It is easier to take the measure of the newspaper as a medium for conveying information

if we recognize that it has not been around forever, and that it continues to evolve. Great grandpa would hardly recognize this morning's Chronicle. Anyone who deplores the loss of newspaper readers to

television ought to consider that newspapers were themselves deplored at one time for a similar reason. In 1910, sociologist Max Weber asked:

Not all newspaper readers and certainly not all television viewers have deep concern about reports of events significant to our lives, those reports sometimes identified as "real news." The newspaper shares with television an audience segment not much given to "real news." These newspaper readers barely glance at the front page lead headline before turning their attention to entertainment, their exclusive interest, which is happily met by pages full of comic strips, horoscopes, puzzles, Dear Abby, and, if one places professional and intercollegiate sports properly in the category of entertainment, the scores. Add the television logs, the movie listings, the grocery coupons,

and the insert section with the sales at the mall. For this readership, the newspaper is a bargain, delivered at the doorstep. As for the "real news" itself, serious matters in most local newspapers are placed alongside generous helpings of gossip, scandal, and police blotter extract. Local newspapers would not survive on a total diet of serious news. The public, wanting entertainment, drove the content then, as now.

By the late nineteenth century, spots of color appeared now and again amid the black-and-white columns of newsprint.

That staple of the modern newspaper, the Sunday funnies, was added when improvements

in color printing led William Randolph Hearst to bring out a comic strip supplement in 1896. Color comics began when it was decided to add yellow ink regularly to an outlandish skirt worn by a

little boy in one strip, Hogan's Alley. The immediate popularity of this addition led to the character becoming known as The Yellow Kid. More than that, the kind of sensational news featured in newspapers owned by Hearst and Pulitzer was pinned with the appellation, yellow journalism. The unpleasant, insulting phrase stuck long after the comic strip stopped running. As for color comics themselves, in time all the Sunday comics were printed in a variety of bold colors. Comic books followed on the magazine racks. 

Pulitzer's New York World at two cents, built a daily circulation of 1.5 million, the nation's first mass circulation newspaper. 

Unlike most newspapers of its day, the World was politically and socially liberal. It was filled with spicy news reports (headlines like "Little Lotta's Lovers" and "Baptized in Blood"4), sports coverage, and circulation-raising stunts such as sending reporter "Nellie Bly" (her real name was Elizabeth Cochrane) into an insane asylum as a patient to expose its awful conditions, and in 1889 sending her around the world by ship, train, horse, and sampan to beat fictional Phineas Fogg's trip Around the World in Eighty Days. Nearly a million readers entered a contest to guess how long it

would take her. Nellie Bly did it in 72 days.

The sensational tabloid (a word derived from a small, easy to swallow dose of medicine) appeared in London in the early years of the twentieth century, its news for the common man packaged in a format that could be read comfortably on a streetcar.

Tabloids, like the New York Daily News, took advantage of the city's switch from horse-drawn buses to electrified trolleys and subways. Strap-hangers were able to read a newspaper held in one hand. To accommodate them on the jouncing ride, publishers shrank broadsheets to tabloid size, made headlines and body type larger, and added more pictures. News stories, too, were more entertaining and, in some cases, more sensational. Tabloid defined both the size and the content of newspapers. It still does.