Before 1890 books, magazines, and newspapers were unable to print photographs. Publishers who wanted to use photographs had to turn to engravers and illustrators to redraw them as lithographs or block prints, an expensive and time-consuming process. Then in the 1890s, a series of inventions combined to enable publishers to print black-and-white images quickly and inexpensively. The result revolutionized the process of reporting the news.

Before a photographic image could be printed, inventors had to solve a number of problems. First, they had to develop a system for printing a range of shades between white and black. A method also had to be devised for breaking a photograph up into a series of dots. The resulting images had to be transferred to printing plates that could work on large, continuous feed, rotary presses. In all, printing black-and-white photographs required the redesign of high-speed rotary printing presses, the creation of new rolls of paper of uniform thickness, the development of new inks, and, most important of all, the creation of a new way to transfer a photograph to a printing plate.

The solutions to all these problems gradually emerged in the 1880s. First, printers invented a method to print shades of gray by exposing a bichromated gelatin film to light. When washed in water, a gelatin relief of the negative was created which, under pressure, produced an impression on a lead plate. The hollows in the lead plate could then contain varying amounts of ink and thus print different shades of gray. But printing these plates required paper of higher quality and more uniform thickness than that used previously.

To turn the picture into a series of lines and dots, the image was "screened." A finely ruled glass screen was created by etching a piece of glass with thousands of lines running in the vertical direction, blackening the depressions, and gluing the glass to a second piece of glass whose etched lines ran in a horizontal direction. When a photograph was exposed through this screen, the picture was broken up into thousands of dots. The density of dots in a particular area of the photographic plate determined the blackness of that area. The new halftone photographic film was printed on a sensitized metallic surface that was then etched to produce the desired printing plate. Any blurred areas on the halftone plate could be retouched by engravers to improve the quality of the image. Photoengraving, which was often called halftone printing, allowed pictures to be printed directly from photographs and cut the cost from $300 a picture to less than $20 without sacrificing quality.

In the 1890s magazines such as McClure's, Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, and Ladies Home Journal quickly exploited the new process. Newspapers, once they had discovered how to transfer this process to the softer, more porous newsprint, quickly followed suit. Adolph Och's New York Times, and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal published Sunday newsmagazines heavily illustrated with photographs of sports celebrities and socialites, reduced the price of their papers, and vastly expanded circulation.

The publication of halftone photographs gave magazines and newspapers a contemporary, journalistic look, which created a sense of immediacy--of being "inside" and behind the scenes. Pictures, short articles, and sensational language introduced immigrant and middle-class readers alike to the accidents, crimes, and murders that made up what one magazine editor called the "whirlpool of real life." In the process the media helped create cultural communities that were connected not by shared interaction but by shared information. Some pictures took armchair travelers to exotic overseas destinations; others gave ordinary Americans a peek into the private lives of celebrities, as when Theodore Roosevelt invited cameras into the family quarters of the White House. The vast increase in published photographs also spurred public action to tackle child labor, slum housing, and industrial safety.

Advertisers were quick to take advantage of the new technology to spur interest in bicycles, cereals, and other consumer items. Cosmopolitan magazine ran an article on "bicycling for women" that featured the latest attire.

Critics protested that photographs reinforced the tendency to react without thinking. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but its value would be far lower, they asserted, if it replaced published articles that analyzed society's problems. Finally, the halftone photograph, with its low cost and accessibility, rendered obsolete the artists that magazines and newspapers had previously relied on for wood engravings, pen drawings, and etchings. While the photographs might seem more "real," they, too, were subject to cropping and distortion.

Nevertheless, publishers now recognized that published photographs possessed the power to persuade and inspire. In the political realm, parties moved from mobilizing voters to advertising charismatic candidates, like Theodore Roosevelt, whose colorful lives could be endlessly photographed. Like it or not, photographs would become an increasingly important force in the public's understanding of politics and world events.