How Newspapers Once Survived Near Death

These are, as you may have heard, tough times for newspapers. But they are not the first tough times. In just four years during the mid-1960s, for instance, New York City lost the papers that had come to carry the nameplates of William Randolph Hearst’s American, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Hearst’s Journal, the Mirror, the Sun, the Telegram, Horace Greeley’s Tribune, and Joseph Pulitzer’s World.

The efforts to save these dying institutions, especially the Herald Tribune–then the New York Times’s leading competitor–remain a staple of newspaper nostalgia, and have literally filled books. But what relevance do they have for our own time? No Internet threatened then, no cable television. The ’60s were a time of economic growth.

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