Vintage Journalism

US one sheet for BEST OF ENEMIES (Morgan Neville, USA, 2015)

Designer: Gravillis Inc.

Movies: Good Night, And Good Luck (2005)

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak, and to defend the causes that were for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Sen. McCarthy’s methods to keep silent or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. We proclaim ourselves as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom wherever it continues to exist in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his, he didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, the fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck.

 Taken from Christian Montone

1945 DICK TRACY Comics LIL ABNER vintage advertisement 1940s Newspaper Illustration Minneapolis Star Journal     

More images and items from his collection at his blogspot page:

The History Behind Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post Covers

With his art on cover of the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell became an American icon. The popularity of his illustrations on the cover helped make the Post the magazine America read. Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post both became fixtures in American homes during the early years of the Twentieth Century. The Saturday Evening Post was published weekly in the United States from August 4, 1821 to February 8, 1969 and monthly afterward. Curtis Publishing Co., its publisher for most of that period, claimed the magazine was founded by Benjamin Franklin. However, the Post’s first issue was published more than 30 years after Franklin’s death in 1790. The Post had fallen on hard times by the late Nineteenth Century. The new editor of the Post at that time, George Horace Lorimer, rebuilt the Saturday Evening Post into the premier magazine of its time. Mr Lorimer, as Norman Rockwell called him, took the Post “from a two bit family journal with a circulation in the hundreds to an influential mass magazine with a circulation in the millions.” Quoted from My Adventures as an Illustrator. Although hesitant about approaching the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell was certain that the cover of the Post was his window of opportunity. He had dreamed for years of having his illustrations on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell put aside his fears in 1916 and took two paintings and three sketches to Philadelphia and Mr. Lorimer’s office. Rockwell was so nervous and scared that he almost turned around and headed back to New York when he reached the Post’s office building. To Rockwell’s great relief and delight, Mr. Lorimer liked the two paintings and approved the three sketches for future covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell was paid much more than ever before for his work. He was paid $75.00 each for his two paintings. $150.00 in 1916 dollars would be 2628.44 in 2005 dollars. Quite a sum for a virtually unknown 18 year old artist! Even more important than the immediate payment was the knowledge that he was going to be published on the cover of The Post.

The First Texas News Barons By Patrick Cox -

  Newspaper publishers played a crucial role in transforming Texas into a modern state.By promoting expanded industrialization and urbanization, as well as a more modern image of Texas as a southwestern, rather than southern, state, news barons in the early decades of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for the enormous economic growth and social changes that followed World War II.Yet their contribution to the modernization of Texas is largely unrecognized.

This book investigates how newspaper owners such as A. H. Belo and George B. Dealey of the Dallas Morning News, Edwin Kiest of the Dallas Times Herald, William P. Hobby and Oveta Culp Hobby of the Houston Post, Jesse H. Jones and Marcellus Foster of the Houston Chronicle, and Amon G. Carter Sr. of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram paved the way for the modern state of Texas. Patrick Cox explores how these news barons identified the needs of the state and set out to attract the private investors and public funding that would boost the state’s civic and military infrastructure, oil and gas industries, real estate market, and agricultural production. He shows how newspaper owners used events such as the Texas Centennial to promote tourism and create a uniquely Texan identity for the state. To balance the record, Cox also demonstrates that the news barons downplayed the interests of significant groups of Texans, including minorities, the poor and underemployed, union members, and a majority of women. 

Salt Lake City Weekly (usually shortened to City Weekly) is a free alternative weekly tabloid-paged newspaper published in Salt Lake City, Utah. It began its life as the Private Eye. City Weekly is published and dated for every Thursday by Copperfield Publishing Inc. of which John Saltas is majority owner and president.

John Saltas founded what would become Salt Lake City Weekly in June 1984. He called his monthly publication the Private Eye because it contained news and promotions for bars and dance clubs, which due to Utah State liquor laws were all private clubs. Saltas originally mailed the Private Eye as a newsletter to private club members. State law forbade private clubs from advertising at the time, so Saltas’ newsletter was the only way for clubs to get promotional information out.

In 1988, the Private Eye became a bi-weekly newspaper although it was available mostly in clubs. Distribution of the paper broadened as new liquor rule interpretations at the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (DABC) allowed mainstream media to carry club advertisements as long as they weren’t “soliciting” members. The “Private Eye” thus ended its mailed period and was available for free in public distribution outlets for the first time. In 1989, Private Eye was admitted to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), the organization’s 40th member

Yes, all info is from Wikipedia, shame on me! 

Today’s historical woman is Elizabeth Jane Cochran also known as Nellie Bly.

Nellie Bly was a groundbreaking investigative reporter. She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within.

She got her start at the Pittsburgh Dispatch after writing an anonymous letter countering a misogynistic article titled “What Pittsburg Women are Good For”. The editor of the Dispatch was so impressed with her writing that he employed her as a reporter for the newspaper. As it was common for women to have pen names at the time, Elizabeth Cochran rebranded herself as Nellie Bly.

Bly is most well known for expose on the conditions of mental hospitals in 1887. She practiced deranged expressions for one night only.The next day she was examined by several doctors, all of which declared her insane. She was then admitted to Bellevue Hospital. Where she witnessed first hand the conditions of the hospital.

The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not.

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum. The jury’s report recommended the changes Bly had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill went to the asylum.

"I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God’s creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly".

March 6th 1981: Cronkite signs off

On this day in 1981 the legendary anchor of CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, signed off for the last time. Cronkite had been presenting the news for nineteen years and became known as ‘the most trusted man in America’. He is known for his departing catchphrase “And that’s the way it is”, followed by that day’s date. Cronkite reported on some pivotal moments of the twentieth century, including the Nuremberg trials, the moon landing, and the Watergate scandal. He also got involved in the politics of the day, and is known for his denunciation of the Vietnam War which led President Johnson to bitterly remark “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”. Cronkite is also remembered as the anchor who broke the story of the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd 1963. After his retirement, Cronkite continued to be an active figure in the American media and as a political activist. He died in 2009 in New York City, aged 92.

On Being a Badass – absolutely fantastic piece by Ann Friedman on “how tempting it is to fall into gendered, old-school definitions of toughness,” using the memoirs of two tough female conflict-zone journalists as the springboard for a broader meditation. Well worth reading. 

More than a century ago, pioneering Victorian journalist Nellie Bly actually demonstrated how to be a badass without succumbing to narrow definitions.