As circulation increased, major newspapers could legitimately command higher and higher advertising rates, thus ensuring a reasonable level of profitability for the paper's owners and employees. A steady stream of attention-grabbing headlines therefore became critical to the successful management of the industry. In this sense, the city's major dailies weren't as much selling sensationalized tales about murderers on trial for their lives as much as they were selling cultural information that readers could use to formulate their conception of urban life and what it meant to them as individuals. To say as much challenges the idealized notion that many Americans, both inside and outside the journalism trade, have about the nature of the news media in our society. While this may well be laudable goal that deserves indefatigable pursuit, it masks the inevitable inability of reporters, photographers, and editors to affect the shape and interpretation of events.
Journalists are never mere conduits of information.
Rather, they consciously and subconsciously mould the events they witness in such a manner as to maximize their understandability and, yes, their marketability to a paper-buying public. With some news events, doing both was not always possible. Less adaptable stories were relegated to the inside pages of the paper. But the Leopold and Loeb case, for reasons I shall now attempt to explain, proved especially adaptable to the urban culture and social life of 1920s Chicago and thus dominated the front pages of the city's newspapers like few other stories were able to do. During the 1920s, a high-point in the urban newspaper industry, there were nearly a dozen dailies in wide circulation in the city of Chicago.