Perhaps just as strikingly, by the 1920s a La Prensa monopoly on classified advertising insulated the paper’s owners from economic dependence not just on any political faction or social class, but on any single group of business advertisers as well. These thousands of classified advertisements, which covered the first five to twelve pages of the newspaper, extended the public of La Prensa well beyond the upper-class and educated middle-class readership that editors almost exclusively addressed in the paper’s editorials.39 La Prensa achieved an average circulation of over 250,000 copies daily in 1927, growing to over 380,000 daily and nearly 500,000 for the Sunday edition by 1946, while its pre–World War II record stood at 745,894 copies on January 1, 1935.40 This rapid rise in circulation necessitated a division of labor and level of capital investment that was in stark contrast to the artisanal production of nineteenth-century newspapers. In fact, by early 1946 La Prensa employed 1,698 persons and had consumed twenty-six thousand tons of imported newsprint the previous year—the scarcity and high price of newsprint due to the world conflict notwithstanding.41 Despite the political troubles the paper faced in the subsequent Peronist years, its circulation only continued to climb and the ranks of journalists, printers, and other staff at the paper to swell.
The tremendous wealth generated by La Prensa brought with it a rearticulation not only of the relationships between newspapers, market, and political society, but of that between the Argentine press and foreign news organizations. Indeed, La Prensa even played a key role in changing the character of international news agencies. In January 1919, editor and proprietor Ezequiel Paz contracted the services of Scripps’s struggling United Press, which had only months earlier lost its contract with La Nación. When, six months later, the United Press—and thus La Prensa in Argentina—broke the story of the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Paz signed a full contract with the agency.42 La Prensa, which already maintained an extensive system of correspondents in Europe and Latin America, effectively merged its foreign service with that of the United Press. The paper began paying up to U.S. $550,000 per year to the news service, an amount that one former United Press journalist would later call “probably the largest sum of money that any newspaper in the world paid to any news-gathering organization.”43 Extensive coverage of Italy and Spain for La Prensa—the countries of origin of the majority of Argentina’s immigrants—essentially acted as a subsidy to the expansion of the news service in Europe, since the detailed information and analysis gathered at Ezequiel Paz’s behest remained property of the United Press for subsequent distribution to the rest of the agency’s clients.44 Paz’s demand that the service give special attention to the Arica-Tacna dispute between Chile and Peru in 1925 further boosted the fortunes of the agency, and by the end of the year the once struggling United Press served 95 percent of the business available on the continent.45 This intertwining of the Argentine paper and the Washington-based United Press became extreme: between 1920 and 1930, La Prensa essentially underwrote the expansion of what would become one of the world’s more important news agencies, and the Paz family’s newspaper continued as the United Press’s single largest client until the paper’s expropriation in 1951.
Its high circulation made individual issues of La Prensa an integral if ephemeral part of the urban landscape, while the La Prensa building itself stood as an imposing monument not just to the wealth the paper generated but to the broader social, cultural, and political pretensions of the Paz family. Designed by Parisian-trained architects Alberto Gainza and Carlos Agote and finished in 1898, the large, ornate building stands on the Avenida de Mayo, the long avenue anchored on either end by the seats of the national Executive and the national Congress, respectively. Just meters from the Plaza de Mayo, the La Prensa building shares a common wall with the offices of the mayor of the Federal Capital. The building’s cupola held what would become the paper’s emblem: a three-thousand-kilogram French sculpture of an Argentine Marianne—the personification of the republican virtues of Reason and Liberty—standing with extended arms, carrying both a large lantern and a copy of La Prensa.46 The spatial message of the Paz family is clear, and often found itself explicitly articulated in the pages of the paper: La Prensa stood as an equal and independent fourth branch of the Argentine state itself, illuminating and watching over the workings of the other branches.
Fig. 2
The La Prensa offices, 1938.
Fig. 3
Statue to be placed atop La Prensa offices.
In addition to housing La Prensa’s newsrooms, the building held an “Industrial Chemical Clinic” for agriculturists and merchants, medical and legal clinics open to the public, an extensive library, a restaurant, rooms for fencing and billiards, a theater, and a large banquet room.47 Following his visit during the Argentine Centennial celebrations in 1910, former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau wrote,
The building is one of the sights of the city. Every department of the paper is lodged in a way that unites the most perfect of means to the end in view. Simplicity of background, a scrupulous cleanliness, comfort for every worker therein, with a highly specialized method that gathers together all the varied workers on the staff to direct them toward their final end and aim, namely, promptness and accuracy of news. With all this there are outside services, such as a dispensary, so complete it would need a specialist to catalogue it, and suites of apartments that are placed at the disposal of persons whom the Prensa considers worthy of honor. I confess that I thought less luxury in this part of the building would have been more to the taste of the poor distinguished men who are lodged there, since a comparison with their own modest homes would be wholly to the disadvantage of the latter.48
La Prensa was the most technologically and stylistically modern of the Buenos Aires newspapers in the first decades of the century, and the paper’s building itself seemed to embody the promise of an unbounded, elegant, and self-confident Argentine modernity.
La Prensa’s closest journalistic peer also grew out of the tradition of factional journalism to become one of Latin America’s premier dailies, even if it did not attain the same degree of commercial success as the Paz family paper. On January 4, 1870, less than three months after the birth of La Prensa, La Nación appeared under the direction of former president of the republic Bartolomé Mitre. Although it had been preceded by La Nación Argentina, originally Mitrista but now the political mouthpiece of a competing faction of the Partido Liberal, Mitre announced that the new paper would differ from that paper in more than politics: the first issue of La Nación carried the subheading “A General Interest Newspaper,” proclaiming a break from the journalistic model of the partisan press and the embrace of a broader journalistic program.49
With national unity at least provisionally secured and the bases of a stable political order emerging, Mitre ostensibly abandoned the overt factionalism of La Nación Argentina to place La Nación within the French model of journalism of opinion—as a supporter not of immediate and personal political interests, but as caretaker of the long-term stability of oligarchic liberalism. In the paper’s first editorial, “New Horizons,” Mitre wrote, “The great conflict has finished… . La Nación Argentina was a [means of] struggle. La Nación will be a [means of] propaganda… . . With the nationality founded it is necessary to propagate and defend those principles in which it is inspired, the institutions that are its basis, the guarantees that it has created for all, the practical ends it seeks, [and] the moral and material means that must be placed at the service of those ends.”50 Yet, like La Prensa, La Nación remained tied to the political aspirations of its founder, who led the 1874 revolt against Avellaneda, and to those of its subsequent owner, Emilio Mitre, who headed the Mitrista Republican Party.51