In ida b wells time, the whole idea of balance in journalism was still pretty new and changing fast. Many newspapers were straight up funded by political parties. But from the 18 thirties on, boat loads of immigrants were coming to the us. The newspaper industry responded by rating a new kind of urban publication, the penny paper. To do so, they had to shed their partisan baggage and try to sell as many papers as possible. They had to become politically independent and rely on trying to reach a broad a rather than just one political party or another. So he says, what we now call objectivity developed partly because of this new business model. Journalists were trying to be more detached