History of American Journalism

1
History of Journalism
In America
2
History of American Journalism

• Newspapers have not always been the
  sophisticated, full-color 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.

3

• This newspaper was printed on three sheets of
  stationery-size paper and the fourth page was
  left blank so that readers could add their own
  news before passing it on to someone else.

4

• 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.

5

• 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.

6

• In the early years of its publication the
  News-Letter was filled mostly with news from
  London journals detailing the intrigues of
  English politics, and a variety of events
  concerning the European wars. The rest of the
  newspaper was filled with items listing ship
  arrivals, deaths, sermons, political
  appointments, fires, accidents and the like.

7

• One of the most sensational stories published
  when the News-Letter was the only newspaper in
  the colonies was the the account of how
  Blackbeard the pirate was killed in hand-to-hand
  combat on the deck of a sloop that had engaged
  his ship in battle.

8

• On view here is the May 14, 1761 issue of the
  News-Letter. The front page is displayed in its
  entirety. As was the custom then, the front page
  was devoted to events overseas. This issue
  contains news from London, a speech by the King
  to the House of Commons, and various accounts
  from Westminster and Whitehall

9

• Also displayed from this issue is an ad from
  the back page for a Scheme of a Lottery. The
  lottery was created to sell 6000 tickets at 2
  each to raise funds to pave the highway in
  Charlestown from the Ferry to the Neck. Of the
  12,000 to be raised, according to the ad,
  10,800 is earmarked for prizes and 1200 for
  paving the highway.

10

• 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.

11

• 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.

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One of the most famous journalists of the
Colonial Era was Benjamin Franklin. At only 12
years old, he became a printing apprentice for
his brother. He eventually ran away from home.
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He ran to Pennsylvania at 17. Because he had some
printing experience, he worked on a paper there
and eventually bought the Pennsylvania Gazette.

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Under Franklin, the Gazette, a four-page
publication, became the best of its era.

15

Join or Die was a famous editorial cartoon in the
Philadelpia Gazette. The snake is labeled with
all 13 colonies.
16
Franklin also was famous for his Poor
Richards Almanac. This Almanac was
full of maxims, or witty sayings, and
proverbs like, Haste makes waste, and
Do not take up a wife until you have a
house (and a fire) to put her in.

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• 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.

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• Newspapers of the day cost about 10 cents
  each . . . too expensive for the masses. But
  there was a large literate audience out there.
  Day took advantage of the fact that he could
  print thousands of papers inexpensively and sold
  the papers for a penny each.  

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• He also changed the content of newspapers to
  make it more sensational and more popular to the
  lower class. He hired boys to hawk 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.

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• Cheap newspapers sold to the workers were a
  hit. His idea was huge success and newspapers
  crossed that line that made them truly mass
  media. Others were quick to follow his lead. They
  became so powerful that they were called Lords of
  the Press.

21

• 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.

22

• 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.

23

• Abraham Lincoln became the first president to
  direct armies in the field directly from the
  White House.

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• During the darkest days of the terrible war
  Lincoln would pace back and forth in the
  telegraph office awaiting news of the fate of the
  nation that would emerge from the new telegraph
  invention.

25

• 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.

26

• To alleviate this situation, reporters
  developed the inverted pyramid form of writing,
  putting the most important facts at the beginning
  of the story.

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• 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.

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• As newspapers began to compete more and more
  with one another to increase circulation and
  obtain more advertising revenue, a different type
  of journalism was developed by publishers Joseph
  Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

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• 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.

30

• 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."

31

• Drawn by R.F. Outcault, the popular (if
  now-unfunny) strip became a prize in the struggle
  between Pulitzer and Hearst in the New York
  newspaper wars. They continuously competed for
  stories, writers and power.

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• Outcault moved the strip to Hearst's papers
  after nine months, where it competed with a
  Pulitzer-sponsored version of itself.

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• Yellow Kid cartoonist Richard Outcault

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• 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
  under cover to expose the many wrongs that
  developed in nineteenth century cities after the
  industrial boom. Most of her reporting was on
  women.

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• 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.

36

• She wanted people to know different womens
  plights and understand why some became fallen
  women." She hoped that by reading her articles
  other women would want to help their sisters. She
  wanted people to realize the unfairness that
  women were afforded at the turn of the century.

37

• She got a job on the Pittsburgh Dispatch
  when she wrote a furious letter complaining about
  an editorial that claimed that women were good
  for little but housework. She covered social
  questions such as divorce, slum life, and
  conditions in Mexico for the paper.

38

• In 1887 she moved to Joseph Pulitzer's New
  York World, for which she exposed the conditions
  in which the insane lived by pretending to be mad
  and getting herself committed to the asylum on
  Blackwell's Island. She also investigated
  sweat-shops tenements, the world of perry crime
  and Corps de Ballet by the same methods.

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• The high point in her life, however was the
  round-the-world 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.

40

• 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.

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• After William Randolph Hearst moved to New
  York, he and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readers
  by making their papers more and more sensational.

42

• In 1895, Hearst purchased the New York
  Morning Journal and entered into a head-to-head
  circulation war with his former mentor, Joseph
  Pulitzer, owner of the New York World.

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• To increase circulation both started to
  include articles about the Cuban Insurrection. 
  Many stories in both newspaper greatly
  exaggerated their claims to make the stories more
  sensational. 

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• Both Hearst and Pulitzer published images of
  Spanish troops placing Cubans into concentration
  camps where they were suffered and died from
  disease and hunger.

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• The American public purchased more newspapers
  because of the sensational writing, and this
  strongly encouraged Hearst and Pulitzers
  newspapers to write more sensationalized stories. 

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• Some of the most sensationalized articles
  concerned Butcher Weyler and his
  reconcentration policies, and the Cuban
  Insurrection.

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• Circulation continued to soar as the Journal
  reported that an American civilian was imprisoned
  without a trial and stating that no American was
  safe in Cuba as long as Weyler was in charge.

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• Another major  story that enraged the American
  public was written by one of Hearst's reporters, 
  Richard Harding Davis,  who came upon the story
  while on his way back from Cuba. 

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• The reporter learned of the story of Senorita
  Clemencia Arango.  Arango was forced out of Cuba
  for helping the rebels, and was supposedly
  strip-searched by Spanish detectives. 

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• This angered the Victorian ideals of the
  American public even though the story was found
  to be in error and that a woman searched Arango
  and not Spanish male detectives.

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• This cartoon made fun of the way Hearst and
  Pulitzer were each claiming to own the story
  about the Spanish-American War.

52
In 1972, two burglars got caught stealing from
a government building. The normally small
incident was made national when two reporters,
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were able to tie
the robbery to the president.

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Woodward and Bernstein used an
anonymous source named Deep
Throat to uncover the story. They met
in dark alleys and parking lots to get
information. Lots of people tried to guess who
Deep Throat was, but no one knew for sure until
Mark Felt announced in 2005 that it was him.

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The burglars were also trying to plant wire
taps and listening devices in the Democratic
National Committee. It was part of a long series
of illegal activities to war with the Democratic
party.

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Claiming, I am not a crook, the president
denied any involvement, but the reporters story
was true. Nixon was impeached and resigned the
presidency. Gerald Ford, who just died, took over.

56
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.

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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.

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The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and
USA Today are read all over the country small
towns and rural districts usually have daily or
weekly local papers made up largely of syndicated
matter, with a page or two of local news and
editorials. These local papers are frequently
influential political organs.

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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.

60
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
news-papers and to their associate members.

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Improvements in photocomposition and in printing
(especially the web offset press), have enhanced
the quality of print and made publication
possible at great speed. Modern newspapers are
supported primarily by the sale of advertising
space. Computer technology has also had an
enormous impact on the production of news and
newspapers.

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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.

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Online papers

• Some online papers only give the headlines. To
  get full stories, you must pay a membership fee
  and log on.

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Free online papers

• Other papers offer their online editions for free.