Story Pitches & Advertising Pitches: Selling Newspapers

Early in the fifth season of the television show The Wire, the city editor of The Baltimore Sun strides through the newsroom, setting junior editors and cub reporters to trembling as he passes them. “You know what a healthy newsroom is?” he asks before answering himself. “It’s a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time!”

I am what my editors and curators, my friends and family, the National Press Photographers Association, and the Southern District Court of New York all refer to, usually with a sneer, as “a newspaperman.” 

Some might find this title embarrassing—it feels a bit like admitting, in our low late era, to having been a buggy-whip manufacturer, a lamplighter, or a switchboard operator: one of those jobs that once was and (probably) shall never be again. But it was always—and still is—a sturdy, if rumpled profession. In the course of my career—I began at the fledgling New York Sun and have since worked at one point or another for most every paper in the city—the business of the news has moved from blue-collar work to white collar to no collar, and almost all of its practitioners have moved from headlines to breadlines. 

The American newspaper business was built on advertising. In many cities, there would be multiple newspapers—at one point there were more than 50 in New York—all reporting on the same city, the same stories. If somebody was murdered, the same dozen reporters and photographers would show up to cover it; if the mayor was on the take, all the same publications would rush to be the very first to tell the world about it, with every one of their competitors lagging only minutes behind. 

And so newspapers turned, pretty much everywhere, to branding. Here in New York, the same story might be reported by The New York Times (the “Old Gray Lady” as it is popularly known), which prides itself on seriousness, impartiality, and a certain adult respectability, or the New York Post, which offers celebrity news on its sixth page and attention-grabbing headlines on its first. After a man was decapitated at a strip club in April 1983, the Post screamed from every newsstand: “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.” When a prominent city congressman got caught sending sexually suggestive photographs of himself to various women, daily headline writers always remembered his name was Anthony Weiner.

The Village Voice—my favorite alma mater—takes pride in its deep, investigative journalism into some of the city’s most overlooked challenges while offering sex advice and advertisements for escorts on its back pages. The Daily News, billing itself as New York’s “picture newspaper,” has a massive team of photographers ready to rush to every daily occurrence, and pays them top dollar for recording the city’s most unbecoming happenings.

This was reflected in their criers—an old tradition from the industrial era on, made most famous by the barking children and young men on street corners hawking the news. Reporters were paid poorly—the difference between a newsman and a pizza was that a pizza could actually feed a family of four—but sales could bring in real money. 

The importance of sales showed in the posters, too. There was a time when news was an excursion, not an incursion—it didn’t come to people all day, every day as they doomscrolled social media; it came through one’s decision to pay a few shekels to find out what was going on in the world. Everybody did it—everybody paid, everybody learned—but it meant that all area newspaper sales were zero-sum. As a result, newspapers issued promotional posters that were pasted on newsstands and gazebos and on walls all over the city, a boon to newsies selling papers on the streets. These posters, however ephemeral, weren’t selling news—but vibes.

The Times, madam, might get you a job. The Voice, sir, might get you a boyfriend. The Post might get you excited. And the Daily News might get you in trouble.

Sensationalism in the sale of news was not unique to the United States, of course, and the reality of selling the news goes back a long way. There are plenty of stories about forum newsreaders talking about what this Roman general or that one did to the ever-suffering Carthaginians. In Germany, too, modern newspapers have battled for their share of the market between communists and fascists, laborers and businessmen, the intelligentsia (as in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung poster above) and the everyman.

In the United Kingdom, where very few newspapers claim to be impartial (and are not required to be), promotional advertising sometimes reflects current politics—but, more often, buxom beauties punctuate the pages of these tabloids, offering not a point of entry into the real world but, perhaps, an escape from it.

And then, of course, there is yet another reality: in some markets, news wasn’t a choice but an obligation. The news can, as we all know, become the mouthpiece of a regime, and in some cases that branding in the market—the kind that headlines provide, the kind that posters provide—is an illusion.

For example, Poster House’s recent exhibition The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy featured plenty of news articles and publications produced in Italy under Mussolini’s regime—but all of them reported Mussolini’s news the way Mussolini wanted it. The consumer’s choice was only really one of tone and typeface. The same could, of course, be said of Nazi Germany, where there was only one opinion steering the news, and it came from only one man.

While in Soviet Russia there were many news publications, they were all published by the same company. This is demonstrated in the poster for Pravda (Truth) below, which tries to put a positive spin on an uncomfortable reality: no matter which paper your newsie sells you, it’s all the same.

“All I know is what I read in the papers,” quipped Will Rogers, the American entertainer, actor, and writer, at the beginning of his stage monologues of the 1930s, “and that’s the alibi for my ignorance.” He didn’t mean it, of course—as one of the great wits of his generation, Rogers was well-read and couldn’t hide it. But the papers have always provided a fine punching bag for pundits, with all the news that’s fit to print—and plenty to wonder about among what isn’t. Today, newspapers have been outpaced by television news—and social media, and shock and awe—but every medium is still marketed in the same way. You tell the news, but you sell the vibes. 

After all, as the famed journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken of The Baltimore Sun wrote in 1920, long before the fictional editor on The Wire ever strode its newsroom: “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant. And the crazy crazier.”

B.A. Van Sise FRGS is a photographic artist, author, and curator, primarily focused on the intersection between language and the visual form. Previously a journalist for The Village Voice and Newsday, he is also the author of Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust, and On the National Language: the Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi and Crisosto Apache. His work has been featured in major solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Woody Guthrie Center, and the Skirball Cultural Center.