Public domain photo by Gary Todd
I love this passage from David Sachsman and Warren Sloat’s “The Press and the Suburbs: The Daily Newspapers of New Jersey” (1985). They’re writing about The Record of Bergen County, but it could have pertained to any number of papers:
It is the happiest of newspaper cycles. The advertisers supply the money, lots of it (49 pages of ads a day). The newspaper spends the money freely to produce a solid product, employing 198 full-time news staffers and 81 part-timers to fill a 24-page news hole. The high-income audience centered in towns like Ho-Ho-Kus, Wyckoff, Franklin Lakes, and Rivervale buys the newspaper and goes shopping, pleasing the advertisers, who buy more ads.