Newspapers have been entwined with American politics, culture and technology.

Evolving from publications devoted to political advocacy and commerce to those emphasizing news and dependent on advertising, newspapers began reaching a mass audience as the United States became an industrial and urban nation in the mid to late nineteenth century. These changes coincided with the invention of the telegraph in 1848 and the rise in literacy allowing for news to be disseminated rapidly and consumed by greater numbers of people, particularly a growing middle class.

By the late nineteenth century, newspapers generally took the form they have today.

The New York Times, owned by Adolph Ochs, contrasted sharply with the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

While the Times fashioned itself as the paper of historical record, focusing on world and national events, the World and the Journal sought to entertain their audiences, with news about crimes, scandals, high society and the city in which their readers lived. Many of these distinctions still hold true, with the New York Daily News and the New York Post, along with other urban tabloids, carrying on the tradition of the now-defunct World and Journal.

Other fixtures of today’s newspapers developed in the 1920s. After the rise of public relations and propaganda, particularly during the First World War, journalists became skeptical of the reality presented to them by the government and other organizations. In response, newspapers became more interpretive, explaining the significance of events and trends to their readers. This coincided with the rise of specialized reporting, in which journalists became knowledgeable in the subject or government agency they were covering, decreasing their dependence on government officials. This period was also marked by the rise of syndicated political columnists, most notably Walter Lippmann, who brought even more subjectivity to newspapers.

These changes paralleled the growth in the federal government, which increased in size and function during the New Deal—a series of federal government programs designed to combat the Depression—in the 1930s. This complexity further encouraged the development of interpretive journalism as reporters sought to simplify the increasingly complex workings of government for their readers.

After the Second World War, two developments significantly altered the role of newspapers. The first was the United States’ transformation into a world power and the onset of the Cold War. Subject to news management and deception by government officials in the 1950s, the trust between journalists and political leaders began to unravel by the 1960s as the Vietnam War intensified. This distrust reached new heights in the early 1970s. In 1972 the New York Times and the Washington Post published the “Pentagon Papers”—a secret bureaucratic history of the Vietnam War—over the objections of President Richard Nixon. In addition, newspapers, particularly the Washington Post, brought to light the Nixon administration’s Water-gate crimes. These events highlighted newspapers’ shift to investigative journalism.

The other major development that altered newspapers’ future was television, which reached most American homes by the late 1950s. In addition to providing entertainment to millions of Americans, television served as an alternative news source. The networks’ evening news programs contributed to a sharp decline in the number of afternoon publications, leaving many cities with only a morning daily newspaper by the 1990s.

However, alternative weekly newspapers, such as the Boston Phoenix, African American newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, and immigrant newspapers continue to offer city dwellers other sources of print news. More significantly television could provide news instantaneously and with pictures, meaning information in newspapers was often “old.” The public came to trust television journalists more than their newspaper counterparts, a trend that held into the late 1990s.

In response to television’s prominence, newspapers began emphasizing features as well as local—as opposed to national and international—news. Many newspapers, including the New York Times, began developing special sections devoted to topics such as home improvement and science, content similar to that of Time and Newsweek magazines. In addition, because it was more difficult for newspapers to break news on a regular basis, their stories became more analytical, explaining the significance of news events rather than simply reporting them.

The newspaper industry responded in other ways. In 1980 the Gannett Company launched a national newspaper, USA Today, which was intended to appeal to a news audience largely reliant on television. With shorter stories, plentiful graphics and color pages, USA Today shared many characteristics with television news. Even its curbside vending machines resembled television sets. In 1997 it trailed only the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper devoted to business news, in US daily circulation.

In the 1990s other changes affected American newspapers. Newspaper chains, such as Gannett and Knight Ridder, began owning a higher proportion of newspapers throughout the country By 1998 newspaper chains owned 80 percent of US daily newspapers, a 17 percent increase from 1986, marking a dramatic concentration of newspaper ownership.

Yet another change, the rise of the Internet, posed both a threat to and an opportunity for newspapers. By 1998, 20 percent of Americans got their news from the Internet at least once a week, though not necessarily from newspapers’ World Wide Web-sites, potentially reducing newspapers’ overall readership. However, the Internet gave newspapers the opportunity previously afforded only television and radio: to publish breaking news immediately.

Newspapers have been represented in a variety of films throughout the twentieth century. Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles, was a thinly veiled movie on the life of William Randolph Hearst. The investigative work of the Washington Post, which helped uncover the Watergate scandal, was documented in the movie All the President’s Men (1976). The Paper, released in 1994, chronicled one day at a fictional New York City tabloid, focusing on the ethical aspects of news gathering.