Journalism's Next Revolution

THE DEBUT OF APPLE'S IPAD on the day before Easter was a triumph of public relations, yielding the company a multimillion-dollar bonanza of free publicity. Of course, a splashy start is one thing, long-term commercial success quite another. The Edsel also got a lot of free publicity when it made its debut.

After three million units sold, it is clear the iPad is no Edsel. The latter was just a Ford with an unappealing design. The iPad is a new beast in the electronic zoo. What makes it new is not its design or its snazzy, intuitive graphics. Instead what's new is the fact that it has carried the Kindle e-book concept a giant leap forward. This shows the way to a genuinely electronic form of print journalism, perhaps even the merger of print and electronic journalism in the not-too-distant future.

The iPad signals the long-awaited end of the era of cutting down trees, turning them into paper, printing words on it, distributing it across a vast country and then recycling it or throwing it into landfills the next day.

Thus the iPad is much more like the Model-T than the Edsel. It is going to change both an industry and a whole way of life. The last time journalism underwent such a fundamental shift, the political world changed as well. It might again.

NEWSPAPERS HAVE BEEN around since the 17th century. But early newspapers weren't like modern ones. Instead, most were devoted to one subject, such as shipping news. Others were intended to further a political cause or party and were little more than editorial pages wrapped in tendentious news reports and local advertising.

Early newspapers were very expensive, usually six cents a copy when that sum would have bought a meal. There were no newsstands, either. Most people read newspapers at clubs and taverns. What made them so expensive was that the flatbed presses in use in 1800 were hardly more advanced than what Gutenberg had used 350 years earlier, and they could produce no more than 125 impressions an hour.

Early in the 19th century, journalism went through two fundamental shifts, one technological and the other commercial.

The technological shift was the steam-powered press, introduced in England in 1814. It could make 1,100 impressions an hour, and that soon doubled with the introduction of a press capable of printing on two sides simultaneously. Printing speed received another huge boost in 1843, when the rotary press was invented in the United States, capable of printing tens of thousands of pages an hour.

With the new press speed, newspapers could be sold profitably much more cheaply, greatly increasing demand. Soon they were being hawked on every street corner. In 1833, Benjamin Day's New York Sun sold bundles of a hundred copies to stores and newsboys for 67 cents. The copies were resold for a penny each. By 1835 the Sun was selling 15,000 copies a day, almost four times the number that any New York newspaper had sold two years earlier.

In that year, James Gordon Bennett, a Scottish immigrant to New York, produced the first issue of the New York Herald, based on a new journalistic model. The Herald was nonpartisan, aimed at the broadest possible audience, and instead of telling the readers what the editor thought good for them to know, Bennett printed what he thought they would want to read.

He printed the first stock reports in a general-interest newspaper, the first weather report, the first sports news, the first illustration. He covered grisly crimes—once thought beneath a serious paper's dignity—in full detail, and covered as well the doings of New York's social and business elite, much to the elite's displeasure.

He introduced the first foreign correspondents, and the first Washington correspondents. He was even the first to use the word "leak" in the journalistic sense. By the Civil War, the Herald was selling 400,000 copies a day, more than all the newspapers in the world had sold in the year 1800.

IN 1865, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW reported that "the daily newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam engine is not more essential to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind."

It did far more than that. Mass-circulation newspapers made popular opinion a far more potent political force. Using the new telegraph, William Howard Russell's reports to the Times of London from the Crimean War brought down the government of Lord Aberdeen when they revealed the utter incompetence of the British military. In 1871, The New York Times destroyed the Tweed Ring in New York State with its revelations of corruption.

These were the first examples in history of governments falling for reasons other than electoral or military defeat, or a coup d'état

Apple's iPad is the technological breakthrough needed for 21st century journalism to evolve as rapidly as 19th century journalism did 200 years earlier. All we need now is a latter-day James Gordon Bennett to conceive the new business model. 

JOHN STEELE GORDON is an author of business books, most recently
An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.