1883: The birth of mass media
Until the 1880s, only the upper classes read magazines. They were small soft cover books, carrying stories that appealed to a classically-educated, elite readership that identified with Europe. The poorfolk read newspapers and weekly tabloids. Magazines were expensive, partly because printing technology limited even the most popular to a run of 100,000 copies; it simply took too long to push any more paper through a press.
Plus, until congress created second-class mail in 1879, the American Post Office only carried magazines for short distances, at high cost.
The R. Hoe and Co. rotary printing press fed three rolls of paper through the press at once, and made possible printing runs of as many copies as publishers wanted. At the same time, some publishers were trying to appeal to the new publicly-educated, industrial-urban lower-middle-class by decreasing their prices.
In 1883, the Scotland-born publisher S.S. McClure dropped the price of his general-interest McClure's magazine to only 15 cents. It was phenomenally successful. His rival publisher, Frank Munsey, lowered the price of Munsey's Magazine from 25c to 10c. Suddenly every major magazine cut its prices and upped its circulation. (With paper publications, the more copies printed, the cheaper each one cost to produce.) The average citizen had always been interested in literature and comment, but it had been too expensive before. The powerful and fashionable lost their control of the arts to public taste. Magazines ceased to be soapboxes, and became mass media instead.
S.S. McClure and Frank Munsey were the Rupert Murdoch (and, I suppose, Mort Zuckerman) of their day, but in a more primal, less sophisticated, fashion. Both were U.S.-based entrepreneurs who had grown up poor but McClure was an idealist with a seemingly heartfelt desire to reach many people. Munsey never espoused any goal except to make big money in the magazine trade (he succeeded). McClure's provided the earliest muckraking stories (Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, for instance) and help develop documentary photography as an editorial device. Munsey's specialized in sentiment and western fiction, and was the first magazine to print female nudes (captioned as 'art') in America. Horatio Alger published his "rags-to-riches" stories in Munsey's.
Within five years after its birth, Munsey's lowest-common-denominator approach had brought it the largest circulation of any magazine in the world. Most of it still looked like a book. There were no headlines or continued stories, and pictures were confined to within columns. In the 1800s reading habits were different. You started at the very first page and read straight through, column by column, until the end. People didn't flick through or skim, and magazine layouts didn't encourage them to.
But ever increasing use of illustration and photography began to change these habits.
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