In the early 1800s, many newspapers remained political mouthpieces. Whig friends of Horace Greeley persuaded him to found the New York Tribune, and trumpet high tariffs and the United States Bank, key parts of the Whig economic program. He later switched to the Republican Party and ran for president.
By the late 1800s, sophisticated—and costly—printing equipment emerged. The journalist William Allen White wrote disdainfully that “a newspaper was an organ sometimes political but, at bottom and secretly, an organ of some financial group in the community.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, big corporations and newspaper chains were driving weaker publications out of business. To avoid chasing readers away, views became broader and less extreme.
Today, barriers to entry have tumbled down, hurting conventional news outlets while helping publications such as Politico, Puck, or Punchbowl News beyond anything Meyer and Morley could have imagined.
One key to success, Meyer believed, was the creation of a respected—and independent—editorial page as well as lively news columns.
At the paper’s offices overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Morley was given the task of assembling a group of smart writers and editors. One was Anna Youngman, who had taught at Wellesley College and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Soon her editorials on the economy were widely quoted, as Fortune put it, for their “insight, vigor, and prestige.” Other Post staffers wrote of the deteriorating political situation in Europe, or of the programs President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched to revive the economy.
In 1938, a rival paper merged with the Post, bringing popular comic strips and columns by luminaries such as Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Parker. The paper was no longer just a local paper, but a powerful national one.
Money still mattered, and Meyer lost a lot on the paper—more than $1.3 million in 1935 alone, equal to about $30 million today. His daughter, the late Katharine Graham, wrote in her autobiography Personal History: A Memoir that the paper’s ability to woo retail advertisers “continued to elude him until over a decade later, after the war.”
In addition to buying financial independence, Meyer worried about projecting political independence.
When he bought the paper, he sought to avoid looking like a tool of one party or the other. Soon after buying the Post, he turned down an offer that would have made him chairman of the Republican National Committee.