Data from the 1860 U.S. Products of Industry censuses on Iowa and Wisconsin are analyzed to provide benchmarks against which to compare other data on investment, raw materials and labor costs, and the volume of products for frontier weekly newspapers. They answer questions about what it cost to start a paper, how many people were employed, what raw materials cost, how productive weeklies were as businesses, and how newspapers compared to other businesses.
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Dyer et al. (1994) studied this question.