Disgusted by publishers and editors who refused to cover important stories for fear of offending advertisers, the press baron E. W. Scripps rejected conventional wisdom and set out to prove that an ad-free newspaper could be profitable entirely on circulation. Duane C. S. Stoltzfus s Freedom from Advertising details the history of Scripps s innovative 1911 experiment, which began in Chicago amid great secrecy. The tabloid-sized newspaper was called the Day Book, and at a penny a copy, it aimed for a working-class market, crusading for higher wages, more unions, safer factories, lower...

In an age before radio and television, E. W. Scripps's ownership of twenty-one newspapers, a major news wire service, and a prominent news syndication service represented the first truly national media organization in the United States. In "The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914-18, " Dale Zacher details the scope, organization, and character of the mighty Scripps empire during World War I to reveal how the pressures of the market, government censorship, propaganda, and progressivism...

Inspired by Madison s observation, Mark Lloyd has crafted a complex and powerful assessment of the relationship between communications and democracy in the United States. In Prologue to a Farce, he argues that citizens political capabilities depend on broad public access to media technologies, but that the U.S. communications environment has become unfairly dominated by corporate interests.

Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Lloyd demonstrates that despite the persistent hope that a new technology (from the telegraph to the Internet) will rise to serve the needs of the...