The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Kindle Edition)

From Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-A history of U.S. newspapers from the arrival of the penny papers in 1830 to the height of the industry’s publishing in the early 1930s. Douglas attributes the onset of radio to the fading of newspapers as a social force. This browsable volume offers readers glimpses of the men and women who made American journalism the crass, clumsy, down and dirty, but always exciting medium it remains today. Of course there are chapters on Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Charles Dana, and women in the pressroom (especially Nellie Bly). Chains; tabloids; the rise of the New York Times; and that glorious oddity of nature, tobacco, and gin-the reporter-are covered as well. Douglas seems to be prejudiced in favor of newspapers as a form of news delivery as opposed to television. He also suggests that today’s TV journalism is more homogenized than the homogeneous press of that golden age of newspaper pas (more…)