History of American newspapers facts for kids
The history of American newspapers begins in the early 18th century with the publication of the first colonial newspapers. American newspapers began as modest affairs—a sideline for printers. They became a political force in the campaign for American independence. Following independence the first amendment to U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press. The Postal Service Act of 1792 provided substantial subsidies: Newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny and beyond for 1.5 cents, when first class postage ranged from six cents to a quarter.
The American press grew rapidly during the First Party System (1790s–1810s) when both parties sponsored papers to reach their loyal partisans. From the 1830s onward, the Penny press began to play a major role in American journalism. Technological advancements such as the telegraph and faster printing presses in the 1840s also helped to expand the press of the nation as it experienced rapid economic and demographic growth. Editors typically became the local party spokesman, and hard-hitting editorials were widely reprinted.
By 1900 major newspapers had become profitable powerhouses of advocacy, muckraking and sensationalism, along with serious, and objective news-gathering. During the early 20th century, prior to rise of television, the average American read several newspapers per-day. Starting in the 1920s changes in technology again morphed the nature of American journalism as radio and later, television, began to play increasingly important competitive roles.
In the late 20th century, much of American journalism became housed in big media chains. With the coming of digital journalism in the 21st century, all newspapers faced a business crisis as readers turned to the Internet for sources and advertisers followed them.
Top row: The Union and Advertiser (William Purcell) - The Omaha Daily Bee (Edward Rosewater) - The Boston Daily Globe (Charles H. Taylor) - Boston Morning Journal (William Warland Clapp) - The Kansas City Times (Morrison Mumford) - The Pittsburgh Dispatch (M. O'Neill).
Middle row: Albany Evening Journal (John A. Sleicher) - The Milwaukee Sentinel (Horace Rublee) - The Philadelphia Record (William M. Singerly) - The New York Times (George Jones) - The Philadelphia Press (Charles Emory Smith) - The Daily Inter Ocean (William Penn Nixon) - The News and Courier (Francis Warrington Dawson).
Bottom row: Buffalo Express (James Newson Matthews) - The Daily Pioneer Press (Joseph A. Wheelock) - The Atlanta Constitution (Henry W. Grady & Evan Howell) - San Francisco Chronicle (Michael H. de Young) - The Washington Post (Stilson Hutchins)
Contents
Colonial period
On September 25, 1690, the first colonial newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published in Boston. However, it was suppressed after its first edition.
In 1704, the governor allowed The Boston News-Letter, a weekly, to be published, and it became the first continuously published newspaper in the colonies. Soon after, weekly papers began publishing in New York and Philadelphia.
Merchants published mainly commercial papers. For example, The Boston Daily Advertiser reported on ship arrivals and departures.
Prior to the 1830s, a majority of US newspapers were aligned with a political party or platform. Political parties would sponsor anonymous political figures in The Federal Republican and Daily Gazette. This was called partisan press and was not unbiased in opinion.
The first editors discovered readers loved it when they criticized the local governor; the governors discovered they could shut down the newspapers. The most dramatic confrontation came in New York in 1734, where the governor brought John Peter Zenger to trial for criminal libel after the publication of satirical attacks. The jury acquitted Zenger, who became the iconic American hero for freedom of the press. The result was an emerging tension between the media and the government. By the mid-1760s, there were 24 weekly newspapers in the 13 colonies (only New Jersey was lacking one), and the satirical attack on government became common practice in American newspapers.
Revolutionary epoch and early national era: 1770–1820
Weekly newspapers in major cities and towns were strongholds of patriotism (although there were a few Loyalist papers). They printed many pamphlets, announcements, patriotic letters and pronouncements. On the eve of Revolution Virginia had three separate weeklies at the same time named The Virginia Gazette—they all kept up a heavy fire against the king and his governors.
The number and geographical distribution of newspapers grew apace. In 1800 there were between 150 and 200; by 1810 there were 366, and during the next two decades the increase was at least equally rapid. With astonishing promptness the press followed the sparse population as it trickled westward and down the Ohio or penetrated the more northerly forests. By 1835 papers had spread to the Mississippi River and beyond, from Texas to St. Louis, throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and into Wisconsin. These pioneer papers, poorly written, poorly printed, and partisan often beyond all reason, served a greater than a merely local purpose in sending weekly to every locality their hundreds of messages of good and evil report, of politics and trade, of weather and crops, that helped immeasurably to bind the far-flung population into a nation. Every congressman wrote regularly to his own local paper; other correspondents were called upon for like service, and in some instances the country editors established extensive and reliable lines of intelligence; but most of them depended on the bundle of exchanges from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, and reciprocally the city papers made good use of their country exchanges.
As the number of cities of 8,000 or more population grew rapidly so too the daily newspapers were increasing in number. The first had appeared in Philadelphia and New York in 1784 and 1785; in 1796 one appeared in Boston. By 1810 there were twenty-seven in the country—one in the city of Washington, five in Maryland, seven in New York, nine in Pennsylvania, three in South Carolina, and two in Louisiana. As early as 1835 the Detroit Free Press began its long career.
The press in the Party System: 1820–1890
The political and journalistic situation made the administration organ one of the characteristic features of the period. Fenno's Gazette had served the purpose for Washington and Adams; but the first great example of the type was the National Intelligencer established in October 1800, by Samuel Harrison Smith, to support the administration of Jefferson and of successive presidents until after Jackson it was thrown into the opposition, and The United States Telegraph, edited by Duff Green, became the official paper. It was replaced at the close of 1830 by a new paper, The Globe, under the editorship of Francis P. Blair, one of the ablest of all ante-bellum political editors, who, with John P. Rives, conducted it until the changing standards and conditions in journalism rendered the administration organ obsolescent. The Globe was displaced in 1841 by another paper called The National Intelligencer, which in turn gave way to The Madisonian. Thomas Ritchie was in 1845 called from his long service on The Richmond Enquirer to found, on the remains of The Globe, the Washington Union, to speak for the Polk administration and to reconcile the factions of democracy. Neither the Union nor its successors, which maintained the semblance of official support until 1860, ever occupied the commanding position held by the Telegraph and The Globe, but for forty years the administration organs had been the leaders when political journalism was dominant. Their influence was shared and increased by such political editors as M. M. Noah and James Watson Webb of the New York Courier and Enquirer, Solomon Southwick of the Albany Register, Edwin Croswell, who edited The Argus and who, supported by Martin Van Buren and others, formed what was known as the "Albany Regency." The "Regency", the Richmond "Junta", which centered in the Enquirer, and the "Kitchen Cabinet" headed by the editor of The Globe, formed one of the most powerful political and journalistic cabals that the country has ever known. Their decline, in the late thirties, was coincident with great changes, both political and journalistic, and though successors arose, their kind was not again so prominent or influential. The newspaper of national scope was passing away, yielding to the influence of the telegraph and the railroad, which robbed the Washington press of its claim to prestige as the chief source of political news. At the same time politics was losing its predominating importance. The public had many other interests, and by a new spirit and type of journalism was being trained to make greater and more various demands upon the journalistic resources of its papers.
The administration organ presents but one aspect of a tendency in which political newspapers generally gained in editorial individuality, and both the papers and their editors acquired greater personal and editorial influence. The beginnings of the era of personal journalism were to be found early in the 19th century. Even before Nathan Hale had shown the way to editorial responsibility, Thomas Ritchie, in the Richmond Enquirer in the second decade of the century, had combined with an effective development of the established use of anonymous letters on current questions a system of editorial discussion that soon extended his reputation and the influence of his newspaper far beyond the boundaries of Virginia. Washington Barrow and the Nashville Banner, Amos Kendall and The Argus of Western America, G. W. Kendall and the New Orleans Picayune, John M. Francis and the Troy Times, and Charles Hammond and the Cincinnati Gazette, to mention but a few among many, illustrate the rise of editors to individual power and prominence in the third and later decades. Notable among these political editors was John Moncure Daniel, who just before 1850 became editor of the Richmond Examiner and soon made it the leading newspaper of the South. Perhaps no better example need be sought of brilliant invective and literary pungency in American journalism just prior to and during the Civil War than in Daniel's contributions to the Examiner.
Though it could still be said that "too many of our gazettes are in the hands of persons destitute at once of the urbanity of gentlemen, the information of scholars, and the principles of virtue", a fact due largely to the intensity of party spirit, the profession was by no means without editors who exhibited all these qualities, and put them into American journalism. William Coleman, for instance, who, encouraged by Alexander Hamilton, founded the New York Evening Post in 1801, was a man of high purposes, good training, and noble ideals. The Evening Post, reflecting variously the fine qualities of the editor, exemplified the improvement in tone and illustrated the growing importance of editorial writing, as did a dozen or more papers in the early decades of the century.
Editorials
The editorial page was assuming something of its modern form. The editorial signed with a pseudonym gradually died, but unsigned editorial comment and leading articles did not become an established feature until after 1814, when Nathan Hale made them a characteristic of the newly established Boston Daily Advertiser. From that time on they grew in importance until in the succeeding period of personal journalism they were the most vital part of the greater papers.
Penny press
In the 1830s new high speed presses allowed the cheap printing of tens of thousands of papers a day. The problem was to sell them to a mass audience, which required new business techniques (such as rapid citywide delivery) and a new style of journalism that would attract new audiences. Politics, scandal, and sensationalism worked.
James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1794–1872) took the lead in New York. In a decade of unsuccessful effort as a political journalist he had become familiar with the increasing enterprise in news-gathering. He despised the upscale journalism of the day—the seriousness of tone, the phlegmatic dignity, the party affiliations, the sense of responsibility. He believed journalists were fools to think that they could best serve their own purposes by serving the politicians. As Washington correspondent for the New York Enquirer, he wrote vivacious, gossipy prattle, full of insignificant and entertaining detail, to which he added keen characterization and deft allusions. Bennett saw a public who would not buy a serious paper at any price, who had a vast and indiscriminate curiosity better satisfied with gossip than discussion, with sensation rather than fact. The idea that he did much to develop rested on the success of the one-cent press created by the establishment of the New York Sun in 1833. To pay at such a price these papers must have large circulations, sought among the public that had not been accustomed to buy papers, and gained by printing news of the street, shop, and factory. To reach this public Bennett began the New York Herald.
The Herald, like the Sun, was at once successful, and was remarkably influential in altering journalistic practices. The penny press expanded its coverage into "personals"—short paid paragraphs by men and women looking for companionship. They revealed people's intimate relationships to a public audience and allowed city folk to connect with and understand their neighbors in an increasingly anonymous metropolis. They included heavy doses of imagination and fiction, typically romantic, highly stylized. Sometimes the same person updated the paragraph regularly, making it like a serial short short story. Moralists were aghast, and warned of the ruin of young girls. (Commenting on censorship of books in the 1920s, New York Mayor Jimmy Walker said he had seen many girls ruined, but never by reading.) More worrisome to the elders they reflected a loss of community control over the city's youth, suggesting to Protestant leaders the need for agencies like the YMCA to provide wholesome companionship. Personals are still included in many papers and magazines into the 21st century.
Specialty media
In a period of widespread unrest and change many specialized forms of journalism sprang up—religious, educational, agricultural, and commercial magazines proliferated. The Catholic immigrants started arriving in large numbers and major dioceses sponsored their own newspapers. For example, between 1845 and 1861, the Diocese of St. Louis saw four newspapers come and go: the Catholic News-Letter (1845–48), The Shepherd of the Valley (1850–54), The St. Louis Daily Leader (1855–56), and the Western Banner (1858–61). The Boston Pilot was the leading Irish Catholic paper whose news and editorials were reprinted often by other Catholic papers the leading Irish Catholic newspaper of the period. The paper tried to balance support of the Union with its opposition to emancipation, while maintaining Irish American patriotism.
Evangelical Protestants began discussing temperance, prohibition, and Even broach the subject of votes for women. Abolition of slavery after 1830 became a highly inflammatory topic promoted by evangelical Protestants in the North. The leading abolitionist newspaper was William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, first issued January 1, 1831, which denounced slavery as a sin against God that had to be immediately stopped. Many abolitionist papers were excluded from the mails; their circulation was forcibly prevented in the South; in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Alton, and elsewhere, editors were assaulted, offices were attacked and destroyed; rewards were offered in the South for the capture of Greeley and Garrison; in a few instances editors, like Lovejoy at Alton, lost their lives at the hands of mobs.
Rural papers
Nearly every county seat, and most towns of more than 500 or 1000 population sponsored one or more weekly newspapers. Politics was of major interest, with the editor-owner typically deeply involved in local party organizations. However, the paper also contained local news, and presented literary columns and book excerpts that catered to an emerging middle class literate audience. A typical rural newspaper provided its readers with a substantial source of national and international news and political commentary, typically reprinted from metropolitan newspapers. Comparison of a subscriber list for 1849 with data from the 1850 census indicates a readership dominated by property owners but reflecting a cross-section of the population, with personal accounts suggesting the newspaper also reached a wider non-subscribing audience. In addition, the major metropolitan daily newspapers often prepared weekly editions for circulation to the countryside. Most famously the Weekly New York Tribune was jammed with political, economic and cultural news and features, and was a major resource for the Whig and Republican parties, as well as a window on the international world, and the New York and European cultural scenes. The expansion of the Rural Free Delivery program, which allowed easier access to daily newspapers to rural areas of the United States in the early twentieth century, increased support for populist parties and positions.
Mass markets, yellow journalism and muckrakers, 1890–1920
Muckrakers
A muckraker is an American English term for a person who investigates and exposes issues of corruption. There were widely held values, such as political corruption, corporate crime, child labor, conditions in slums and prisons, unsanitary conditions in food processing plants (such as meat), fraudulent claims by manufacturers of patent medicines, labor racketeering, and similar topics. In British English however the term is applied to sensationalist scandal-mongering journalism, not driven by any social value.
The term muckraker is most usually associated in America with a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics in the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the 1920s. It also applies to post 1960 journalists who follow in the tradition of those from that period. See History of American newspapers for Muckrakers in the daily press.
Muckrakers have most often sought, in the past, to serve the public interest by uncovering crime, corruption, waste, fraud and abuse in both the public and private sectors. In the early 1900s, muckrakers shed light on such issues by writing books and articles for popular magazines and newspapers such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Collier's Weekly and McClure's. Some of the most famous of the early muckrakers are Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker.
Early muckrakers:
- Nellie Bly (1864–1922) Ten Days in a Mad-House
- Thomas W. Lawson (1857–1924) Frenzied Finance (1906) on Amalgamated Copper stock scandal
- Fremont Older (1856–1935) San Francisco corruption and the case of Tom Mooney
- Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936) The Shame of the Cities (1904)
- Charles Edward Russell (1860–1941)—investigated Beef Trust, Georgia's prison
- Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) expose, The History of the Standard Oil Company
- Burton J. Hendrick (1870–1949)—"The Story of Life Insurance" May–November 1906 McClure's magazine
- Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)—exposed crime in labor unions in the 1940s
- I.F. Stone (1907–1989)—McCarthyism and Vietnam War, published newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly
- George Seldes (1890–1995)—Freedom of the Press (1935) and Lords of the Press (1938), blacklisted during the 1950s period of McCarthyism
Yellow journalism
Yellow journalism is a pejorative reference to journalism that features scandal-mongering, sensationalism, jingoism or other unethical or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or individual journalists.
The term originated during the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal from 1895 to about 1898, and can refer specifically to this period. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well. The New York Press coined the term "Yellow Journalism" in early 1897 to describe the papers of Pulitzer and Hearst.
Newsboys in the front line of the circulation wars
Sensationalism made readers want to purchase newspapers, and circulation managers had to find new ways to handle the much heavier load. They typically relied primarily on newspaper hawkers or newsboy who sold individual copies of one paper on downtown streets. There also were plenty of newsstands that sold different titles from a stationary stand or storefront. Vending machines came in the 1890s. Home delivery was not uncommon in the early 1900, but became increasingly important as paperboys began to deliver more newspapers to subscribers. A busy corner would have several hawkers, each representing one major newspapers. They might carry a poster board with giant headlines, provided by the newspaper. The downtown newsboy started fading out after World War II, when publishers began to emphasize home delivery. Teenage newsboys delivered papers on a daily basis for subscribers who paid them monthly. Hawkers typically purchased a bundle of 100 copies from a wholesaler, who in turn purchased them from the publisher. Legally every state considered the newsboys to be independent contractors, and not employees, so they generally were not subject to child labor laws.
Newsboys' were not employees of the newspapers but rather purchased the papers from wholesalers in packets of 100 and peddled them as independent agents. Unsold papers could not be returned. The newsboys typically earned around 30 cents a day and often worked until late at night. Cries of "Extra, extra!" were often heard into the morning hours as newsboys attempted to hawk every last paper.
The local delivery boy pulling a wagon or riding a bicycle while tossing the morning or evening paper onto the front porch was a product of the 1930s. Newspapers lost circulation and advertising as the economy went down, and needed to boost revenues and cut expenses. Starting in 1930, the International Circulation Managers' Association launched a national operation to show local newspaper management how to boost home newspaper readership. The designed a prepackaged curriculum in door-to-door subscription marketing. This movement created the middle-class newspaper boy and permanently altered the relationship between teenage years and entrepreneurial enterprise. Circulation managers solved their problem. The teenage boys. They were still independent contractors rather than employees, but the circulation manager designed the routes, and taught the boys how to collect and account for the subscription money. To inspire the young entrepreneurs, they created a distinctive gendered managerial philosophy of masculine guidance. It inspired the boys' entrepreneurship and stabilized their work habits, while providing extra money for tight family budgets.
American photographer Lewis Hine crusaded against child labor by taking photographs that exposed bad conditions, especially in factories and coal mines. In sharp contrast, however, Hine's photographs of newsboys them did not depict another appalling form of dangerous child labor or immigrant poverty, for they were not employees. There were working on their own as independent young entrepreneurs and Hine captures the image of comradeship, youthful masculinity and emerging entrepreneurship. The symbolic newsboy became an iconic image in discourses about childhood, ambition and independence.
Newsboys became an iconic image of youthful entrepreneurship. Famous American newsboys included Bruce Barton, Ralph Bunche, Joe DiMaggio, Thomas Edison, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joe Kennedy, Sam Rayburn, Walter Reuther, David Sarnoff, Cardinal Spellman, Harry S. Truman and Mark Twain.
Ethnic press
While the English language press served the general population, practically every ethnic group had its own newspapers in their own language. Many immigrant populations in the 19th century were drawn to the rich farmlands of the Great Plains states such as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. In small communities that drew large influxes of specific ethnic groups community newspapers became a place where political and religious interests could be promoted in familiar languages. Many of these papers also wanted to embody the spirit of American democracy within their readers. One paper committed to ensuring all Danish-American citizens took part and exercised their rights was the Den Danske Pionerr or The Danish Pioneer in translation. This paper was backed by Sophus F. Neble a Danish immigrant who had failed at dairy farming and instead set to typing and enhancing the paper in Omaha, Nebraska. Under Neble that paper rose to a circulation of 40,000 during World War I.
German publishers were one of the most influential immigrant groups in developing the ethnic press. By 1890 there were 1,000 German-language newspapers published each year in the United States. Prior to World War I Germans were accepted as a reputable immigrant group with over five million immigrants moving to the country between 1820 and 1924. However once America entered the conflict national opinion changed and German culture was no longer welcome in the country. A large amount of anger was focused at German newspapers which some American's viewed as supporting Germany in the war effort. In October 1917 Congress passed legislation that sought to control foreign-language press. The laws stated that newspapers must translate all printed material concerning the war. The German papers nearly all folded in World War I, and after 1950 the other ethnic groups had largely dropped foreign language papers. This drop of foreign-press publications during World War I was not only felt by German-Americans. In 1915 the circulation of the daily Yiddish newspapers was half a million in New York City alone, and 600,000 nationally. In addition thousands more subscribed to the numerous weekly papers and the many magazines.
Representative was the situation in Chicago, where the Polish Americans sustained diverse political cultures, each with its own newspaper. In 1920 the community had a choice of five daily papers - from the Socialist Dziennik Ludowy [People's daily] (1907–25) to the Polish Roman Catholic Union's Dziennik Zjednoczenia [Union daily] (1921–39) - all of which supported workers' struggles for better working conditions and were part of a broader program of cultural and educational activities. The decision to subscribe to a particular paper reaffirmed a particular ideology or institutional network based on ethnicity and class, which lent itself to different alliances and different strategies. Most papers preached assimilation into middle class American values and supported Americanization programs, but still included news of the home country.
After 1965, there was a large surge of new immigration, especially from Asia. They set up few major papers. By the 21st century, over 10 percent of the population was Hispanic. They patronized Spanish-language radio and television, but outside large cities it was hard to find Spanish newspapers, books or magazines for sale.
Chains and syndicates, 1900–1960
E. W. Scripps founder of the first national newspaper chain in the United States, sought in the early years of the 20th century to create syndicated services based on product differentiation while appealing to the needs of his readers. Success, Scripps believed, depended on providing what competing newspapers did not. To achieve this end while controlling costs and centralizing management, Scripps developed a national wire service (United Press International), a news features service (Newspaper Enterprise Association), and other services. Scripps successfully reached a large market at low costs in new and different ways and captured the interests of a wider range of readers, especially women who were more interested in features than in political news. However, the local editors lost a degree of autonomy and local news coverage diminished significantly.
In part to aid in his political ambitions, Hearst opened newspapers in other cities, among them Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. By the mid-1920s he had a nationwide string of 28 newspapers, among them the Los Angeles Examiner, the Boston American, the Chicago Examiner, the Detroit Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Washington Times and Washington Herald and his flagship the San Francisco Examiner. In 1924 he opened the New York Daily Mirror, a racy tabloid frankly imitating the New York Daily News. Among his other holdings were the magazines Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazaar; two news services, Universal News and International News Service; King Features Syndicate; and a film company, Cosmopolitan Productions, as well as real estate. Hearst used his influence to help Franklin D. Roosevelt win the 1932 Democratic nomination. However he broke with Roosevelt in 1935 because Roosevelt did not want to fund the veterans' bonus. After that the Hearst chain became the bitter enemy of the New Deal from the right. The other major chains likewise were hostile, and in 1936 Roosevelt had the support of only 10% of the nation's newspapers (by circulation).
Competition: television and Internet, 1970–present
A 2015 report from the Brookings Institution shows that the number of newspapers per hundred million population fell from 1,200 (in 1945) to 400 in 2014. Over that same period, circulation per capita declined from 35 percent in the mid-1940s to under 15 percent. The number of newspaper journalists has decreased from 43,000 in 1978 to 33,000 in 2015. Other traditional news media have also suffered. Since 1980 the television networks have lost half their audience for evening newscasts; the audience for radio news has shrunk by 40%.
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See also
- African-American newspapers
- History of journalism
- History of newspaper publishing
- German American journalism
- Irish American journalism
- Mass media and American politics
- Preservation (library and archival science), for preservation of old copies
