Hello and welcome to our newest venture, a blog dedicated to reporting on the hottest and most talked about American news. We are very excited to begin our work, but we thought it was necessary to first offer you a warm welcome and then explain our motivations. You can find the latter in our About Us section.
We wanted to dedicate this space to the history of American news publishing, just because we love the story detailing this beautiful tradition and we also find it interesting and worthy of mention. Enjoy reading!
Humble Beginnings
The first sort of news reporting in the United States started when it was still a set of colonies. The first reporter was thus John Pory who reported on the state of the land and the health of the colonists back in the early 1600’s.
A few decades later, Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, was published in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning on September 25, 1690; it was the first paper with regular issues in colonial times. Papers were distributed in pubs and churches; they were also often read out loud by the town crier.
However, these papers were usually written by hand, which greatly affected the outreach, as you can imagine. It wasn’t until April 24, 1704, that the American colonies had a reliable printed newspaper that detailed the daily news. That paper was The Boston News-Letter, published continuously for 72 years.
Publishing started flourishing once the United States gained independence from Britain and became a full-fledged country. The newspapers of the young republic differed significantly from the ones we know today. They offered a ground for politicians and thinkers to present their views on governing the country, often featuring long detailed essays on the topic.
Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States, famously also founded the New York Post in 1791; the newspaper still exists today.
Before he did that, however, his essays found their way on the pages of the Independent Journal, the New York Packet, and The Daily Advertiser, along with works by other founding fathers such as James Madison and John Jay. These essays are now contained in the collection known as The Federalist or The Federalist Papers.
It made sense that these first newspapers were highly political as this was the only way for politicians to communicate with their constituents and to offer them transparency by showing them how this revolutionary democratic republic was going to operate.
Of course, not all newspapers, in fact very few of them, were neutral in nature. The pages were the battlefield of political opponents who weren’t afraid to personally attack each other. It’s needless to say how much these partisan papers influenced elections.
With the innovation of the printing press in the 1830’s, newspapers could afford to publish more articles and decided to use the space to include current events. These innovations also significantly lowered the price, which allowed more people to become regular readers.
Another massive step towards mass-publishing was the invention of the linotype in the 19th century, which again increased the size of the newspaper and lowered the cost.
The form changed the content and the frequency of new issues. Skilled editors began treating publishing as a lucrative business and tried to accommodate the mass reader by featuring stories that would appeal to them such as sports coverage, crime stories, local celebrities and so on.
On the other side of the spectrum, war correspondence found its way to the page with the beginning of the Civil War. Northern newspapers were quick to report on the events with which they could garner support and mobilize the nation. Journalists were sent alongside troops to report on each battle, while the newspapers were publishing the casualty list to inform the families of the fallen soldiers.
After the Union was secured and everything returned to normal, editors used the tactics of the politicians that came before them and began battling each other. The most famous rivalry is that between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The two men created Yellow Journalism, a fierce fight for readership that concentrated on sensationalist coverage.
The newspaper industry was without a rival for centuries until radio and television came along. The latter won the battle, but then the Internet took over and the newspapers found their way back, albeit in an online form, much like this blog.
