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This is one of several papers presented at a Federal Trade Commission Symposium on Media Concentration. It expresses views of the National Association of Advertising Publishers regarding problems that publishers of advertising shoppers and free newspapers encounter from chain-owned newspapers. Shoppers and free newspapers are described and differences from regular newspapers are noted. The growth of competition between shoppers and newspapers and the effect of concentration of ownership on paid newspapers is explored. It is suggested that in towns where the chain newspaper faces no competition, advertising rates soar; whereas in towns where the independent shopper offers competition, advertising rates stay firm or even go down. It is also contended that to the extent that shoppers continue to compete, it will be much easier for a new paid newspaper to enter the field. It is noted that the Association believes that interstate commerce regulations can apply to their problems. (MKM)

Pricing of subscriptions and single copies has historically been arbitrary. Evidence indicates that the newspaper industry has tended to overestimate the elasticity of demand for newspaper circulation. This study analyzed price changes, circulation changes, and population changes for all daily newspapers in the United States between 1970 and 1975. Results strongly supported the hypothesis that the demand curve is highly inelastic and that newspapers have been grossly undercharging for their product in relation to the market. The estimate of elasticity for all newspapers during the six-year period studied indicated that a 50% increase in price resulted in only a 1.25% decrease in circulation, with percentage change in population of the publishing city or metropolitan area held constant. Projected potential loss to the newspaper industry because of past reluctance to raise per-copy price from 10 to 15 cents is estimated at more than one billion dollars a year. There appears to be no evidence that daily newspapers have yet approached the point of diminishing returns from price increases to the audience consumers of the industry. (Author)

Framed by the heuristic device of "long waves" of capitalist development, journalism ideology is historically anchored to competitive media economics. (Long waves are 50-year economic cycles comprised of alternating 25-year periods of economic expansion followed by contraction periods.) With each long wave, a new institutional ecology emerges. Competition-generated economic and ideological crises merge in contraction phases; crises are then resolved through reconstruction in expansion phases. Two major shifts in the economic infrastructure of journalism--partisan to commercial, competition to monopoly--provided the impetus for a corollary shift in ideology. Journalism responded to economic crises by harnessing morality to marketing mechanisms. Commercial strategies to restabilize economic crises were ratified in the ideological language of public morality. The American tendency to translate economic crises into moral terms, commercial strategies into professional ideologies, mystifies the linkage of culture to economics. Economic crisis sets the agenda for ideological reconstruction. In the mid-1980s, American journalism is moving through a transition state to a new economic and cultural ecology. If the historic pattern holds, a resolution to the crisis will not emerge for another decade or so. (Author/DF)

Journalism historians in recent years have made good use of agenda-setting theory in research, but there has been one drawback: in concentrating on the political and economic views of publishers, editors, and reporters, the agendas of those working behind the scenes, the public relations men and women have been overlooked. The public relations agenda was particularly important in the 1920s, when it was estimated that over half of all stories in the "New York Times" and other major newspapers originated in public relations offices. Ivy Lee, the "father of modern public relations," had an agenda that can best be understood through an analysis of his economic and theological beliefs in an early twentieth-century context. Lee was one of the first public relations practitioners to oppose competitive enterprise and espouse alliances of large corporations with each other and the federal government. He combined sophisticated economics with "situational ethics" developed through assimilation of popularized Darwinian theory and Freudian thought. Lee's beliefs concerning economics and theology allowed him to conceal his major objectives with almost total assurance that he was working for a greater good. This helps to explain why Lee had such great success in dealing with the press: He was seen as a proponent of the economics of the future, and his liberalism proved influential. (Author/DF)

Economic change in China is coming about through wide-ranging economic reforms, is taking place at an unprecedented pace, and is affecting the lives of many of the inhabitants of the world's most populous nation. However, the attempts to reform the political process have been slow, like the attempts to reform the Chinese press. The Chinese press is the instrument of the Communist Party and a vital cog in the machinery of government. Changes in China's press system are taking place, mostly rhetorically rather than in practice. But a part of the rhetoric is driven by the realization that economic development and national modernization cannot continue to move forward without corresponding changes in other social sectors, including the press. There are two approaches to promote press reform. One advocates that the basic system and role of the press should be altered and would involve redefining Chinese press theory; while the other calls for relatively modest adjustments in the press' present operation and would involve affecting media performance through changes in content and improvement of news writing and presentation. Regardless of which approach is taken, it seems clear that problems arise in the discussion on press reform, such as whether an open economic system can exist in a closed press system and the impact on society as journalists become more independent and better educated. (Three notes are included, and 37 references are appended.) (MS)