At the turn of the twentieth century, ambitious publishers like Joseph
Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert McCormick produced the
most spectacular newspapers Americans had ever read. Alongside current
events and classified ads, publishers began running comic strips, sports
sections, women's pages, and Sunday magazines. Newspapers' lavish
illustrations, colorful dialogue, and sensational stories seemed to
reproduce city life on the page.
Yet as Julia Guarneri reveals, newspapers did not simply report on
cities; they also helped to build them. Metropolitan sections and civic
campaigns crafted cohesive identities for sprawling metropolises. Real
estate sections boosted the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while
maintaining cities' roles as economic and information hubs. Advice
columns and advertisements helped assimilate migrants and immigrants to
a class-conscious, consumerist, and cosmopolitan urban culture.
Newsprint Metropolis offers a tour of American newspapers in their
most creative and vital decades. It traces newspapers' evolution into
highly commercial, mass-produced media, and assesses what was gained and
lost as national syndicates began providing more of Americans' news.
Case studies of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee
illuminate the intertwined histories of newspapers and the cities they
served. In an era when the American press is under attack, Newsprint
Metropolis reminds us how papers once hosted public conversations and
nurtured collective identities in cities across America.
