SOURCE: Badaracco, Claire. “The Influence of Publicity Typologies on Sherwood Anderson's News Values.” Journalism Quarterly 66, no. 4 (winter 1989): 979-86.

In the following essay, Badaracco analyzes the influence of advertising and marketing techniques on Anderson's early-twentieth-century news columns in which he explored the development of the emerging American business class.

The rise of journalistic mass markets and commercial language trades, as the advertising journal writer Sherwood Anderson predicted, would so saturate the future American Public's appetite for news that its understanding of publicity would become second nature.¹ Advertisements, political propaganda, business pamphlets, brochures, catalogs and trade journals (what Frank Luther Mott² classified as synonymous with “house organs”) were so abundant, according to Lawrence Romaine, that a catalogue of this type of printing in America between 1744-1900 would comprise 50 volumes.³ Mott's categorization bears re-examination: there is greater differentiation among this classification of commercial writing than has been suggested to date, and...