The technological imperative imposed by this fiercely competitive newspaper market also fundamentally changed the character of press production techniques, and with it the relations of production within the newspaper industry. Where José C. Paz and Cosme Mariño printed the first issue of La Prensa themselves with a hand-driven rotary press, by 1935 the paper’s 1,050-horsepower presses stood two stories high and forty-six meters long.90 Crítica updated its presses to the latest Hoe Superspeed upon Botana’s transfer of the paper’s facilities to Avenida de Mayo 1333. In singular Crítica fashion, the paper’s journalists boasted that the extraordinary publishing capacity of the machine more than compensated for the nearly year-long process of its assembly: “with a single hour of continuous publishing the Hoe rotary can encircle the city in a belt of newspapers.”91 In a poem dedicated to the new rotary, poet and Crítica journalist Raúl González Tuñón even found inspiration in its seemingly boundless technological modernity, proclaiming it a “song of steel” and “the heart of Buenos Aires.”92 El Mundo and the other major newspapers of the city maintained similar installations. For newspaper proprietors, access to capital goods and industrial inputs of ever-increasing cost and sophistication was not only an indicator of the power and progressive nature of their papers; it proved absolutely essential to the survival of their enterprises.
Fig. 4
Printer at a Hoe printing press, November 1941.
Fig. 5
Printers at work in La Prensa, October 1924.
This industrialization of the newspaper production process implied not only the growing complexity of the press’s division of labor, but the emergence of capitalist relations of production—and class conflict—in the newspaper industry. Prior to the establishment of La Prensa and La Nación, printers had already begun the process of unionization, eventually creating the Federación Gráfica Bonaerense (FGB) for the typographers of the Federal Capital and Greater Buenos Aires in 1907. By 1922, when members of the Argentine Socialist Party gained effective control of the union, the FGB maintained a strong presence among the 350 printers employed with La Prensa, and had made inroads at the other major dailies as well.93 Similarly, news vendors (popularly called canillitas) unionized in 1920 as the Federación de Vendedores de Diarios.94 Less than two years later, the canillitas mounted a bitter strike against La Razón, which only hastened the decline of the evening paper. After the first canillita death at the hands of strikebreakers from the right-wing Liga Patriótica, Botana confidante Eduardo “El Diente” Dughera organized protective caravans to cover vendors in what had become a virtual war among evening newspaper distribution networks.95 When the strike ended nearly ten months later, not only had the vendors’ union achieved broad recognition, but Crítica had emerged as the country’s dominant evening paper and “El Diente” had become the “undisputed boss” of what remained the dangerous business of newspaper sales.96
Fig. 6
News vendors prepare El Mundo for distribution, mid-1930s.
The emergence of the commercial press also profoundly altered the relationship between proprietors and journalists, and between Argentine intellectuals and the market. Where politician-journalist-proprietors of the nineteenth-century press like Bartolomé Mitre had given way to journalism entrepreneurs like Natalio Botana, the newsroom itself also became filled with wage earners. In an environment of growing demand for texts of all kinds, the commodification of journalism practice, as Ángel Rama has observed, allowed intellectuals far greater latitude in their relationship to state power and political factions.97 It did, however, subordinate many of them to the demands of newspaper proprietors and the commercial logical of the newspaper industry. If Martín Fierro author José Hernández, in the era of factional journalism, had viewed the journalist as a “precursor to the political leader,” by the 1920s journalism had become an activity that at best could serve as a source of inspiration, avenue of opportunity, and economic subsidy for writers and artists; at worst, newspapers simply provided a meager paycheck in exchange for long hours and the subordination of writing to the demands of editors and the whims of the market.98
Indeed, the enormous success of many dailies depended in great measure upon the array of truly impressive literary talent that gravitated toward the practice of journalism. Many of Argentina’s most important writers of the 1920s and 1930s came to work for Botana’s Crítica, including Jorge Luís Borges, Roberto Arlt, Raúl and Enrique González Tuñón, Leopoldo Marechal, Edmundo Guibourg, Ulyses Petit de Murat, and Pablo Rojas Paz. Borges’s direction of Crítica’s Revista Multicolor de los Sábados in 1933 and 1934, a brief but memorable period, also made the sensationalist daily a literary rival of La Nación: in addition to the writings of Borges, Petit de Murat, Enrique González Tuñón, and Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, the supplement carried Borges’s translations of international figures like O. Henry, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.99 Similarly, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío reached his fame while writing for La Nación, the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí served as a correspondent at the paper from 1882 to 1891, and novelist Eduardo Mallea directed La Nación’s literary supplement in the 1930s and 1940s.100 Even the editorial writing that appeared in the paper tended to better that of La Prensa in expressive quality and intellectual subtlety, and La Nación at different times boasted regular editorialists of the caliber (and disparate political views) of Joaquín V. González, Leopoldo Lugones, and Alberto Gerchunoff.101
Despite the glorification of the bohemian lives of journalists in the course of the 1920s—especially those of the literary figures associated with Crítica—the newsroom was a place of long hours and generally poor pay. In his memoirs of his time at Botana’s newspaper, Roberto Tálice, who joined the paper, like many of his colleagues, while in his mid-teens, recounts that not only did his wages cover a small room in a boardinghouse and little more, but “Crítica has made us into fakirs.” Tálice even credited the omnipresence of drug use among the paper’s journalists less to bohemian experimentation than to the more pragmatic demands of their work routine: “Although it pains me to recognize it,” Tálice would later write, “many attribute the miracle of such great resistance to sleep and alcohol to the little envelopes of cocaine, sometimes vials, containing a gram dose of the purest Merk.”102
The experience of Tálice, as well as that of other journalists, embodies a profound shift in the nature of writing as a social practice. The commodification of journalistic labor, though less stark than that of printers’ and newspaper vendors’ labor, rested uneasily with the cultural nature not just of the poetry, short stories, and novels of newspaper employees like Raúl González Tuñón, Jorge Luís Borges, and Roberto Arlt, but with the content of newspapers themselves. In his 1933 Radiografía de la pampa, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada denounced the particular form that the commodification of writing took within the newspaper industry, where authors became subject to the commercial demands of advertisers and found their individual expression brutally subsumed within the collective enterprise of the newsroom. Little remedy existed for the situation, however, since “having nothing to eat is worse… . Those intellectuals free of the politics of the press businesses are destroyed at the root.”103 Novelist Leopoldo Marechal, even more dramatically, evokes the merging of anonymous