Newspaper

B

Revolutionary Period

In 1750, 12 newspapers were being published in the American colonies, which then had a total population of about 1 million. By 1775 the population had increased to 2.5 million, and the number of newspapers had jumped to 48. Most of these papers were published weekly, contained only four pages, and typically had a circulation of fewer than 400 copies. The papers printed more essays than news. The essays emphasized the importance of individual freedom, anticipating the American Revolution (1775-1783).

The major limitation on press freedom in Britain in the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century was the stamp tax. This tax had the effect of raising the price of newspapers to the point where few people could afford to buy them. By making newspapers more expensive, the stamp tax reduced the number of newspaper readers. In this way the British government limited the power of the press by limiting its circulation.

The Stamp Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1765, would have placed a similar tax on American newspapers. This legislation required that American paper products, including newspapers, bear a British government stamp as proof of tax payment. Many Americans rebelled against the act, which was to take effect on November 1, 1765. As that day approached, newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Journal ceased publication, announcing that they were 'EXPIRING: In Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again.' Then, cautiously, the newspapers began appearing again, without the stamp. The Stamp Act proved unenforceable and was soon repealed, but it had the unintended effect of uniting many editors and publishers in support of independence from Britain.

During successive waves of colonial protest against the British, newspapers published woodcut prints of divided snakes representing the weakness of the colonies if they remained divided, and woodcuts of coffins (designed by American patriot Paul Revere) representing the victims of the Boston Massacre. Colonial papers also published revolutionist essays by American patriots John Dickinson and Thomas Paine. Papers further demonstrated their revolutionary zeal by publicizing the names of people who weakened prospects for independence, such as those who continued to import British goods in spite of organized boycotts.

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In 1773 colonists gathered in the house of a newspaper editor, Benjamin Edes of the Boston Gazette, to organize the Boston Tea Party—a protest against Parliament’s decision to tax tea imported to the colonies. Among the other leading newspapers in the struggle against British policies were the Massachusetts Spy, published by Isaiah Thomas, and John Holt's New York Journal. Two women, Sarah and Mary Katherine Goddard, published the Providence Gazette, another anti-British voice during these years. American patriot Samuel Adams, who often edited the Boston Gazette, organized the Committees of Correspondence, groups of colonists who garnered public support for independence. In 1776 the front pages of colonial papers carried the Declaration of Independence, an official validation of the fight for independence that had embroiled colonists and British soldiers for more than a year.

During the Revolutionary War, newspapers reported military developments to an increasing number of readers. Business generated by the war brought advertising revenue to the papers. While most newspapers were staunchly proindependence, not all the colonial papers espoused anti-British sentiments. James Rivington's New York Gazetteer gave voice to both the Tory, or pro-British, and the patriot side in the ongoing conflict in what Rivington called his 'Ever Open and Uninfluenced Press.' Despite their professed allegiance to the principle of a free press, the Sons of Liberty—a society of influential American patriots—were infuriated by Rivington's paper. He responded by taking more openly Tory positions. After the Revolution, the New York Gazetteer ceased operation, leaving a largely uniform press in the newly independent colonies.

The new press, however, soon found itself deeply divided after the war—first, concerning the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and, later, when the Constitution of the United States was adopted. The conservative Federalists directly opposed the Anti-Federalists, or Democratic-Republicans, who advocated the rights of states over a central, national leadership. One issue, however, united the newspapers of the country: All supported the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, religion, the right of assembly, and the right to petition Congress. The First Amendment has endured many challenges since its inception, but it remains the cornerstone of the free press in the United States.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 called into question the freedom of the press. The Sedition Act provided that a person could be fined or imprisoned for publishing false or malicious statements about the president or Congress. The Federalists, who supported the law, used it to imprison editors who opposed their policies. However, the Federalists did not invoke the same law against editors who attacked Democratic-Republican policies, such as those of Thomas Jefferson. Reaction against this repressive law helped Jefferson win the presidency in 1800 before it expired in 1801.

C

Penny Press

The Pennsylvania Evening Post and Daily Advertiser, the first daily newspaper in the United States, began publication in 1783 in Philadelphia. By 1800, 20 daily papers were in operation. The number continued to increase in the first three decades of the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution spread and spawned a new working class in the nation's growing cities. Until the 1830s newspapers focused almost entirely on business and political news. Benjamin Henry Day changed this approach in 1833, when he published the first edition of the New York Sun. Day filled his paper with reports of local crime and violence, human-interest stories, and entertainment pieces and sold it for one penny. This event marked the creation of the penny press, which dominated American journalism throughout the rest of the 19th century.

The penny press owes much of its success to the invention of the cylinder press, which printed newspapers quickly and cheaply (see Printing: Printing Presses). The cylinder press was first used in the United States in 1825. Six years later New York industrialist Richard M. Hoe improved the cylinder press by adding a second cylinder, and in 1846 he patented the first rotary press, which employed several cylinders. By 1835 Day was using steam engines, first used in 1814 to drive the presses at the Times in London, to print his rapidly growing Sun. Steam-driven rotary presses made it possible to push newspaper sales much higher. The old style printing press could print perhaps 125 newspapers in an hour. By 1851 the Sun's presses printed 18,000 copies in an hour. The New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times soon followed the Sun’s model. The penny press quickly spread to other Eastern cities and across the country as the nation expanded westward.

D

Newspapers in the 19th Century

The invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1837 dramatically improved the speed and reliability of news reporting. Newspapers became the major customers of the telegraph companies. The high cost of telegraph transmissions led to the formation of telegraph wire services, which distributed stories to many different papers. The Associated Press, now one of the world’s leading wire services, was founded as a cooperative venture by New York newspapers in 1848. The telegraph enabled newspapers to fill their pages with news that happened the previous day in cities located hundreds, then thousands, of miles away. With the successful completion of a transatlantic cable in 1866, American newspapers could print news from Europe with similar speed.

The rise of the wire services also tended to reduce the emphasis on personal opinion in news stories. In addition, as editors and reporters embraced the ideals of science and realism in the late 19th century, they began treating facts with a new respect. After Adolph Simon Ochs acquired the New York Times in 1896, it became one of the world's foremost newspapers. Its reputation was based more on the thoroughness of its reporting than on its editorials or positions on issues.

As newspapers competed with one another to increase circulation, publishers sought new methods to attract readers. Publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began using drawings and comic strips to enliven their newspapers. They also transformed their papers with coverage of scandalous events and sensational stories. These tactics proved successful immediately, and a number of other papers followed suit. Journalists and writers labeled papers that relied on sensational stories or comic strips to attract readers yellow journalism, after the popular Hearst comic strip The Yellow Kid.

Other changes also encouraged newspaper growth at the end of the 19th century. The development of the first Linotype machine in the mid-1880s sped up typesetting by making possible the automatic casting of entire lines of type (see Typesetting Equipment). The regular use of photographs in newspapers, which began in 1897, also broadened readership. Improvements to the rotary press drove newspaper circulation in large cities into the hundreds of thousands. By 1900 daily newspapers in the United States numbered 2,326. Most large cities had several papers each, and many smaller cities had at least two newspapers.

E

Alternative Papers

Even in cities where a number of different papers were in circulation, many people felt newspapers did not represent their interests or points of view. One solution for communities of immigrants who spoke English as a second language was to publish newspapers in their native language. From 1794 to 1798, French speakers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, published the French-language newspaper Courrier Français. Early Spanish-language newspapers appeared in New Orleans in 1808 and in Texas in 1813. Beginning in 1828 members of the Cherokee Nation in northern Georgia published the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in both Cherokee and English. The Jewish Daily Forward, printed in Yiddish, first appeared in New York in 1897; by 1923 local editions were printed in 11 other cities. Waves of immigration to American cities in the first decades of the 20th century increased demand for foreign-language papers. According to one survey, the United States had 160 foreign-language dailies in 1914 and a total of 1,323 foreign-language papers in 1917.

African Americans and their abolitionist supporters also sought alternatives to mainstream newspapers. In 1827 John B. Russwurm and Reverend Samuel Cornish produced the first newspaper published by African Americans in the United States, Freedom's Journal. 'We wish to plead our own cause,' they wrote, 'too long have others spoken for us' (see African American History: Free Black Population). Ten years later, Cornish became editor of the New York newspaper Colored American. The abolitionist crusader William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in 1831 with the expressed purpose of producing a public backlash against slavery. The great African American writer and activist Frederick Douglass started the North Star in 1847 to attack slavery. This publication later became Frederick Douglass’ Weekly and was followed by Douglass’ Monthly, which originated as a supplement to the Weekly.

Women’s rights activists also formed alternative papers to champion their cause. American reformer Amelia Jenks Bloomer published the Lily from 1849 to 1859. Women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the Revolution from 1868 to 1871.

Socialist newspapers also boomed for a time in the United States, reaching a total circulation of 2 million in 1913. Many of these papers ceased publication during World War I (1914-1918), when freedom of the press was severely curtailed. Many alternative publishers were tried under the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917 and amendments passed in 1918, which prohibited printed attacks on the U.S. government.

F

Concentration of Ownership

The number of newspapers published in the United States declined in the first half of the 20th century. In many cases, stiff competition from other papers in the same city led newspapers to merge with the competing papers. For example, New York City once had 20 daily newspapers, but by 1940 it had only 8. Also in 1940, 25 American cities with more than 100,000 residents had only 1 daily newspaper.

Ownership of many of the newspapers that survived shifted from local citizens to national chains. American newspaper publishers Edward Wyllis Scripps and Milton Alexander McRae assembled the first large newspaper chain, the Scripps-McRae League of Newspapers, in 1894. Three years later they developed the Scripps-McRae Press Agency (now United Press International) to supply their chain with articles. Scripps also established the first newspaper syndicate, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, to provide his papers with comics and feature articles. By 1914 the Scripps-McRae League published 23 newspapers.

William Randolph Hearst assembled an even larger news media empire. Hearst owned 6 newspapers in 1904. He steadily acquired more newspapers and related businesses, and by 1922 he owned 20 daily papers, 11 weeklies, 2 wire services, 6 magazines, and a newsreel company. Many people viewed the trend towards chains and consolidation with concern. Fewer newspaper publishers meant fewer editorial perspectives, a problem that magnified exponentially when newspaper publishers also controlled the content of other publications in the same region.

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