The Great Newspaper Crackup …

Jack Schafer: Gravediggers earned overtime during the second decade of the last century as they shoveled earth over such expired newspapers as the Boston Journal, the Cleveland Leader, the New York Press, and the Boston Traveler. They were kept busy in Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Portland, Ore., too, where newspapers either went under or consolidated with stronger competitors.

In his much remarked-on obituary for the dead dailies in the January 1918 Atlantic Monthly, Oswald Garrison Villard described the passing of these papers in language that could have been lifted from the recent eulogies for the shuttered Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, called the Boston Journal's demise a "tragedy of journalism"—one that could potentially slay democracy, too, because multiple news sources were required to present "both sides of every issue" to the citizenry. He was appalled that in a number of big cities—including Cleveland, the nation's sixth-largest—only one morning paper had survived. (We should be so lucky today.)