon the field and is doing excellent work. Revolutions never go backward; and it is certain that women’s work and influence in the press will increase, and that they will be among the marked features of the twentieth century newspaper. It requires no prophetic gift to make this prediction. The onward movement of women has acquired too much momentum to be checked, even if there were any desire to check it.”
He added that women have “put a quietus upon the theory that the inability of her sex to bear arms and go to war relegates her necessarily to a second place in all world’s work.”
His words were far more optimistic than what was to come for women in the workplace. Statistics reveal that career employment, advancement and promotion for women in the newspaper industry was not a rosy picture throughout the twentieth century. WWII is a benchmark era where many women left work to resume private roles in society, as mother and wife. In the newspaper industry, women did not make the advances that Boynton predicted. In fact, few women in newspaper careers held the highest posts in newspapers even as of the late twentieth century. The late Washington Post publisher and editor Katherine Graham, who retired a few years ago, was the exception to the rule of female employment in positions of authority in newspaper management.
Boynton may have predicted communication styles for the 21st century when he wrote, “If we were to predict as one of the coming features communication with the other planets in our solar system and the publication of newspapers simultaneously in the Earth and Mars, the prediction would be regarded as pure idiocy or an exaggeration of the national tendency to brag. Yet such a communication would be little more surprising than the changes that have been wrought by the telegraph and telephone.”
Boynton came close in his prediction. Today, hundreds of satellites circle the globe. Signals bounce from earth through the atmosphere to satellite and back to earth. Communication signals through computerized radio-waves are beamed back to earth from spacecraft millions of miles and light years away. It is not too incredible, glancing in retrospect, that Boynton thought it possible at the turn of the 21st century to have newspapers on Mars.
Editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser Foster Coates wrote that others believe twentieth century newspapers “will be a small, well written, closely edited epitome of the happenings of the world.” Percy S. Heath, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, did not agree with that assessment, writing that the twentieth century newspaper will be larger and more personal, journalists will be better trained. Then he added what today is an unexpected statement:
“They will very likely write in the first person. So that the newspaper reader may know at once whether he or she will be reading the truth. There will be no place in the twentieth century journalism for the lying reporter or the fraudulent editor. It will be truth, truth, truth and light everywhere. The twentieth century newspaper will be aggressive, independent, and have only one motto: Do Right.”
G. M. McConnel of the Boston Traveler must have foreseen the style pioneered by USA Today. “More and more the news feature must develop, and it will be the study not, as now, to expand a mustard seed of fact into a column of space, but to condense the news of the world as far as consistent with clearness.”
He also commented on syndicated editorial writers. “Editorial writing is now impersonal, and often expresses what the writer does not think. In the future, he will write for half a dozen papers instead of one–on differing themes and sign his name.”
Frank A. Richardson of the Baltimore Sun: “The newspaper of the next century will be guided by the hand of strictest truth and honor, for policy, if not conscience, will make it so.” He predicted, “It will trench more upon the domain of literature, science and art, and the area of its labor and its effort will be so enlarged that the seeker after all knowledge will be quite content with the repast spread upon its pages.”
Probably the most prescient of the editors was James Elverson of the Philadelphia Enquirer.
“As fast as science progresses, journalism will make use of its inventions,” he predicted., noting that, “If the flying machine is perfected, every first class reporter will have one. If the air ship is a success, they will distribute tons of newspapers daily.”
He was even more daring in describing the future of publishing. “Pneumatic tubes may distance trains; photoscopes may reproduce pictures 10,000 miles away, and possibly the kinetoscope may be so adapted that every reader may have one in his house in which to view the scenes of which he reads in his favorite newspaper.”
He added, “Possibly, we shall not use type any more, but by some complex arrangement issue rolls that shall run through phonographs. Then, as the twentieth century man sits down to breakfast he can have the news read to him while he sees every event in the kinetoscope, and at the same time he can swallow his morning meal.”