Today, journalism's just a business. News is just a product. Now I'm hardly the first guy to lament the parlous state of the present. That's because journalism has always been a business. When readers of the New York Herald in the 1830s complained that the ads for a snake-oil salesman named Dr. Brandreth were vulgar and distracting, Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett responded tartly.
Business is business-money is money.
We permit no blockhead to interfere with our business. One hundred years after Bennett, William Randolph Hearst ruled his vast empire from a cliff side in California with a daily spate of cables, telegrams, and letters to the minions scattered across the country. The correspondence survives in Hearst's papers at the University of California-hundreds of communications nearly every day. And for each communication dealing with news or newsroom issues, there are a dozen dealing with advertising, circulation, and profit. But that's what it is, something for the merchant to stock on the shelves in order to lure the customer through the door.