In most communities, including Versailles and Midway, and larger cities like Lexington and Louisville, there is only one newspaper – and a growing number have none.
The news media landscape was very different in the 1800s, according to newspaper historian Alex Wright.
He says the number of newspapers grew from 37 at the end of the Revolutionary War to 20,000 by 1900 (more than half of the newspapers being published in the world).
What Wright describes as “just crazy growth” was driven by a variety of factors, including newspapers being subsidized by the government (with very low postal rates for mailing a newspaper) “because they saw it as a public good for people to have access to news,” he says.
Most people in the 1800s lived in small towns and remote areas of the country, so newspapers were their primary source for reading material, he says.
Poems, jokes and recipes were printed on the front page, so newspapers didn’t “look that much like what we think of as a newspaper today,” he continues. “… The hard news would often appear on the very last page because it took a week to set the paper in type by hand, and so they would wait to the very end to put in the most recent stuff…”
Today, people get news as it happens on their smartphones, while most newspapers continue losing subscribers.
“Everybody wants to get the biggest audience they can get,” longtime journalist and University of Kentucky journalism Professor Emeritus Al Cross says. “They know in this fractionalized (news media) environment, they can’t get the huge national audience … but they can get enough to make their business successful. And the way to make money in the modern media environment is to give people what they want … information that confirms what they already believe or that is entertaining. And we get too much sizzle and not enough steak, and sometimes the steak is cooked too hard on one side.”
In the early 1800s, newspapers freely used material from other newspapers (there were no copyright laws), and were “very much like social media platforms of today because they were not just where people went to get political headlines or news. It was also about stuff that would pass the time…,” Wright says.
“One of the interesting themes” that Wright says he explores in his recently published book, Empire of Ink, “is just how … diverse, and often opinionated 19th-Century newspapers were, and how that really changed over the course of the century.”
In the early 1800s, he says, “Newspapers were often highly partisan. They were often actually sponsored by the political parties.”
As newspapers became less reliant on political patronage to pay operating expenses and more reliant on subscribers and selling advertising, he says, “You start to see the beginnings of more of what we think of as modern journalistic practice” by the end of the 19th Century.
Journalism was becoming a profession, and publishing a newspaper was no longer “a side hustle” for someone who owned a print shop, Wright says. By the 1880s and 1890s, he says newspaper publishers started embracing the principles of objectivity and neutrality.
One way for newspapers to distinguish what they produce as journalism is by having a brand, which is commonly referred to as a motto or slogan.
“All the News That’s Fit to Print” was adopted as a motto by The New York Times in 1896 because owner and publisher Adolph Ochs wanted to distinguish his newspaper from its competitors.
Founded in 1851 as the New-York Daily Times, The New York Times “aimed to distinguish itself from sensationalist press of the era through deep, serious-minded reporting,” according to a History of The New York Times.
Other newspapers have also had mottos or slogans during their histories. The Sun had one after The Midway Sun and Woodford Weekly were consolidated in February 1877. “A Free Press Will Guard Liberties Of The People” was beneath the Sun’s banner on June 21, 1878.
Even though most newspapers do not have a motto or slogan, Cross says, “I like them because it gives (readers) a sense of a newspaper’s philosophy and outlook and what it thinks is important.”
“It’s your brand. It’s bumper sticker. It’s your identity. And every news organization needs to have some type of identity. That’s just good business,” he adds.
In 2017, The Washington Post adopted “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its first official slogan in its 140-year history. According to an Associated Press article on Feb. 24, 2017, “The Post reports that employees, including Editor Marty Baron, decided nearly a year ago to adopt a new slogan and ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ was one of the first ideas. They considered more ‘positive-sounding’ versions but ultimately went with the alliterative phrase.” According to the AP story, Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward used the phrase in reference to Richard Nixon for years. He says it came from a judicial opinion in a First Amendment case and “it’s about the dangers of secrecy in government.”
Closer to home, the Kentucky Lantern, based in Frankfort, also has a motto: We Shine Where It’s Dark.
It started with the name we chose for our online news site, says Jamie Lucke, the founding editor-in-chief of the Kentucky Lantern.
“We had to come up with a name” because States Newsroom, the nonprofit that has created nonprofit news sites across the country, including the Kentucky Lantern, does not name the sites.
Lucke chose Lantern, which was suggested to her by reporter Sarah Ladd, because there were so many newspapers already named Sun in Kentucky, including The Woodford Sun.
“It’s a metaphor that newspapers and journalism have used for a long time. That we bring light to areas of government and society and life that need to be illuminated,” Lucke says.
“If you light a lantern in the middle of the day, it’s not that big a deal,” she adds, “but on a dark night, that’s when it’s really bright. And I think it’s a metaphor that works because we’re shining brightest, we’re doing our best when we are exposing things that, maybe, powerful interests would rather not become public.”
Cross says newspapers became more fair and objective after World War II when they consolidated, and television became the primary way of getting the news. So instead of a city like Lexington having both a Republican newspaper, The Leader, and a Democratic paper, The Herald, a consolidated Herald-Leader aimed to have more broad appeal, he says.
“The newspaper owners realized that it was good business for them to go down the middle – not … left or right, but down the middle,” says Cross.
That good business strategy prevailed, he adds, until the advent of the Internet and social media, which “fractionalized the news environment where everybody got hungry for audience, and more in the business of giving people what they wanted instead of what they needed…”
As a nonprofit, Lucke says the Lantern can focus on local and state stories that no one else is going to cover. Moreover, she says the Lantern is there to fill the gaps created by the loss of newsroom jobs across Kentucky because advertising revenue has migrated away from print and even digital news outlets.
However, working in a nonprofit newsroom is “profoundly different,” says Lucke, “even though the fundamental job is exactly the same: to inform the public and abide by the ethics of journalism.”
“In the glory days of newspapers,” she continues, reporters did not have to focus on producing stories that would get a lot of clicks, which are often “not the most important stories to a functioning democracy.” So instead of producing stories about local and state governments and our courts, stories are more entertainment-based, she adds.
Lucke, who retired in April after more than 50 years in journalism, beginning with The Kentucky Colonel while a student at the University of Kentucky and predominantly with the Herald-Leader (for over 30 years), says she is grateful to have ended her career as the first editor of the Kentucky Lantern.
People across the state, she continues, appreciate the journalism produced by the nonprofit news upstart, which relies on donations and not subscriptions or advertising to pay operational expenses. She says that is very different than the traditional business model for newspapers, when advertising in your hometown newspaper was the way to reach your customers.
Because the Lantern, Sun and other newspapers say they are producing journalism, Cross says newspapers have “a certain responsibility not to be partisan.” That is not the same as a newspaper having an ideology, which he says can lean liberal or conservative.
So newspapers, even those that are nonprofit like the Sun, can (and do) express their opinions on land use and other local issues on the editorial pages, he says.
“Most news outlets are either centrist or slightly liberal,” he says, “but very few are as liberal as their critics like to say…”
After the Revolutionary War, newspapers were viewed as instruments of political power and influence, Wright says, but by the 1840s more newspapers, including The New York Sun, were being published for the common working people. By appealing to the masses with sensational stories about crimes and scandals for only a penny, the Sun was profitable and “spawned a bunch of imitators,” says Wright, who has a family history in the newspaper business.
Beginning in the 1800s, he says family members operated small-town newspapers in Georgia. No one in his family saved any of the family newspapers, which is why he got interested in newspaper history.
“As I started doing the research (15 years ago), it just kind of took on a life of its own,” says Wright. “… There (are) so many interesting characters in this world,” including well-known figures like Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin and lesser-known people, including a young girl who started her own newspaper when she was 11 years old.