19 Searching for Similarity
Eric Hoyt, Ben Pettis, Lesley Stevenson, Sam Hansen · 2025
During the early 1920s, few niche businesses were more crowded than the trade press of the US film industry.Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, and Exhibitor's Trade Review published in New York City and competed for dominance among a nationwide readership.Many more regional papers sprang up in the nation's distribution hubs, such as Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis, to serve their local industry communities.And yet still more trade papers covered the movies: Camera!published in Los Angeles for the production community; Harrison's Reports issued weekly reviews that were "free from the influence of film advertising"; and the most famous entertainment trade paper of all, Variety, reported on the movies alongside vaudeville and "legitimate theatre."How unique were these trade papers?This is a question relevant to today's researchers, who encounter all of the above-mentioned trade papers (and more) when running searches within the Media History Digital Library's search platform, Lantern.Is a review in Exhibitor's Trade Review interchangeable with a review in Exhibitors Herald?Should a news item that appears in Motion Picture News be interpreted any differently than one that appears in Moving Picture World?Questions of similarity (and its inverse, distinctiveness) were also on the minds of the publications' original readers and editors more than a century ago.Exhibitors "are watching the motion picture journals more or less critically, " observed W. Stephen Bush in 1917, who had recently left his position editing Moving Picture World to take a leadership role at Exhibitor's Trade Review. 1 The motion picture distributors purchased large amounts of advertising within the same trade papers that reviewed their products.Could the reviews be trusted?How much of the new content was the work of the papers' own writers, editors, and correspondents?And Table 19.