of the 1853 constitution might have imagined. The Argentine press of the nineteenth century, rooted in a tradition of factional political conflict and intimately tied to those wielding or aspiring to wield state power, had become something quite different: a capital-intensive, technologically advanced, and market-dependent commercial newspaper industry with millions of readers.
The Press as Newspaper Industry
The rapid expansion of the press in the early twentieth century not only created a quantitatively distinct set of institutions, it also engendered a profound qualitative shift in the nature and social significance of journalism. The press’s divergence from the model of factional journalism signaled a new relationship between individual newspapers and the public, one mediated by the market and in which political affinity receded in importance in favor of a broader set of appeals to potential readers. The growth of a newspaper market also carried with it a significant change in the relationship between political society and the press: by the 1920s, the owners of the nation’s premier newspapers had become largely autonomous from the factional politics and even the social classes that marked their origins. At the same time, the industrialization of the press demanded a rearticulation of newspaper relations of production, with the hand-cranked printing presses manned by nineteenth-century politician-journalists giving way to enormous mechanized rotary presses under the guidance of wage-earning printers producing the texts of increasingly specialized working journalists. More than the development of a new style of journalism, then, the emergence of the commercial press implied a profound reworking of the press’s entire network of relationships.
Where political militancy linked reader and newspaper in the tradition of factional journalism, the relationship between the commercial press and the public was mediated by a more complex amalgam of factors. By the 1920s, the appeal of the most widely read newspapers of the Argentine Republic lay less in explicitly polemical political and economic journalism that addressed the concerns of an audience segmented by partisan militancy than in more general reporting and editorials that engaged the political, work, sport, leisure, social, and cultural concerns of increasingly broad sectors of the population. Sensationalism, melodrama, and the incorporation of photographs and other graphic material in the daily press sought the attention of popular-class readers, while the physical layout and page size of newspapers like El Mundo facilitated the incorporation of reading into the routine of the urban middle- and working-class daily commute.86 In the place of specific factional sympathy, then, a more stable—and more sweeping—set of political, class, gender, cultural, and ethnic markers grew in prominence as newspaper directors aimed at generating a committed readership.
The factional newspaper’s role as public forum for partisan debate also increasingly ceded space to a more powerful form of publicity. If Argentines together consumed far more newspapers than their regional peers in the first half of the twentieth century, those living in the Argentine capital also absorbed greater quantities of a much more sophisticated set of classified and display advertising. Not only were residents of the Argentine capital considerably wealthier and more literate on average than other Latin Americans in the first half of the century, but a 1920 U.S. Department of Commerce study declared Buenos Aires “an oasis in the advertising desert” and “so far in advance of all other cities of South America in advertising development as to be in a class by itself.”87 Exposure to classified and display advertising became an integral and unavoidable part of the newspaper reading experience, in effect “educating” readers as consumers and producers even as it served as a conduit for the incorporation of consumer demands into the market.88 Commercial publicity—the “poetry of Modernity,” in the words of Henri Lefebvre—together with the breadth of newspaper reporting thus helped shape the city’s rapid economic transformation in the first decades of the century.89
Such changes signaled a fundamental shift in the practical nature of the relationship between press and public. Where nineteenth-century factional newspapers had ideally served as participatory media for communication among political militants, the scale of the twentieth-century commercial press placed newspapers before the public less as an accessible forum for expression than as an item of consumption. Similarly, even as press owners competed to sell ever-increasing numbers of newspapers to a growing public, they also competed to sell advertising space to businesses. With the relationship between press and public increasingly mediated not by political exchange but by market exchange, the practice of journalism assumed an additional role that press critics would soon declare threatened to overwhelm all others: that of delivering the attention of consumers to the goods and services offered by businesses. The press by no means ceased to serve as a forum of public debate; the penetration of the commodity form in the relationship between newspaper and reader, however, placed expression through the press in a new key.
The technological imperative imposed by this fiercely competitive newspaper market also fundamentally changed the character of press production techniques, and with it the relations of production within the newspaper industry. Where José C. Paz and Cosme Mariño printed the first issue of La Prensa themselves with a hand-driven rotary press, by 1935 the paper’s 1,050-horsepower presses stood two stories high and forty-six meters long.90 Crítica updated its presses to the latest Hoe Superspeed upon Botana’s transfer of the paper’s facilities to Avenida de Mayo 1333. In singular Crítica fashion, the paper’s journalists boasted that the extraordinary publishing capacity of the machine more than compensated for the nearly year-long process of its assembly: “with a single hour of continuous publishing the Hoe rotary can encircle the city in a belt of newspapers.”91 In a poem dedicated to the new rotary, poet and Crítica journalist Raúl González Tuñón even found inspiration in its seemingly boundless technological modernity, proclaiming it a “song of steel” and “the heart of Buenos Aires.”92 El Mundo and the other major newspapers of the city maintained similar installations. For newspaper proprietors, access to capital goods and industrial inputs of ever-increasing cost and sophistication was not only an indicator of the power and progressive nature of their papers; it proved absolutely essential to the survival of their enterprises.
Fig. 4
Printer at a Hoe printing press, November 1941.
Fig. 5
Printers at work in La Prensa, October 1924.
This industrialization of the newspaper production process implied not only the growing complexity of the press’s division of labor, but the emergence of capitalist relations of production—and class conflict—in the newspaper industry. Prior to the establishment of La Prensa and La Nación, printers had already begun the process of unionization, eventually creating the Federación Gráfica Bonaerense (FGB) for the typographers of the Federal Capital and Greater Buenos Aires in 1907. By 1922, when members of the Argentine Socialist Party gained effective control of the union, the FGB maintained a strong presence among the 350 printers employed with La Prensa, and had made inroads at the other major dailies as well.93 Similarly, news vendors (popularly called canillitas) unionized in 1920 as the Federación de Vendedores de Diarios.94 Less than two years later, the canillitas mounted a bitter strike against La Razón, which only hastened the decline of the evening paper. After the first canillita death at the hands of strikebreakers from the right-wing Liga Patriótica, Botana confidante Eduardo “El Diente” Dughera organized protective caravans to cover vendors in what had become a virtual war among evening newspaper distribution networks.95 When the strike ended nearly ten months later, not only had the vendors’ union achieved broad recognition, but Crítica had emerged as the country’s dominant evening paper and “El Diente” had become the “undisputed boss” of what remained the dangerous business of newspaper sales.96
