Tom Leonard is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and the university librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. The following are his remarks delivered at the Federal Trade Commission’s “News Media Workshop” held on December 1 and 2, 2009:

Discussing journalism, a few years after he launched a successful newspaper in New York in the 1840s, Horace Greeley wrote, "I have been fortunate here, as the world says. . . (but) I need money badly, and I am an assemblage of pains . . . You do not realize how little the mere talent of writing well has to do with success . . . there are a thousand in this city who can write very good prose . . . while there are not fifty who can earn their bread by it."

This should be enough for all of us to put away our notions of a Golden Age for reporters and editors, when markets were open, quality journalism thrived, and the public lined up with advertisers, handing money over with a smile.

I have written two books on the hardscrabble times of the press in the 19th century. And while promising not to mention Horace Greeley again, I want to take you into this world in order to show how deeply compromised the press was in trying to pay its bills.

1) Copyright Protection was little help to newspapers and magazines, indeed they benefited by its absence.

American publications pirated British material until the 1890s, helping Yankee start-ups.

My convention, the local papers that were the heart and soul of 19th century newspapers reprinted freely from one another though a system of exchanges.
Our local press began as aggregators.

2) Pay Wall, What pay wall?

One existed, and free publications were extremely rare. Readers, however, leapt over the pay wall every chance they got. Pick up any American paper of the 19c, especially in small communities and you will see editors begging for subscribers to pay up their subscriptions.

Would you know the cause, dear readers,
Why the paper stops to-day?
‘tis because so many of you
Owe The Printer and Won’t Pay (Iowa, 1872)

Relentless price cuts were the common business strategy of the press in the end, only then did they get a reading public that would sustain them.

3) Government subsidies and special treatment was the order of the day.

1st class mail rate subsidized the press and the exchange of newspapers in the mail to editors (so that content could be shared) was free.

Exemption for child labor laws were granted and jolly newsboys were the consoling myth.

Newspapers got in on the ground floor of the most dynamic emerging media with their broadcasting licenses ca. 1920.

As you and my fellow panelists know, newspapers and magazines emerged as thriving enterprises from the 19th century and publishing fortunes from Journalism were many. The republic entered a period of reform and the extension of rights to citizens. So what some call the Whig view of history may be reasonable here.

The fit of local and national advertising with the press made this possible, along with a new urban and immigrant nation that found the newspaper, in particular, their ticket to a better life.

But this mostly happy outcome for the press was NOT because

1. the press was protected by strict limits over intellectual property
2. payment schemes for individual readers were sound and sustainable
3. the government stayed out of the picture and simply allowed enterprise to thrive.