practices prevailing in the business world. As a medium of information and publicity, it is measured by the standards of the community in which it circulates. It is a product of its environment, and at the same time it is a force in creating that environment.
Conditions in newspaper making to-day are the outgrowth of the journalism of preceding generations. The changes that have produced these conditions are to a considerable extent the results of social, political, and economic forces. A brief survey of the development of newspaper editing and publishing, with special reference to present problems in journalism, will help to a better understanding of the function of the newspaper of to-day.
Growth of the Business Element. In the last seventy-five years in this country, the editing and the managing of newspapers have undergone a significant development. From being a comparatively simple undertaking, newspaper publishing has become a big, complex, highly organized enterprise. In 1835 it was possible for one man, James Gordon Bennett, Sr., to start the New York Herald with a cash capital of $500, and to perform the greater part of the work connected with its publication, for the owner-editor's duties ranged from editorial writing to keeping books, from gathering police news to making out bills, and from commenting on conditions in Wall Street to writing advertisements. The first instance of ownership of a newspaper by an incorporated stock company came ten years later when Horace Greeley and Thomas M'Elrath , editor and business manager respectively of the New York Tribune, decided to share their personal ownership of that paper with five assistant editors and with the five employees of the business and mechanical departments who had been connected with the Tribune
