Who Owns the News?

From Linotype to Live Feed

Returning friends: Hello again and thank you for joining us for the fifth book in our series of not-exactly-cozies. Courageous readers, I salute you!

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This kind of reading doesn’t have a comfy storyline. It is often uncomfortable, painful, and there’s no happy ending. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can figure out what to do about it.

My earliest newspaper memory: I’m on my hands and knees, kid-style, with the daily Commercial-News spread out on the floor in our living room at 617 Sheridan, in Danville IL, a town (then) of about 35,000. It’s 1946, maybe early 1947. I’m in Mrs. Johnson’s first grade at Lincoln School, where we’re doing phonics. The radio, in the corner beside the couch, is playing. I’m staring at a befuddling word in big black letters across the front page: Czechoslovakia.

And while I’m trying to puzzle it out, the newsman on the radio, Gabriel Heatter (“There’s good news tonight!”) pronounces that very same word—as if the Universe has just given me a helpful clue. And there it is, in all its resonant phonic glory: Chek-o-slo-VA-ke-a.

I say it out loud, then louder. Triumphant. My first big word. In the newspaper. A landmark moment in my young reading life, and one I’ve never forgotten.

That little episode might have sparked my appetite for the news and my affection for small-town newspapers, like the Commercial-News and the Milan (MO) Standard, my mother’s hometown newspaper, which arrived in the mail once a week and was her lifeline to people and places she’d left behind and needed now, when life was such a post-war puzzle.

And who knows. If we scratch my subconscious long enough, we might learn that that moment (CzechosloVAkia!) led to the Enterprise (in the China Bayles mysteries), the Enterprise trilogy and the Darling Dispatch, in the10-book series about a small Southern town in the 1930s.

In fact, I was thinking about Darling and the Dispatch as I was rereading your comments on my previous post and thinking that some of our local newspapers now aren’t much different than newspapers in the 1930s. And then, reminded of that, I reread part of Chapter Four of The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover. I enjoyed this peek into the past, and thought you might, too. Times are much different now, in many ways. And yet, not.

Chapter Four: Charlie Dickens Gets a Tip

Charlie was working on the lead story for Friday’s Dispatch, about Boomer Bronson falling off the roof of Claude Peevy’s barn without killing himself, thankfully (although how thankful you were depended on what you thought about Boomer, Charlie reckoned). That Boomer was drunk as a skunk on Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning probably figured heavily in his survival, although that wasn’t the kind of detail that Charlie could include in the Dispatch.

Nor could he include the fact that this happened at midnight and that Claude was up there on the roof with Boomer, both of them naked as jaybirds. Or that when they were found by Mrs. Peevy, they were lying on their backs on a pile of hay, yodeling to the moon. Or what Mrs. Peevy might have said (or might have been imagined to say) when she came upon the scene.

Without these interesting details, Boomer’s tumble wasn’t much of a story—which was a sad thing, but nothing new. Once upon a time, Charlie had written feature stories for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun—undercover stories, investigative stories, in-depth, tell-it-all stories that told readers what they didn’t know. He had dug up the dirt on local politicians, blown the whistle on some notorious police corruption, and triggered a federal investigation that ended with a major-league crime boss going to jail. He had been read, applauded, rewarded, and even fired a time or two. He had been good. He had been damn good.

That was then. This was now. While Charlie had scored several big stories in the Dispatch—the killing of Rider LeDoux by the federal revenue agents at Mickey LeDoux’s still on Dead Cow Creek, the embezzlement scheme at the CCC camp, and the sensational murder of the “Eleven O’Clock Lady”—there had not been one single shred of news worth reporting in the past few months. (Boomer’s story, unfortunately, was more notable for the parts that couldn’t be printed in the paper.)

And the only news on the horizon was the barbershop quartet competition being held in town next week. There certainly wasn’t much excitement in that—just a bunch of guys singing close harmony on the stage at the Academy, with a big community pie supper afterward. Of course, if the Lucky Four Clovers were lucky enough to win, there might be a nice story in that. Local interest, anyway, with a focus on each of the four men. If they won. People said they were good, but Charlie wasn’t enough of a music fan to know whether the hometown team stood even half a chance.

With an ironic twist of his mouth, Charlie pulled Boomer’s story out of his typewriter and dropped it into the wooden tray on his desk, one of a stack of wooden letter trays labeled Page One, Two, Three, and Four. They were the same trays his father had used for the very same purpose back in the day when he edited and published the Dispatch. That was before Charles Dickens the elder succumbed to lung cancer and left the newspaper to his only son. Charles Dickens, the younger, himself a newsman, had figured to sell it quick, pocket the change, and go back to his job of crime reporter for the Plain Dealer.

But after the stock market took its fatal nosedive, the Plain Dealer (and every newspaper, everywhere) had stopped hiring. Worse, nobody wanted to buy a newspaper with a shrinking subscription list, declining advertising revenue, and a faltering job printing business—in a two-bit Southern town where a halfway decent story came along once in a blue moon. His father’s pride and joy was an albatross around Charlie’s neck.

Well, the Boomer story, inconsequential as it was, filled out the rest of the page. In a couple of hours, Ophelia would take Charlie’s stories and hers to the Linotype machine and begin setting up the four pages of what they called home print: the local news; the church and club news; births, deaths, marriages, and travel (mostly weekend visits to family on the other side of the county). There was also Liz Lacy’s “Garden Gate” column and whatever local ads Ophelia had been able to sell. That part of the job had to be finished in time to get the pages on the press late Thursday night.

On Friday, the home print pages would then be folded together with the four pages of ready print that Charlie bought from a syndicate called the Western Newspaper Union, as did the hundreds of other little newspapers around the country. The ready print pages contained the national and international news (mostly dismal, these days); the financial news (still disastrous and not likely to improve, whatever Roosevelt did); the women’s column (twaddle, in Charlie’s opinion); serialized fiction (trash); comics (popular); and sports (even more popular than the comics)—although this year’s World Series would make it to the national page, with good reason. The St. Louis Cardinals had just squeaked past the Detroit Tigers four games to three, with pitching brothers Dizzy and Daffy Dean each winning two games for the Gas House Gang. They were still dancing in St. Louis, where after the game, August Busch’s new team of Clydesdales had paraded around the infield, pulling a shiny red beer wagon loaded with free bottles of Bud. This was the first wet Series since the “Thirsty-first” of July, 1919, when the National Wartime Prohibition Act had thrown three strikes at the beer industry.

In fact, the ready print ought to be loaded with big news this week. Over in Germany, they were still talking about the extravagant Nuremburg rally the Nazis had staged for their man Hitler, whom they were now calling their Führer. Back home, investigators were trying to figure out the cause of the fire that destroyed the Morro Castle, leaving 137 passengers and crew dead. The latest cost-of-living figures were out. The average cost of a new house (if you could afford one) was $5,970, but if you were renting, you could figure on spending an average of $240 a year out of your average annual wage of $1,600. And there had been three more kidnappings in the past seven days. A plague of kidnappers had settled on the land, it seemed, snatching anybody whose family might be willing to pay a ransom.

With any luck, the bundles of ready print would arrive from Mobile on the Thursday afternoon Greyhound, although that depended on whether the bus (which was no spring chicken) made the trip without breaking down. If all went according to Hoyle, the Dispatch would be in the mail carrier’s flivver and on its way to subscribers on the RFD routes by early Saturday morning. Charlie himself would fill the newspaper racks around the square in time for to catch the Friday night moviegoers and Saturday shoppers.

Such was the life of a small-town newspaper editor in 1934. But things were about to change.

Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1980s, American daily newspapers experienced remarkable expansion, consolidation, and transformation. In the 1930s, most newspapers were locally owned and closely tied to their communities, with many cities supporting multiple competing dailies.

The end of the Great Depression, the war, and the postwar economic boom fueled rising literacy, advertising revenue, and suburban expansion—all of which helped daily papers become even more central to civic life. Circulation numbers rose steadily, and by the 1950s, newspapers were riding high, bolstered by strong classified ad sales, unionized newsrooms, and public trust in professional journalism. Sunday editions grew thicker, boasting multiple sections and expansive investigative features. The influence of the big-city dailies—like the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post—expanded nationally, even as small-town papers retained loyal readerships.

Yet this half-century of growth also saw increasing concentration of ownership and early signs of vulnerability. From the 1960s onward, family-run operations were gradually replaced by chain ownership, with corporations like Gannett and Knight-Ridder acquiring dozens of regional dailies. Afternoon papers declined as readers turned to evening television broadcasts for their news. Who owns the news began to be a serious issue for many communities.

By the 1980s, while total circulation remained strong, the cracks were visible: production costs were climbing, competition from broadcast media was intensifying, and younger audiences were harder to reach. Even so, daily newspapers remained dominant news platforms, central to American political discourse and public awareness. Trust in journalists remained high, and newspapers continued to hold the high ground in a media landscape they could still claim as their own.

But then things started to go south. From the mid-1980s through the early 21st century, the American daily newspaper industry underwent a steep decline marked by digital disruption, economic contraction, and a crisis of public trust. The arrival of the internet fractured the advertising base—first when Craigslist began killing classified revenue, then when Google and Facebook siphoned off display ads. Readers followed advertisers as they moved online, but few papers successfully managed to translate print dollars into digital cents. Newsrooms shrank dramatically under relentless rounds of layoffs and buyouts, and many small dailies either folded or were bought for parts by private equity firms. Even flagship institutions like The Washington Post and The New York Times struggled to adapt, caught between the legacy of print and the demands of digital.¹

And then there was politics. In the Clinton era, the president (beset by scandal and angry about the press’s coverage of his behavior with women) charged the media with “sensationalism,” while Newt Gingrich and the GOP sought to control the narrative by orchestrating media events, using strategic messaging, and attempting to “work the refs”—a phrase used by Republican Party chair Rich Bond to describe efforts to pressure journalists for more positive attention. The question, “Who owns the news?” was reframed as “Whose story is this?” and “Who gets to tell the story?”²

It was in this turbulent context that The Washington Post was bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2013, just as Martin Baron assumed the post of executive editor. Under Bezos’s ownership and Baron’s leadership, The Post underwent a dramatic digital reinvention—but the broader landscape remained precarious, shaped by shrinking revenue, growing polarization, and an information ecosystem increasingly dominated by social media. Now, the question “Who owns the news?” became more urgent: “Who owns the story? Is it true?”

And then, of course, Trump. But we’ll save that for next week, when we open discussion Baron’s book. I hope you’ve been reading and thinking and have your opinions sorted, ready for a conversation.

But even if you haven’t read the book yet, the news has been a part of your life, hasn’t it? If you’ve lived through even part of this arc—from the paperboy’s deliveries on your doorstep to paywalled apps on your phone—you’ve witnessed a media revolution. What’s gained? What’s lost? Do you still trust what you read? Do you miss what’s gone?

I’d love to hear how your news habits have changed—or stayed the same. Drop a comment or send a note. Our conversation here, like the news, is always happening.

A Note on Collaboration
Some of the language and historical scaffolding in this piece emerged from a dialogue with Silas, my AI counterpart in long-form nonfiction. Silas doesn’t generate the voice—I do—but he’s there when I need a second brain to keep the signal clear and the noise out. If that sounds strange, you’re not alone. I wrote about this experimental collaboration over here.

1. Ghosting the News, by Margaret Sullivan, puts a finger on the problem. As local dailies and weeklies disappear, there’s more polarization, less political engagement, and more low-information citizens who are less capable of making good decisions about governance—at all levels.

2. Steve Kornacki’s book, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism will give you an excellent picture of the way things were when things started getting out of hand.