Advertising has been a part of American newspapers since the country's first continuous newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, was founded in 1704. From the earliest days of the newspapers in colonial America, advertising has been a necessary element in newspapers, serving as a source of revenue that was vital in defraying the costs associated with publishing a paper. However, throughout the history of the country, a few U.S. publishers have tried to establish successful newspapers without advertising and thus without the necessity of acceding to the wishes of advertisers.
Charles Dana was one of those who envisioned the possibility of operating an adless newspaper. Dana was the owner and editor of the New York Sun, a newspaper run with revenues from advertisers. In 1868, he made the elimination of advertising from the New York Sun a primary objective. Though he was unable to achieve the goal of publishing a newspaper without any reliance on advertising, he did reduce the paper's dependence on advertising and relegated the wishes of advertisers to a secondary position behind the news of the day, often removing advertisements from a particular issue of the Sun if important news required additional space.
Early in the twentieth century, E.W. Scripps made several attempts to achieve success in newspaper publishing without advertising. Scripps had first achieved success in publishing by creating an empire in the penny press with inexpensive publications targeted at the working class. He disliked having advertisements in his papers because dependency on advertisers left him beholden to advertisers and also because the advertisements themselves took up space that he much preferred to devote to news. After he had achieved success in the penny press, he decided to pursue the goal of operating a chain of adless newspapers. His plan was to first establish a successful adless newspaper in New York City and then build a chain of papers by opening newspapers successively in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. He began planning his opening venture in New York City; however, his plans for an adless paper in New York City fell apart before the first paper was printed when the newly appointed editor of the paper died without warning.
Scripps next attempted to establish an adless paper in Chicago, and this attempt was somewhat more fruitful than the attempt in New York, though Scripps did not manage to achieve long-term success with an adless paper in Chicago. Scripps' adless paper in Chicago was the Chicago Day Book, which was first published in September of 1911. This paper achieved small, regular growth, which encouraged Scripps to believe that an adless paper could potentially prove financially feasible. However, it was actually profitable for only one month during its existence, and it never came close to the steady base of 30,000 customers that it needed to achieve long-term success. Publication of the Chicago Day Book was stopped in 1917. During the period that Scripps was trying to turn the Chicago Day Book into a successful paper, he opened a second adless paper, the Philadelphia News-Post. This paper was operated without any advertising for a two-year period from 1912 to 1914 before losses forced its closing.
Another attempt was made to operate a successful adless newspaper when Ralph Ingersoll founded the left-wing daily paper PM in 1940 in New York City. Ingersoll had served as an editor for Fortune and Life magazines before starting PM. In PM, he hoped to create a high-quality paper managed by the writers, one that was unencumbered with advertising and was supported by subscriptions. To get the paper started, he raised funds from an impressive group of successful businessmen and hired well-known and well-respected writers, including Dorothy Parker and Theodore Seuss Geisel, who later became known as Dr. Seuss. Because of a huge amount of publicity surrounding the introduction of the paper, first-day sales were an incredible 450,000 copies. However, daily circulation quickly dropped off to approximately 30,000 copies; within three months, the paper had lost so much money that Ingersoll and his investors were forced to sell out to Chicago's Marshall Field, who eventually added advertisements to the papers.
