The Experiment Known as PM

In the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, Christopher Daly has an interesting story about PM, the ambitious experiment to publish an ad-free newspaper in New York.  The brainchild of Ralph Ingersoll, who had been one of the driving forces behind Time, Fortune and Life,  PM was meant to be a unabashedly liberal writer's newspaper when it was launched in 1840.  It lasted only eight years but during that time the newspaper published many hard-hitting exposes.  It also made innovative use of photographs, graphics and maps.  As Daly writes, today's new media start-ups will recognize in the publication the financial struggle to deliver a new kind of journalism.  But the real message for today, he argues, was PM's attempt "to produce a publication that serves the interests of people who are closer to the bottom than the top in terms of power and influence."