Muckraking For much of the 1800s, newspapers and magazines had been relatively expensive and mainly a medium for poems, short stories, and other literary works. Besides the largely entertainment oriented approach of these magazines, the majority of the people that read them were upper class citizens of the cities. However, with innovations in the late 19th century that reduced the cost of printing, the price of the printed communication medium dropped drastically. Instead of upper class city-dwellers being the exclusive audience of newspapers and magazines, the middle and even lower class citiz