"Let Munsey Kill It!": The Birth of the Newspaper Chain

A Businessman's Vision.

In 1890 New York had fifteen English-language daily newspapers. By 1932 it had half that number. The twentieth-century trend toward newspaper consolidation began in earnest during the century's first decade. Frank A. Munsey did as much as any other person to bring this about. His own rags-to-riches tale began when he started a children's magazine, the Golden Argosy, and proceeded to build a publishing empire with Munsey's, an illustrated general-interest weekly that had a circulation of 650,000 in 1900. A shrewd businessman with no sentimentality toward the traditions of newspaper publishing, Munsey saw chaos and disorder in an industry that he believed had 60 percent too many products. He dreamed of a chain of five hundred newspapers. In addition to creating vast economies of scale, this enterprise would employ the greatest minds in every field, dispensing wisdom from a central facility, with...

[The entire page is 723 words long]

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