Transcript History of American Journalism

Identify the following:

The first continuously published newspaper

The first newspaper affordable to the masses

The case that set a precedent for freedom of the
press

The first nationally published daily newspaper
History of Print Journalism
Newspapers have not always
been the sophisticated, fullcolor extravaganzas we know
today. American journalism
had its humble beginnings in
the Colonial period with the
publication of Benjamin
Harris’ Publick Occurrences
Both Forreign and Domestick,
which was shut down after its
one and only issue on Sept. 26,
1690. (See note)
This newspaper was
printed on three
sheets of stationerysize paper and the
fourth page was left
blank so that readers
could add their own
news before passing
it on to someone else.
Unfortunately, the
essays which this
paper contained did
not please the
authorities, and
Harris had not
bought the required
license, so the paper
was shut down after
just one issue.
The first continuously
published American
newspaper did not come
along for 14 more years.
The Boston News-Letter
premiered on April 24,
1704. The publisher was
John Campbell. The
paper originally appeared
on a single page, printed
on both sides and issued
weekly.
One of the most
sensational stories
published when the NewsLetter was the only
newspaper in the colonies
was the the account of
how Blackbeard the
pirate was killed in handto-hand combat on the
deck of a sloop that had
engaged his ship in battle.
Perhaps the most famous
name in early American
journalism is that of Peter
Zenger. Publisher of the New
York Weekly Journal, Zenger
was accused and tried for
libel against the colonial
British government in 1735.
In this picture, Zenger is
arrested and his printing
press is burned by Colonial
authorities.
Zenger was found innocent and it was that one verdict that paved
the way for a free and independent press in America. For the first
time it was considered proper for the press to question and criticize
the government. This is a pillar of a free press in the United States
and any country that is free. Journalists have to be able to question
the actions of the government in order to make them accountable.
All that is needed for newspapers to become a mass
medium is a good idea. Along comes Benjamin Day in
1833. Day opened the New York Sun and created the
Penny Press, charging only one cent per issue, making
newspapers affordable, for the first time, for the masses.
He also changed the content of newspapers to make it
more sensational and more popular to the lower class. He
hired boys to sell the newspapers on street corners. It was
the Penny Press that also began using advertising as a
way to bring readers information, but advertising also
helped by paying for the printing and distribution of
newspapers.
The Civil War era brought some “new” technology
to the publishing industry. Photography became a
popular addition to newspapers. Matthew Brady
set up a camera on the battlefields and
photographed the soldiers at war. One of his
photographs appears above.
An invention that
helped speed
news along was
the telegraph.
Reporters were
able to send
encoded news
back to their
papers as it was
happening.
Abraham
Lincoln became
the first
president to
direct armies in
the field directly
from the White
House.
Because the
telegraph wires
kept going down
on a regular
basis, sometimes
the story that a
reporter was
trying to send got
cut off before it
was finished.
To alleviate this
situation,
reporters
developed the
“inverted
pyramid” form
of writing,
putting the most
important facts
at the beginning
of the story.
This way, the
most important
part of the story
would most likely
reach the
newspaper, and if
anything got cut
off, it would be
the lesser
important details
of what
happened.
In the mid-1890s, Pulitzer (in the New York World)
and Hearst (in the San Francisco Examiner and later
the New York Morning Journal) transformed
newspapers with sensational and scandalous news
coverage, the use of drawings and the inclusion of
more features such as comic strips.
After Pulitzer
began publishing
color comic
sections that
included a strip
entitled "The
Yellow Kid" (left)
in early 1896, this
type of paper was
labeled "yellow
journalism."
Yellow Kid
cartoonist Richard
Outcault
One of the most popular
reporters of the Yellow
Journalism era was a woman
named Elizabeth Cochrane
who wrote under the name
“Nellie Bly.” She wrote with
anger and compassion. She
wrote to expose the many
wrongs that developed in
nineteenth century cities after
the industrial boom. Most of
her reporting was on women.
She directed her articles to
upper class women to open
their eyes and hearts to their
impoverished, hungry, hopeless
sisters. She felt very strongly
that women and their issues
were not represented in
newspapers or any where else.
The high point in her life,
however was the round-theworld trip, which she made in
72 days, 6 hours,11 minutes
and 14 seconds. Joseph Pulitzer
sent a special train to meet her
return to San Francisco, and
she was greeted by fireworks,
gun salutes, brass bands and
parade on Broadway.
In 1895 Nellie Bly married
a millionaire, Robert
Seaman, 50 years older
than herself, and retired.
She lost most of his money
after he died and in 1919
tried unsuccessfully to
make a comeback. She died
in 1920.
The American public purchased more
newspapers because of the sensational writing,
and this strongly encouraged Hearst and
Pulitzer’s newspapers to write more
sensationalized stories.
This cartoon made fun of the way Hearst and
Pulitzer were each claiming to “own” the story
about the Spanish-American War.
As the U.S. population in the
latter half of the 20th
century has shifted from
cities to suburbs, and with
the growth in competition
from other media, many
large city newspapers have
had to cease publication,
merge with their
competitors, or be taken over
by a chain of newspaper
publishers such as the
Gannett Company or
Knight-Ridder Inc.
In 1982, using satellite
transmission and color
presses, the Gannett chain
established a new national
newspaper, USA Today,
published and circulated
throughout the United
States, Europe, and Asia.
As the U.S. population in the
latter half of the 20th
century has shifted from
cities to suburbs, and with
the growth in competition
from other media, many
large city newspapers have
had to cease publication,
merge with their
competitors, or be taken over
by a chain of newspaper
publishers such as the
Gannett Company or
Knight-Ridder Inc.
Since the invention of the
telegraph, which enormously
facilitated the rapid
gathering of news, the great
news agencies, such as
Reuters in England, Agence
France-Presse in France, and
Associated Press and United
Press International in the
United States, have sold their
services to newspapers and
to their associate members.
Improvements in
photocomposition and in
printing (especially the web
offset press), have enhanced
the quality of print and made
possible the publication of
huge editions at great speed.
Computer technology has
also had an enormous impact
on the production of news
and newspapers.
By the 1990s this technology
had also affected the nature
of newspapers, as the first
independent on-line daily
appeared on the Internet. By
the decade's end some 700
papers had web sites, some
of which carried news
gathered by their own staffs,
and papers regularly
scooped themselves by
publishing electronically
before the print edition
appeared.