From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890-1920

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

Seldom has a day passed during this decade that has not seen Canadians
debating the increasing homogenization and conglomerization of their
daily press. The ever-extending journalistic empires of Conrad Black,
Ken Thomson, and Pierre Peladeau may win plaudits from business
analysts, but defenders of a varied and outspoken press sound the
tocsin. The chief virtue of From Politics to Profit lies in its
anchoring of this debate in those decades of heated industrialization
and urbanization at the turn of the century. As Canadians crowded into
the cities, received better education, and found themselves possessed of
more discretionary income, their expectations of the press changed. They
had grown up in a 19th-century world in which newspapers were
“competitive and diverse.” The press was the servant of local
impulses: political, commercial, and religious. Sotiron argues that a
“public myth” supported this role, that the press “educated” the
public even if its role as the “fourth estate” dictated that the
business of making money from publishing was of secondary importance. In
this vein, Sotiron would have served his readers better if he had
provided a background chapter on the nature of the 19th-century Canadian
newspaper. His depiction of its role as “educative” will trouble
many historians of early Canadian society, who see in its newspapers the
voice of religious, ethnic, and regional vituperation.

The prosperity, urbanization, and literacy of the Laurier boom
broadened the potential appeal of newspapers; city audiences wanted
information, not partisanship. The market segmented. Women wanted
women’s news. Sports fans wanted their scores. Retailers wanted space
to hawk their wares. Hard-edged partisanship had little place in city
newspapers: it might drive away readers—and besides, the rewards of
journalistic loyalty to politicians through patronage and government
contracts were paling in comparison with the rewards of mass circulation
and advertising. The daily newspaper thus became a “big business” in
which profit squeezed out partisanship and even diversity of opinion.
Sotiron profiles the entrepreneurs who capitalized on these
possibilities. Hugh Graham of The Montreal Star was, perhaps, their
archetype. Toronto publishers like John Ross Robinson soon followed.
Sotiron argues that Canada’s first newspaper “chain” began in
1897, when William Southam of the Hamilton Spectator sent his two sons
to purchase the Ottawa Citizen. Canada’s nascent press barons quickly
learned to manage their enterprises, plotting their performance like a
factory production line. They were soon trying to influence the
marketplace through cartels that secretly set prices and advertising
rates. And if politicians retreated from the editorial room,
special-interest groups like railways and farmers discovered that having
friends in inky places could help legitimize their place in the public
forum.

This is an exciting and relevant topic, and while Sotiron’s rather
prosaic writing at times misses the full drama of the transition, From
Politics to Profit travels to the heart of the dilemma of balancing
freedom of expression against the profit motive in a capitalist society.