ABSTRACT
The year was 1946, and newspaper journalism in the United States was in trouble.
Such, at least, was the opinion of Kenneth Stewart, writing in the illustrated monthly
magazine The Survey Graphic. Among the problems for news outlined by Stewart were
monopoly ownership, the growth of newspaper chains, a reliance of too many news
outlets on information from the Associated Press and other wire services, and collusion
on the part of the American Newspaper Publishers Association to fix prices. Worst of
all, Stewart lamented, was the fact that so many cities relied on only one source of
information for their news:
Accompanying this litany of statistics was a large informational graphic, titled “Newspa-
pers” and produced by someone known only as “The Chartmakers” (Figure 1). The gra-
phic was designed to visualize the arresting statistic that “only 1 city out of 12 has
competing daily newspapers” (Stewart 1946, 453).
