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While generally understood as an individual-level effect, we argue that reinforcement effects—or the strengthening of existing party loyalties through media exposure—might also play a role in shaping aggregate-level outcomes. Looking across eight presidential elections from 1900 to 1928, this study provides evidence that partisan newspaper circulation was significantly linked to two-party vote share at the county level. Counties with higher circulation rates of Republican dailies had a smaller percentage of votes cast for the Democratic presidential candidate, while a weaker positive association was found between the circulation of Democratic leaning dailies and Democratic vote in non-Southern counties. Some variance in this effect was observed across elections, with some evidence suggesting a weaker association between circulation and vote share as newspapers moved away from overtly partisan content toward a more professional tone. Further, some of the relationships were reciprocal with votes influencing partisan circulation. Results suggest that greater attention be given to the role of the political media environment and how citizens engage with it when understanding macro-level political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassessesThe People's Choiceby Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, one of the foundations of communication and voting behavior research. As with most classics, which are often cited but seldom read, we believe this book has much to teach contemporary social scientists. We return to the original context of the research and use voting data from the period with three broad goals: (a) to find ideas and lessons from this work that generally have been overlooked, (b) to suggest new ways of applying these ideas, and (c) to encourage scholars to engage more with this seminal work to understand ideas that are often overlooked when a complex piece of research is reduced to a brief discussion or passing citation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the sensory and material history of the "Chicago Tribune" newspaper. It presents the newspaper's history as an industrially produced material object and cites the commitment of the Tribune Company to industrial innovation in newspaper production. It also discusses the creation and implementation of a supply chain strategy by the company in the 1940s.

In the early twentieth century, American newspapers enjoyed high circulations while presenting readers with diverse and plentiful content. After 1920, radio broadcasting made even more information available for public consumption, giving audience members an abundant range of media choices. During a time of plenty for readers and listeners, companies in the business of media struggled with the opposite problem: scarcity. As the amount of media content proliferated, the practical ability to disseminate it was determined by the access to scarce resources, and this was true for both radio broadcasting and newspaper publishing. In many respects, the history of the American mass media in the early twentieth century might best be told as a tale of two scarcities, one—the electromagnetic spectrum—defined by absolute limits and the other—the newsprint—defined by access to markets for a particular material, the supply of which often fluctuated in availability and price. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes Paul Lazarsfeld's 1941 book, Radio and the Printed Page, arguing for the book's enduring significance in communication and media studies. In the book, Lazarsfeld rejected the then-influential technological determinist model that Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport had developed through studying the new medium of radio. In contrast to Cantril and Allport, Lazarsfeld found through studying Americans' listening and reading habits that radio's effects on society were not totalizing, and he discovered that radio not only did not diminish the importance of reading printed texts, but that it in fact may have encouraged the practice. The book established Lazarsfeld's scholarly reputation in the United States and formed the basis for his later and widely influential research. Long ignored in the intellectual history of media studies, Radio and the Printed Page is in fact a foundational work, one that contains the clear beginnings of the social constructivist ideas that Lazarsfeld would later articulate in The People's Choice and Personal Influence. Ultimately, the work presented a theory understanding media effects as significant but not totalizing, analyzed how people made meaning of media content through everyday social life, and demonstrated the continuing relevance of print in a world increasingly linked together by newer forms of media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that in early 1968, Bernard Jacobs, the owner and founder of Chicago classical music radio station WFMT, sold his station to WGN Continental FM Corp., a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune. Despite the fact that the Tribune claimed that it would make no changes to the station's programming or management, the sale was profoundly disconcerting to many loyal listeners, a number of whom wrote letters to the federal government opposing the sale and asking it to intervene. Listener Marjorie Newsome wrote that WFMT's audience was composed largely of persons or a more progressive bent, and was a group that possessed a certain level of judgment, sophistication, and discrimination, with respect to its listening preferences. Four years later, Chicago's other major classical music radio station, WEFM, was put up for sale by the Zenith Corp., the company that had owned and operated the station for more than 30 years. Claiming that the station was losing large amounts of money, Zenith sold it to General Cinema Corp. (GCC), a Boston-based entertainment conglomerate, and GCC announced that it would change the station's format from classical to pop music.

Benchmark testing of existing seat designs reveals poor performance in low-speed rear impacts. The neck injury criterion (NIC) exceeds the limiting value of 15 for almost all seats without a whiplash protection system. As only few new car models offer this, a system for retrofit installation was developed and tested. The Retrofit Anti Whiplash System, AWS, consists of a yielding device which is fitted to the seat rails and allows the whole seat to rotate and move backwards. This reduces thorax acceleration and thus the NIC value. As the force required to actuate the device depends on the position of the seat, the system offers optimum protection for large and small occupants. Tests with the rear impact dummy BioRID show a noticeable reduction in NIC compared to the standard seat. Loadings to the neck at a rear impact speed change of a Delta v of 15 km/h (9.3 mph) with AWS are in the same magnitude as at 9 km/h (5.6 mph) without AWS. MADYMO simulations with real crash pulses have been performed, and the potential benefit of AWS is estimated on the basis of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the Media History Digital Library, found at http://mediahistoryproject.org.