> But I do think concentration matters. Ninety years ago, before the networks,
> and in the days when people like Hearst had just come on the scene and still
> faced serious competition, there were hundreds of thousands of subscribers
> and probably millions of readers of the Appeal to Reason (which, if I recall
> correctly, was published out of Kansas). That's not true today -- and I
> don't think this is a small point.
"Appeal to Reason was founded by Julius Wayland in 1897. The socialist journal was a mixture of articles and extracts from radical books by people such as Tom Paine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, William Morris, Laurence Gronlund and Edward Bellamy.
Julius Wayland moved to Girard, Kansas, and in 1900 employed Fred Warren as his co-editor. Warren was a well-known figure on the left and managed to persuade some of America's leading progressives to contribute to the journal. This included Jack London, Mary 'Mother' Jones, Upton Sinclair, Kate Richards O'Hare, Scott Nearing, Joe Haaglund Hill, Ralph Chaplin, Stephen Crane, Helen Keller and Eugene Debs. By 1902 its circulation reached 150,000, making it the fourth highest of any weekly in the United States."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAappealR.htm
Around the time that Appeal to Reason was pulished in Kansas, an anarchist weekly newspaper titled "Lucifer, the Lightbearer" was published in Valley Falls, Kansas. It published Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. Favorite topics of the newspaper included feminism, sexuality, marriage, anarchism and atheisim.
While Lucifer didn't have the circulation of Appeal to Reason, it's evident that it did enjoy a widespread readership. Several months ago I looked at some facsimiles of the newspaper at the Emma Goldman Papers archive. Judging from the letters to the editor and the distribution statement, Lucifer was read in small towns around the Midwest.
Chuck Infoshop.org