Clipping Services

Development

Clipping services have their origins in the expanding media environments of late-nineteenth-century cities. As the number of newspaper titles grew, editions multiplied, and issues expanded in length, a handful of entrepreneurs independently hit on the idea of a press monitoring service. Henry Romeike started the earliest clipping (or cutting) service in London in 1881 and quickly expanded its operations to New York, Paris, and Berlin. Romeike relocated to the United States in 1886 to take charge of his New York office, servicing a roster of entertainers, politicians, industrialists, and socialites eager to keep track of their press coverage. Frank Burrelle, an attorney who had represented mining companies and other clients grappling with image problems, started a similar operation with wife, Nellie, after detecting a demand for such a service among businessmen. Robert Luce, a Boston reporter and later U.S. congressman, started his service at roughly the same time. Burrelle's, Romeike, Luce, and National Press Intelligence took the national lead during the first decades of the twentieth century, while dozens of smaller companies carved out local markets.

Clipping services used industrialized reading operations to provide clients with a steady stream of articles snipped from newspapers and magazines across the country. The thousands of daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals the services subscribed to were reviewed by large staffs of mostly female readers. Each reader, guided by thousands of keywords committed to memory, scanned papers page by page, marking articles of interest. Marked papers were then turned over to razor-wielding clippers, usually men, who sliced out the items and glued them onto color-coded slips. A third group of workers sorted, packaged, and mailed off the clipped stories to clients. Services were paid a fixed retainer fee and collected a few cents per clipping.

Expansion

The clipping services have since the 1960s steadily expanded their operations beyond print media monitoring. Burrelle's began offering local media directories, inventorying all of the newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets in a state or region in 1960. In the 1970s, the company started monitoring radio and television transcripts. Shortly after, VCR technology made it feasible for services to record, edit, and package broadcast news clips.

Throughout its history, the industry has often been derided as a service for self-absorbed celebrities. Admonitions against “reading your own press clippings” even entered the vernacular as a warning to those in danger of becoming too entranced by their public persona. But this image of a frivolous, vanity service has always been a mischarac-terization that overlooks the important social, political, and economic work carried out by the industry. From their start, clipping services sold themselves to politicians, businesses, and other powerful interests as a form of surveillance. Romeike's client list counted leading merchants, manufacturers, and political leaders along with actors and entertainers. Burrelle boasted in a 1905 interview of being able to provide the name of every new amputee in the United States to a client who manufactured artificial limbs. Throughout most of the twentieth century, developers and engineering firms relied on clippings to monitor public budgets, new zoning ordinances, and myriad other concerns to guide their marketing plans. Advertisers used the service to keep an eye on competitor's campaigns. Public relations offices relied heavily on clippings to detect threats to their clients' images and gauge their own success in garnering coverage. The U.S. Department of Defense created its own clipping service to publish a daily journal of cuttings, The Early Bird, that became a reading staple among inside-the-beltway power players. In this sense, the press clipping can best be understood as a control technology developed for the purpose of transforming raw information into social power.

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