Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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By the late nineteenth century, newspapers generally took the form they have today.

The

New York Times,

owned by Adolph Ochs, contrasted sharply with the

ew Yor

World,

owned by Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst’s

New York Journal

While the

Times

fashioned itself as the paper of historical record, focusing on world and

national events, the

World

and the

Journal

sought to entertain their audiences, with news

about crimes, scandals, high society and the city in which their readers lived. Many o

these distinctions still hold true, with the

New York Daily News

and the

New York

Post,

along with other urban

tabloids,

carrying on the tradition of the now-defunct

World

and

ourna

Other fixtures of today’s newspapers developed in the 1920s. After the rise of

public

relations

and propaganda, particularly during the First World War, journalists became

skeptical of the reality presented to them by the government and other organizations. In

response, newspapers became more interpretive, explaining the significance of events and

trends to their readers. This coincided with the rise of specialized reporting, in which

ournalists became knowledgeable in the subject or government agency they were

covering, decreasing their dependence on government officials. This period was also

marked by the rise of syndicated political

columnists,

most notably Walter Lippmann,

who brought even more subjectivity to newspapers.

These changes paralleled the growth in the federal government, which increased in size

and function during the New Deal—a series of federal government programs designed to

combat the Depression—in the 1930s. This complexity further encouraged the

development of interpretive journalism as reporters sought to simplify the increasingly

complex workings of government for their readers.

After the Second World War, two developments significantly altered the role o

newspapers. The first was the United States’ transformation into a world power and the

onset of the

Cold War

. Subject to news management and deception by government

officials in the 1950s, the trust between journalists and political leaders began to unravel

by the 1960s as the

Vietnam War

intensified. This distrust reached new heights in the

early 1970s. In 1972 the

New York Times

and the

Washington Post

published the

“Pentagon Papers”

—a secret bureaucratic history of the Vietnam War—over the

objections of President Richard

Nixon

. In addition, newspapers, particularly the

Washington Post,

brought to light the Nixon administration’s

Water-gate

crimes. These

events highlighted newspapers’ shift to investigative journalism.

The other major development that altered newspapers’ future was

television,

which

reached most American homes by the late 1950s. In addition to providing entertainment

to millions of Americans, television served as an alternative news source. The

networks’

evening news programs contributed to a sharp decline in the number of afternoon

ublications, leaving many cities with only a morning daily newspaper by the 1990s.

However, alternative weekly newspapers, such as the

Boston Phoenix,

African

American

newspapers, such as the

Chicago Defender,

and immigrant newspapers

continue to offer city dwellers other sources of print news. More significantly television

could provide news instantaneously and with pictures, meaning information in

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newspapers was often “old.” The public came to trust television journalists more than

their newspaper counterparts, a trend that held into the late 1990s.

In response to television’s prominence, newspapers began emphasizing features as well

as local—as opposed to national and international—news. Many newspapers, including

the

New York Times,

began developing special sections devoted to topics such as

home

improvement and science, content similar to that of

Time

and

Newsweek

magazines

. In

addition, because it was more difficult for newspapers to break news on a regular basis,

their stories became more analytical, explaining the significance of news events rather

than simply reporting them.

The newspaper industry responded in other ways. In 1980 the Gannett Company

launched a national newspaper,

USA Today,

which was intended to appeal to a news

audience largely reliant on television. With shorter stories, plentiful graphics and color

pages,

USA Today

shared many characteristics with television news. Even its curbside

vending machines resembled television sets. In 1997 it trailed only the

Wall Stree

ournal,

a newspaper devoted to business news, in US daily circulation.

In the 1990s other changes affected American newspapers. Newspaper chains, such as

Gannett and Knight Ridder, began owning a higher proportion of newspapers throughout

the country By 1998 newspaper chains owned 80 percent of US daily newspapers, a 17

percent increase from 1986, marking a dramatic concentration of newspaper ownership.

Yet another change, the rise of the

Internet,

posed both a threat to and an opportunity

for newspapers. By 1998, 20 percent of Americans got their news from the Internet at

least once a week, though not necessarily from newspapers’ World Wide Web-sites,

potentially reducing newspapers’ overall readership. However, the Internet gave

newspapers the opportunity previously afforded only television and

radio:

to publish

breaking news immediately.

Newspapers have been represented in a variety of films throughout the twentieth

century.

Citizen Kane

(1941), directed by Orson

Welles,

was a thinly veiled movie on the

life of William Randolph Hearst. The investigative work of the

Washington Post,

which

helped uncover the Watergate scandal, was documented in the movie

All the President’

(1976).

The Paper,

released in 1994, chronicled one day at a fictional

New Yor

City tabloid, focusing on the ethical aspects of news gathering.

Further reading

Katz, P. (1994)

The New Urbanism,

New York: McGraw-Hill.

GARY McDONOGH

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New York and its boroughs

It is no longer the largest city in the world, and no longer the single dominant city in the

United States. But when Americans speak generically of “the city” the platonic ideal they

usually have in mind is

The

City namely New York City. So deeply has New York come

to settle in American minds that a casual scribble of a city on paper, or a rendering of “

city” in a

children’s

book (Virginia Lee Burton’s

Little House

(1942), for example) is

often an abstract rendering of the skyline that was built in New York in the twentieth

century.

With remarkable persistence, New York remains The City. Although the postwar

world, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, brought a dramatic decline in New York’s

economic fortunes, a flight of people and capital to the suburbs, and cultural influence to

California

and the

Sunbelt,

New York has remained and reinvented its cultural

importance as the century closed. New York has been the city of creative destruction,

constantly destroying and rebuilding itself with abandon. Indeed, building and rebuilding

have always been at the heart of New York’s economic life. But New York has also been

the city of creative destruction in a metaphorical way: it has been the place where

individuals, ideas, art forms and cultural practices are created and destroyed, remade and

reworked. O.Henry may have defined New York’s essence most succinctly when he

wrote, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.”

The capital of capitalism

The “Fountain of Abundance,” also known as the Pulitzer Fountain, sits on Fifth Avenue

in front of the Plaza, the most luxurious of

hotels

. It is an apt symbol for New York. I

the city itself has not always produced abundance for the United States, it has almost

always been the basin into which the nation’s wealth has flowed—even if it is not then

disbursed equally. New York before the war was one of the great manufacturing centers,

ut, starting at the turn of the century, it became the command center of American

capitalism. After the Second World War, manufacturing was slowly but steadily

destroyed—some say it was an assassination by city and state leaders, and not natural

death—with its central industries of textiles, clothing and shipping. Yet, New York

remained the capital city of the financial industry and the home of corporate

headquarters. Cities dependent on a single industry have fallen furthest in the era o

deindustrialization

. New York, with its anchor of

Wall Street

and its corporate offices,

as well as its long tradition as the city where

information

is processed and distributed,

has managed to propel itself into leadership of the service and information economies.

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The resulting city of glass towers and

coffee

bars in Manhattan, on the one hand, and

stagnant poverty in the outer boroughs, on the other hand, encapsulates American wealth

and poverty as well as any urban landscape.

City of immigrants

For many, Ellis Island enshrines the turn of the nineteenth century mass migration o

Central and Eastern European immigrants to the United States, many to New York itself.

Celebration of that monument (restored in 1990) has obscured the fact that New York

was long before that era and long since a city of immigrants. In the post-Second World

War era, and especially after the 1965

immigration

laws, New York has seen a flood o

immigrants from Asia and from Central and South America—far more than arrived to the

city in that mythic “heyday” of immigration. Vast communities of

Puerto Ricans,

Haitians and others from the

Caribbean

islands,

South Asians,

Vietnamese, Koreans

and Taiwanese are all centered increasingly in Brooklyn and Queens. These groups have

revitalized whole

neighborhoods

and continued to make New York the home, as

E.B.White so deftly put it, of those who were “

orn somewhere else and came to New

York in quest of something.” New York was the “city of final destination,” the ultimate

city of migrants in a nation of immigrants (1949:121).

Urban decline and revitalization

The most politically visible street in postwar America may be Charlotte Street in the

orough of the Bronx. A desolate, decaying street of tenements overlooking the Cross

Bronx Expressway (urban renewer Robert Moses’ greatest political technological

masterpiece, and greatest social tragedy) was visited by presidents

Carter,

Reagan,

Bush

and

Clinton

as a symbol of urban decay. Once a vision of paradise for immigrants

fleeing the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Bronx became in the 1970s

predominantly

African American

and

Hispanic

Whites

fleeing to the

suburbs

and its

cheap land and housing, away from a borough increasingly African American, burned

their property to avoid city property

taxes

. Where once fresh air dominated Bronx life,

now fire seemed to gain the upper hand. The ashes that were left symbolized the

intractable problems of older cities and the continued, unsolved problem of racialized

overty. The flight of industry people, wealth and taxes led New York, in the 1970s, into

financial collapse. That the nation’s largest city had to remain in receivership, and under

tight fiscal constraints for years after, showed the extent of urban decline and served as a

sobering reminder of America’s rapid loss of global economic dominance.

If Charlotte Street and the Bronx were the ultimate symbols of urban decline, their

revitalization in the 1980s—fitful and as yet incomplete—has symbolized the resurgence

of old American cities. New York, the true phoenix city, constantly remaking itself, has

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also pioneered the revitalization of cities that took hold in the 1980s. Jane Jacobs,

observing the complex order of urban street life from the second floor of her Hudson

Street apartment in

Greenwich Village

in the late 1950s and early 1960s, issued the

clarion call in her

Death and Life of Great American Cities

(1961) to reclaim America’s

older urban areas in the face of a mass suburban migration.

Her argument was directed against a philosophy of urban planning that was premised

on remaking the city’s social and moral life by violently remaking its physical landscape.

ew York, in the postwar era, pioneered urban renewal on a scale unimaginable

(although dreamed of) in other cities. Robert Moses, one of the most powerful unelected

officials ever to shape New York, remade the city’s physical infrastructure and

fundamentally shaped its social infrastructure as well. Demolishing slums, laying

highways

around and through boroughs, dividing neighborhoods in half, and black from

white, Moses made the modern urban landscape.

The urban revitalization that has taken place in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and

Queens has not affected the restlessness of Staten Island, nor the larger trend o

suburbanization. Beginning a trend that would take place in cities around the country in

1993 Staten Island, the borough furthest from Manhattan, physically and psychologically

voted to seek secession from the consolidated city union created in 1898. Although the

state did not approve Staten Island’s initiative—announced with cannon blasts across

New York harbor—the borough’s action illustrated a desire of suburban areas of cities to

remove themselves from the perceived costs of being attached to a large metropolis.

Crucible of culture

If Jane Jacobs compelled planners, architects and policy-makers to reconsider the

hysical structure of healthy cities, she inexplicably ignored all that was happening

around her in the late 1950s and early 1960s: a vibrant flowering of avant-garde art,

music and ideas in Greenwich Village which would transform American culture forever.

New York and popular culture are inseparable, that much is certain. Is it sheer density

of people (New York has been the largest city in the nation for a century)? Is it that New

York has mastered the fine art of centralizing capital for the creation of culture and the

organization, production and distribution of information of all types, artistic and

otherwise? Is it simply the historical momentum of cultural “agglomeration economies,”

as an economist might argue? That is, once New York became the heart of cultural

innovation, it drew further innovators, because proximity equals efficiency.

Whatever the case, virtually every movement in art, literature, music,

film

and

dance

has been either invented, reinvented, promoted, exploited, or popularized in New York

City. High and low cultures, and the gray areas that separate the two, all were born or

found their home in New York. New forms of

jazz

flourished in New York in the 1940s

and 1950s, with bebop, cool jazz, hard bop and free jazz all coming out of the city’s jazz

clubs. Martha

Graham,

Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine made New York the

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center of dance innovation with younger artists, such as José Limon, Merce

Cunningham,

Paul Taylor and Alvin

Ailey,

finding that only in this city could they pull

together their range of backgrounds and interests.

Broadway

defined musicals and other

theater. Central developments of modern art were pioneered, or at the very least exhibited

and criticized, in the city’s studios and

museums

(the Museum of Modern Art, the

Whitney and Guggenheim Museums).

Photography

as a fine art was pioneered by

Alfred Stieglitz, and the mid-century movement of “street photography” (which might as

well have been called New York photography) found its inspiration in the linear public

spaces of the city

os Angeles, CA

would draw not only the Brooklyn Dodgers

baseball

team (whose

flight in 1957 tolled a symbolic death-knell for Brooklyn, once the third-largest city in

the United States), but also cultural capital. Even though New York’s dominance of the

literary and

publishing

industry has rarely waned,

Hollywood

would by mid-century be

the heart of the film and

television

world. Nonetheless, New York would eventually in

the 1980s and afterwards, lure back filmmakers and television producers in great

numbers. Some, of course, had never left—like Woody

Allen

. The city became the home

to documentary and independent film-makers, and once again the subject of innumerable

films and television programs. Turn on the television in the late twentieth/ early twenty-

first century and one would as likely as not be transported to New York (albeit usually

via a Hollywood stage set) to laugh

(Seinfeld, Mad About You, Friends, Caroline in the

City, The Cosby Show)

or cry

(NYPD Blue, Law and Order, Brooklyn South)

. If one went

to a movie in the 1980s and 1990s (the city’s urban malaise of the 1970s left it off the

silver screen for years), one would see Manhattan’s skyline being celebrated (famously in

Woody Allen’s

Manhattan,

1979), or destroyed (as in

Godzilla,

1998). No other city has

remained so central as the subject and setting for moving-image culture.

New York’s role as the ultimate “crucible of culture” is not only in its role in

romoting art and music, dance and literature, but also in serving as the setting for the

remarkable but also often-tragic interaction of diverse cultures. Archie Bunker, o

television’s

All in the Family,

was portrayed as the typical Queens resident. But, if Archie

worried about his black neighbors being too close, he would find, in the early twenty-first

century much more that was troubling. Queens, the usually ignored borough, has quietly

ecome the future: as of the 1990 census, it was the most diverse district in America, i

not the world, with over a hundred languages spoken in the public schools, and 36

ercent of its population foreign born. In a further hopeful statistic about American

diversity Queens became the first district in the US where African Americans have a

higher median income than whites.

But Queens and neighboring Brooklyn also provided the settings for some of the worst

modern racial clashes. From Howard Beach and Bensonhurst—where young black men

were murdered in white neighborhoods—to Crown Heights—where blacks and

Jews

violently clashed in the early 1990s—African Americans and white ethnic groups have

clashed in wars of turf. These undermined any notion of the peaceful “gorgeous mosaic”

hoped for in 1989 by David

Dinkins,

New York’s first African American mayor. These

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“outer boroughs”

ecame home to fundamentalist religious groups who, not willing to

take to Utah as did the

Mormons

a century and a half earlier, went instead to Queens and

Brooklyn.

New York remains to many Americans a place apart, an island thankfully on the edge

of the continent. When Newt

Gingrich,

Speaker of the House of Representatives for

much of the 1990s, sought to highlight America’s moral decline, he pointed simply to

New York. Ironically however, New York has always exported the future to America—

from zoning to urban renewal, the

sitcom

to the information economy and the

gated

community

. To Americans beyond the city’s boundaries, New York City remains a

touchstone, the symbol of the “best and worst of everything,” the barometer of the

nation’s health and sickness, poverty and wealth. Americans are married, if not always

happily then always intensely and profoundly to New York.

Further reading

Jackson, K. (ed.) (1995)

The Encyclopedia of New York City,

New Haven: Yale

University.

Jacobs, J. (1961)

Death and Life of Great American Cities,

New York: Vintage Books

Mollenkopf, J. (1991)

Dual City: Restructuring New York,

New York: Russell Sage.

White, E.B. (1949)

Here is New York,

New York: Warner Books.

MAX PAGE

New York Times

newspapers

niche marketing

Consumer research and flexible media have allowed manufacturers and service-delivery

firms to target mass marketing towards especially receptive groups, generally divided in

terms of age, gender,

class

and

race

Age remains the most noticeable division, as producers seek to appeal to demographics

known for high disposable income, for example

teenagers

for movies, music and clothes,

adults for

automobiles

and household goods, or older ages for retirement, travel,

insurance and pharmaceuticals. Families also constitute an

advertising

target for mini-

vans and vacations in

Disneyworld

. These strategies, however, entail both advertising

and placement—CBS draws an older audience, for example, while

Reader’s Digest

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reaches the same group.

This identification of buyers implies divisions of class as well: advertisements in the

elite

New Yorker

Forbes

differ from those in

tabloid

newspapers. Similarly

information on

television

and movie appeal allow for both commercial sponsorship and

roduct placement that associates brand names with lifestyles. Catalog delivery in elite

postal zones provides a constant measure of status differences in consumption.

Niches are also defined by gender, evident in ads that posit women as domestic

decision-makers (i.e.

food,

laundry and appliances, etc.). By contrast, advertisements for

trucks, alcohol

and

cigars

evoke masculine images of ruggedness, independence or

sophistication. Gay marketing is relatively recent, but gay periodicals have begun to

ackage their clients in terms of both sexuality and disposable income, as well as offering

“gay voyeur” ads open to multiple interpretations.

Race has proven more controversial: while television shows and

magazines

allow

African American

companies to target black consumers, neighborhood groups have also

decried billboards and advertisements pushing cigarettes and alcohol within

inner-city

neighborhoods,

spurring grassroots opposition in cities

Baltimore

. Ethnic marketing has

not been so clearly defined within American assimilationism, although

catalogs

and

travel agencies evoke nostalgic identification for Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. New

immigrants who constitute distinct language or transnational communities, however, are

reached through

mass media

like Spanish

newspapers, cable

stations and mail

solicitations like those that offer special phone rates for calls to Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Niche marketing is perceived as a threat not only because of its general divisiveness,

ut because of the way it links mass media products to ever narrower segments of the

population. Hence,

“family”

films or teen flicks replace movies of interest to diverse

populations. Electronic printing and

Internet

sales, however, have permitted websites

that adapt to individual shopping patterns or catalogs tailored to previous purchases—

mass marketing for individuals.

CINDY WONG

Nicholson, Jack

b. 1937

Part bohemian beatnik and part establishment, three-time Academy Award winner Jack

Nicholson (

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,

1975;

Terms of Endearment,

1983;

Good as it Gets,

1997) has brilliantly painted the landscape of the American male of the

1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. His expressiveness and intelligence as an actor are

undeniable. Nicholson first played lead at twenty but his break came in the counterculture

cult flick

Easy Rider

(1969). He has since worked with directing legends such as Stanley

Kubrick, Antonioni, Polanski and Milas Forman. Refusing to give in to

Hollywood’s

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casting conventions, Nicholson picked roles as disparate as dapper detective, mental

patient, pothead anti-hero and devil—once with a capital D.His smile is phenomenal: its

dazzling transformation from affectionate to demonic in

The Shining

(1980) renders the

movie a horror classic.

ee also:

actors

MARIAELENA BARETSAGHI

Nicklaus, Jack

b. 1940

The winner of more professional major championships (eighteen) than any other player

in the history of

golf,

the “Golden Bear” is considered by many to be the greatest golfer

of all time. Twice the winner of the US Amateur Championship before he left his home

state of Ohio to turn professional, Nicklaus enjoyed enormous success during the 1960s

and 1970s, during a time when his prominence and that of fellow golfer Arnold Palmer

inspired a rise in the popularity of golf as a spectator sport. Possessed of the twin abilities

to drive for show and putt for dough, Nicklaus is perhaps most famous for his astounding

record of six victories at the fabled Masters tournament over a twenty-three-year span.

ROBERT ANDERSON

Nielsen Ratings

The major television rating system in the US, used by advertisers and broadcasters to

determine the value of

advertising

time, based on how many people and what

demographics say they watch particular shows. The company was founded in 1923 by

Arthur C.Nielsen, Sr; in 1936 the “Audimeter” was introduced to track radio listening. It

has continued to adapt: the Nielsen Hispanic Television Index appeared in 1991 to track

Spanish-language

television;

Net Ratings were introduced in the 1990s.

The Nielsen broadcast sample includes 5,000 US households. Many critics complain

that ratings are inaccurate because of the lack of representation of older people and ethnic

minorities and reliance on faulty measures of attention. In 2000, Nielsen admitted it

undercounted Spanish speakers in

New York

City, NY by 300,000 households.

However, even knowing the ratings’ weaknesses, the industry still needs an agreed-upon

measure to commodify broadcast audience. This, in turn, leads to further fragmentation

of the viewing public as stratified commodities.

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