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Stoltzfus, Duane C.S. Freedom from Advertising: E. W. Scripps's Chicago Experiment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 187 pp. $40.
The Day Book was a gritty little newspaper in Chicago that debated in 1910. Newspaper owner E.W. Scripps hoped to change newspaper history by publishing a newspaper without advertising. If the paper could have reached 30,000 subscribers, it would have turned a profit. If The Day Book experiment had worked, Scripps would have freed the press from the control of the corporations which advertised in other newspapers.
The experiment failed after six years, concludes historian Duane C.S. Stoltzfus, because World War I led to higher newsprint cost, Scripps lost interest, and Chicago was a market with too much newspaper competition for an ad-free newspaper to survive. As Stoltzfus points out, the writing in The Day Book rarely achieved even a level of reporting competence. If not...