NEWSPAPERS

NEWSPAPERS. The story of America's newspapers has been one of change. Newspapers have changed with and have been changed by their target readers, whether members of a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group; a political party; or society's most elite or poorest members. From the first American newspaper printed in 1690 through the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the United States boasted 1,480 daily and 7,689 total newspapers, the industry has sought always to appeal to Americans experiencing immigration, adjustment to a new land, acculturation, and stability. For the American newspaper the equation has been simple, change or die. Many have died.

Americans have started newspapers for many reasons, including to support religious or political beliefs, to express outrage over social issues, and simply to make a buck. For those newspapers to last, however, the one imperative was to attract readers. At its heart the U.S. newspaper industry was a commercial enterprise, and readers led to profits. For even those newspapers supported by special interest groups, like unions, religious or ethnic organizations, or political parties, the need to appeal to readers has been a constant.

Newspapers have evolved throughout the years so much that some scholars liken its progress to the natural sciences, a matter of evolution from one form into another. The earliest newspapers were simple affairs, often composed of only four small pages distributed to only a few elites in colonial New England's small cities. By the twenty-first century American newspapers offered more words than a novel, hundreds of pages, thousands of advertisements, and a circulation spanning the globe. Thousands of people throughout the world read online versions. Others, reminiscent of earlier newspapers, are simple sheets targeting small, often marginalized groups.

The American newspaper story has been filled with flamboyant figures, cultural changes, technological revolutions, and a brashness mirroring that of the United States itself. Newspapers swept west along with the settlers and helped turn small towns into cities. They thundered at injustice and battled the elite. They preached to the converted and to those disdaining their messages. They attacked minorities and were minorities' voices. They gave communities not only a place to read about themselves but also a place that turned the eyes of community members outward upon the world. The story of American newspapers is one of a window on life in America.

Getting a Foothold

The earliest-known newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, lasted only one edition. Benjamin Harris, who published it in Boston, on 25 September

1690, had neglected to get official permission, and perhaps worse, he printed news from the colonies, which disturbed colonial officials. It was banned. Fourteen years later the Boston postmaster John Campbell, who had been sending handwritten newsletters to a select few in New England, bought a wooden press, and the first successful newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, was born. His was more acceptable. He got permission from authorities beforehand and focused on foreign news. Published by authority of the government and reporting foreign news, it copied the British press, which was licensed and forbidden to criticize the government. But just as America was beginning to chafe under restrictive British rules in the eighteenth century, the young American newspaper industry became unruly as well. Papers were generally published part-time by printers, and publishers objected to the licensing requirements and prior restraints on publication imposed by the British rules.

The early years were marked by repeated disputes between publishers and authorities. Benjamin Franklin first became noticed because of such a dispute. His brother James Franklin had started the New England Courant in Boston in 1821, and Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to him as a printer at age twelve. James Franklin, a fiery sort, was imprisoned for criticizing the governor, and at age seventeen Benjamin Franklin took over the paper while his brother was imprisoned. Benjamin Franklin later moved to Philadelphia and started a number of newspapers, including one in German.

Colonial newspapers were generally politically neutral, and some publishers did not want to offend anyone. Their news was that of interest mainly to the upper and middle classes, especially news from Britain and news of shipping. Publishers were frequently related to each other, and some had patrons, wealthy individuals who found it useful to sponsor a newspaper. Boston was the center of the early colonial newspaper world, but Philadelphia became a second center by the middle of the eighteenth century. American newspapers were urban institutions, and they spread with the growth of towns and cities. Thus they followed the urbanization of America. The first newspapers were centered in New England, then they moved into the South, then slowly they moved into the West. Publishers were mostly men, although Elizabeth Timothy took over the South Carolina Gazette in 1738, when her husband, Lewis Timothy, died.

In colonial America religion and religious leaders were influential, and they played significant roles in the early newspapers. Many newspapers were founded for religious purposes, printing sermons, supporting an immigrant group's religion, and performing missionary functions as with those printed to convert Native Americans to Christianity. New England's well-educated clergy promoted the press, although Puritan leaders often engaged in spirited debates with newspaper leaders. In truth these vigorous debates helped the fledgling newspaper industry become profitable in New England, and their absence is considered one significant reason that the newspaper industry grew more slowly in the South.

The colonial era was a time of immigration, and many immigrants spoke foreign tongues. Immigrants often settled in enclaves, distinct groups of one ethnic origin within larger settlements of different backgrounds. Immigrant enclaves found newspapers in their languages welcome aids in creating a sense of community, teaching new comers how to adjust to this new culture, and bringing news of their compatriots both in America and in the Old World. Benjamin Franklin's Die Philadelphische Zeitung of 1732 was typical of the foreign-language press as it was located in a city with a sizable German-speaking population. Literate Germans dominated the foreign-language newspapers for a century and a half, although virtually every other immigrant group published newspapers in its native tongue. Among the first were French and Scandinavian language newspapers.

However, a German writing in English epitomized the growing dissatisfaction of American newspapers with colonial rulers. John Peter Zenger immigrated to America from Germany with his family in 1710 and was apprenticed a year later to the printer William Bradford in New York. After seven years Zenger started his own paper, bankrolled by a group opposed to the newly appointed governor William Cosby. One of Zenger's sponsors, James Alexander, wrote a number of articles recasting British libertarian thought, especially the need for freedom of expression, for the New World. The articles were published anonymously in Zenger's paper, and the editor was arrested in 1734 for "printing and publishing several seditious libels." He spent nine months in jail. At the trial Zenger's attorney argued basically that the articles were true. The prosecution correctly cited the law, which said truth did not matter. But a jury sided with Zenger, and trut has a defense persisted into the twenty-first century.

Newspaper disputes with colonial authorities were only one source of dissent during the middle of the eighteenth-century. American newspapers began reporting perceived British injustices. When in 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, levying taxes on admittance to the bar, legal documents, business papers, and newspapers, many publishers abandoned political neutrality. Patriot newspapers, such as the Boston Gazette of 1755–1775, opposed Boston taxes and urged boycotts. It covered the Boston Massacre in 1770, when several Bostonians were killed in struggles with British soldiers. Not all newspapers sided with the colonies, but those remaining loyal to England suffered. For example, in 1773 the New York Loyalist James Rivington founded Rivington's New York Gazetter, which supported the British. He was embattled almost from the start and was jailed for a short time in 1775. After his printing house was destroyed by a mob on 10 May 1775, he fled to England, then returned with British troops. His Revolutionary War Loyalist newspaper, the New-York Royal Gazette, became synonymous with Toryism.

Following the Revolution the United States was a good place for newspapers. Advertising increased dramatically, and the excitement of a new nation led to increased readership. The new country's first successful daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, started in 1784. More efficient presses lowered production costs, which led to a rapid increase in newspapers, especially dailies. Distribution was mostly by mail, and low postal rates helped. The increased importance of advertising was evident even in the names of newspapers. Twenty of the nation's twenty-four dailies in 1800 carried the word "advertiser" as part of their names. Even the government seemed to be on the side of newspapers. In 1788 the First Amendment to the Constitution aimed to protect the press. As the nation opened the West, newspapers went along and became local boosters of the frontier towns in Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

While the official name of the new nation was the United States, its citizens were anything but united in viewpoints, and the country became embroiled in a dispute over federalism. Political parties formed behind those wanting a strong federal government and those urging state sovereignty. Early debates over postal laws indicated that legislators recognized the effects of communication on modernity, and newspapers soon became leading weapons in the struggle. Both sides started or supported their own newspapers. The era was highlighted by partisan newspapers, like the Federalist Gazette of the United States, to which Alexander Hamilton was a frequent contributor, and the Jeffersonian National Gazette. One result of the struggle between the two factions was the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, aimed at silencing Thomas Jefferson's followers. One of the four laws, the Sedition Act, outlawed newspaper criticism of government officials and effectively nullified the First Amendment. Nearly 10 percent of existing American newspapers were charged under the act. However, it did provide for truth as a defense, thereby putting the Zenger verdict into law. The Sedition Act was allowed to expire in 1801, after national elections put Jefferson's party into power.

The first third of the nineteenth century was a time of expansion for the United States. The National Intelligencer was founded in 1800 as a paper of record, and it was the first to cover Congress directly. Newspapers changed their emphasis from advertising vehicles, although advertising was still a major part of their incomes. Most of their financing came from either political parties or circulation. Papers remained expensive, costing about six cents a paper. Only the mercantile and political elites could afford to buy newspapers. Ever catering to readers, editors focused on politics, business, and the comings and goings of ships in the port. Nevertheless many newspapers were feisty, fighting political or social battles. Not at all atypical of the time were lengthy attacks on immigrants, abolitionists, or black Americans, such as those in the New York Examiner in 1827 that led the Reverend Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm to found the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal. It lasted only a short time but was quickly followed by about thirty black newspapers in the next decade and even more as the abolition question heated up in the years preceding the Civil War. This lively press set the stage for the most dramatic evolution in American newspapers, the penny press.

The Era of the Reporter

The penny press derived its name from its cost, a penny apiece. It challenged the existing elite and the newspapers that served them by developing a new attitude toward advertising, cutting prices to become accessible to the masses, and by paying reporters to cover the news. Earlier newspapers had depended upon friends of the editor or publisher to provide news. The penny press revolutionized the way news was produced, distributed, and consumed. Due to faster presses and cheaper newsprint, penny papers cost less to produce. Advertising underwent a dramatic shift during this period. Previously those who advertised were those who read the paper, and advertising was seen as a mechanism for spreading information among an elite class. But the penny papers catered to the needs of all, and business advertised to inform readers about available products. These new newspapers were sold by street vendors one paper at a time. Thus the paper was available to all and needed to appeal to all for those sales. This led to a change in the kind of news covered. Readers wanted something other than strong opinions. With the rise in reporting, news became more local.

The first penny paper was Benjamin Day's New York Sun in 1833, quickly followed in 1834 by the Evening Transcript and in 1835 by James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald. The successful format spread quickly from New York to other East Coast newspapers and a bit slower to the West. But all followed Day's formula for success, that is, expanded advertising; low price to customers; street sales; new technology in gathering news, printing, and distribution; and paid reporters. Penny papers ushered in a lively time for the United States and for its newspapers, which experienced dramatic changes in technology, distribution, and format. Technological changes during this period included a steam-powered cylindrical press, much cheaper papermaking processes, the growth of railroads, and in the 1840s the advent of the telegraph, which directly led to the establishment in 1848 of the Associated Press, an association of New York newspapers.

Alongside the penny press arose an advanced specialized press appealing to special interests, such as those advocating the abolition of slavery, labor unions, and women's issues. Amelia Bloomer started the first woman's newspaper, the Lily, in 1849 initially as a temperance then as a suffrage paper. Others quickly followed. This era also experienced a grow thin racial and ethnic newspapers. Virtually all these newspapers were published weekly, and their influence on their specialized audiences was great. Before the Civil War more than twenty black newspapers emerged, some edited by towering figures such as Frederick Douglass, who started the North Star in 1847. This paper lasted sixteen years, a long time for an abolitionist paper, during which the name was changed to Frederick Douglass' Weekly. The abolitionist papers published by both black and white advocates were among the most controversial. The abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy of the Observer in Alton, Illinois, was killed by a mob in 1837. No counterpart for abolitionist newspapers existed in the South. Southern legislators had virtually banned comment on the slavery situation. The story was different in the West as the U.S. frontier expanded. Newspapers frequently were boosters of their new cities and often engaged in ideological battles, especially in "Bloody Kansas, " split by the slavery issue.

All this was a prelude to the Civil War, which not only permanently changed the United States but also permanently changed American newspapers. The media had never covered a war before, and the emotional fervor of the war coupled with the increasing competitiveness of the nation's newspapers prompted a host of changes. The Civil War was the first modern war, and newspapers became modern as well. Major newspapers sent correspondents, a first, and the reliance on the telegraph led to two major developments in the way stories were written. The telegraph was expensive, so the writing style became less florid, using fewer words. The telegraph also was unreliable, which popularized the inverted pyramid style of writing in which the most important news is first in the story, followed in succession by less important facts. Photography, especially that of Mathew Brady, brought further developments, although it was a decade before photos could be engraved. Newspapers used Brady's photos as models for staff artists. Sometimes the heated competition led to bribery and fakery. At other times news correspondents faced heavy censorship. For instance, General William T. Sherman ordered the arrest and trial of a reporter, who faced the death penalty. General A. E. Burnside ordered the Chicago Tribune closed and prohibited the New York World from circulating in the Midwest, but President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the orders.

After the Civil War newspapers faced new challenges and opportunities. The pace of urbanization sped up, creating large cities and another spurt of immigration. Mass production replaced artisan craftsmanship, giving further impetus to advertising. Along with the nation, the news became bigger, more costly to report, and reliant on commercial advertising. Newspapers reflected city life, and publishers identified strongly with local business. Frequently publishers realized that extreme partisanship drove away valuable readers, and their political tones moderated.

Despite their growing numbers, immigrants and African Americans in the North felt left out of the competitive mainstream newspapers, which focusing on attracting the largest number of readers, appealed to native-born Americans. Consequently, these groups created their own newspapers. In 1870 the United States had 315 foreign-language newspapers, a number that grew to 1,159 in 1900, two-thirds of which were German. More than one and a half million German-language newspapers were sold in 1900, followed by 986,866 Polish news papers, 827,754 Yiddish papers, and 691,353 Italian papers. More than one thousand black newspapers were founded between 1865 and 1900, but most quickly failed. Black newspapers took the lead in challenging the scaling back of Reconstruction in the South. The editor and writer Ida B. Wells, a former slave, documented lynching throughout the South.

In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution enfranchised all men, including African Americans, but not women. This sparked a second wave of feminism, much of which was centered around newspapers edited and published by women. They were split into two factions, those concentrating on obtaining the vote for women and those seeking broad political and social reform. The latter group included the Revolution, started in 1868 by Susan B. Anthony with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as editor. As shown by its motto, "Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less, " the paper was radical. It lasted only two and a half years. On the other hand, Lucy Stone's more moderate Women's Journal, which was started in 1870, lasted until 1917 despite never having more than six thousand subscribers. These papers maintained pressure for woman suffrage until its eventual passage in 1920.

A short-lived agrarian press had more subscribers. But from its start in the 1880s it primarily served the Populist Party, and it died along with the party after the beginning of the twentieth century. A vociferously anti-urban press, it stood up for farmers' issues. The most notable paper was the National Economist with more than 100,000 readers at its peak. However, more than one thousand Populist newspapers spread throughout the nation's midsection.

By 1920 half of the people in the country lived in cities, where newspapers thrived. This was especially true at the end of the nineteenth century, when two of the most controversial figures in American newspapers took control of New York papers. They led a revolution in coverage and display that earned their style of journalism the sneering label of "yellow journalism" after a comic strip character, the "Yellow Kid." Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst arrived on the New York City scene at a time when its mainstream newspapers were segmenting the audience by focusing on news of interest mostly to one type of reader. For example, the New York Times and Chicago Tribune appealed to the business classes. Hearst and Pulitzer's sensationalized newspapers were aimed directly at the working classes, adding to audience segmentation.

From its beginnings under Henry Raymond in 1851 the New York Times had grown in substance to become the newspaper most appealing to those wanting information. Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York >Journal most appealed to those wanting entertainment. Pulitzer, who had started with a German-language newspaper and had merged the St. Louis Dispatch with the Post before moving to New York in 1883, added display flair. His newspaper emphasized sports and women's news, and he attracted good reporters, including Elizabeth Cochrane. Known as "Nellie Bly," Cochrane became famous for her stunts, such as rounding the world in seventy-two days, beating the time needed in the Jules Verne classic Around the World in 80Days. Pulitzer's chief rival, Hearst, had turned around his family's failing Examiner in San Francisco and purchased the struggling Journal. Aiming at sensationalism of the highest order, Hearst raided Pulitzer's staff, including Richard Outcalt, creator of the "Yellow Kid" comic strip, and introduced color printing. The war for subscribers between Hearst and Pulitzer became sensationalized, and many blamed Hearst for the U.S. involvement in a war with Cuba. The rest of the nation's press splintered into two groups, those growing more sensational and those emphasizing solid reporting of the news. However, all were affected, and following this period multicolumn headlines and photographs became the norm for American newspapers.

By the beginning of the twentieth century many editors had college degrees and came from the ranks of reporters, not from the owner class. This led to an increase in professionalism, as did the general philosophy of the newspaper business that news was a separate division, funded by but not directly affected by advertising. Reporters, often paid on a space-rate system, earned salaries comparable to skilled craftspeople, such as plumbers.

World War I was an unsettling time for the industry. Foreign-language newspapers reached their peak in 1917, but wartime restrictions and prejudices hit them hard, especially those papers printed in German. They began a steep decline. The number of all newspapers peaked in 1909, when a total of 2,600 newspapers were published in the United States. Circulation continued to rise as the country became more urban. Newspapers had another war to cover, an all-out war that brought a rise in American nationalism. As has happened frequently when the nation was engaged in war, the federal government sought to control newspapers. The Espionage and Sedition Act provided a legal basis for shutting down newspapers. The former newspaperman George Creel directed the new Committee on Public Information and worked hard to determine what newspapers printed and omitted, relying generally on cooperation but lapsing into coercion when he felt he needed it. Socialist and black newspapers were particularly hard hit by government actions. Notably Victor Berger, editor of the socialist newspaper the Milwaukee Leader, was jailed. Because it refused to support U.S. involvement in the war, the Leader lost its mailing privileges, which crippled its ability to circulate and to gather news. Lack of support for the war effort, especially attacks on racial discrimination in the armed forces, created problems for black newspaper publishers as well. Creel believed those stories hurt the war effort, and in 1919 the Justice Department claimed the papers' racial stance was caused by Russian sympathizers.

Reflecting the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, black newspapers achieved their greatest success in the first half of the twentieth-century. The number of black newspapers rose from about two hundred in 1900 to a peak of five hundred by the 1920s, then the number began a slow decline to slightly higher than two hundred at the start of the twenty-first century. While most of these were small-town southern papers, in the 1920s four large black newspapers in the North developed circulations of more than 200,000, Marcus Garvey's Negro World, which lasted only from 1918 to 1933, Robert L. Vann's Pittsburgh Courier, Carl Murphy's Baltimore Afro-American, and Robert Abbott's Chicago Defender. The Defender was probably the best known of them, particularly in the 1920s. Abbott, who founded the paper in 1905, was one of the leaders in urging African Americans to move north. Some historians consider his newspaper, which was circulated throughout the South, one of the most effective institutions in stimulating the migration.

Newspapers in a Modern World

The year 1920 marks the line designating when a majority of Americans lived in urban areas. The United States was changing, and news adapted to the modern urban, technological, consumer society. The years since the era of yellow journalism's sensationalism had seen an end to the massive growth in the number of newspapers, although circulation continued to grow. The industry had stabilized, advertising had become national in scope, reporters were becoming higher educated and more professional, and the ownership of newspapers by chains and groups became more common, a trend that continued into the twenty-first century. Newspapers gained new competitors in broadcast media. Newsreels in theaters provided an alternative in presenting news, with moving pictures of events. The growth of the advertising industry pushed the United States toward a consumer society and greater use of brand names, and a professional public relations industry developed.

Newspaper content continued to evolve, especially in the 1930s. Competition pushed newspapers beyond presenting only the facts. Journalists sought to put facts into context. Newspaper content and style became interrelated, and the industry moved toward interpretation, photos, political columns, weekly review of news, and faster, more efficient technology in gathering, printing, and distributing news. Full-time columnists and editorial writers became more common. It was a time of journalism of synthesis, as newspapers attempted to add to the news via such techniques as daily and weekly interpretive news summaries, like the New York Times "Week in Review" section. Consolidation of mainstream papers continued, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked what he called the "monopoly press." Roosevelt's antagonism toward the press had long-term ramifications as he started regular radio chats to bypass reporters. With the Great Depression afflicting most people, the alternative and socialist press thrived, especially social action newspapers like Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker, an influential alternative voice that actively opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, costing it much of its circulation.

The war emphasized some of the weaknesses and strengths of American newspapers. Their lack of coverage overseas left Americans unprepared for the strength of the Axis forces, and they have taken some justified criticism over the years for the lack of reporting on German restrictions on Jews during this period. But the war also emphasized newspapers' strength in their ability to change as needed. During the war the number of correspondents blossomed, and they reported in a vast variety of styles, ranging from the solid hard news of the wire services; through personal journalism like that of Ernie Pyle, one of an estimated forty-nine correspondents killed in action; to cartoonists like Bill Mauldin, whose "Willie" and "Joe" debated the war; to photographers like Joe Rosenthal, whose photo of the flag raising on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima symbolized American success.

Federal authorities censored and attempted to control newspapers, especially the black press, which had more than doubled its circulation between 1933 and 1940 to 1.3 million people. J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had monitored the black press since World War I and was concerned because it was becoming increasingly militant on racial matters. The growth of the big three black newspapers, the Courier, the Afro-American, and the Defender, changed the black press from small, low-circulation southern newspapers to mass-circulation, highly influential northern ones. During World War II the black press was investigated by seven government agencies, and an eighth, the War Production Board, was accused of cutting newsprint supplies to black newspapers. Wildly popular among African Americans was the Courier's Double V platform, standing for "victory abroad [on the battlefield] and victory at home" over racial restrictions.

Much of the press faced a chill from government regulation and the public in the Cold War period following World War II. The Smith Act (1940), the nation's first peacetime sedition act since 1801, prohibited advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. It was rarely used before 1949, when public opinion turned violently anticommunist. Twelve journalists were indicted. Many newspapers, now facing severe competition from television for advertising dollars, turned right along with the nation. Although a lonely few remained on the left, newspapers still attracted congressional anticommunist investigations. Though some questioned Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy from the start of his anticommunist crusade, he easily manipulated most American newspapers and wire services. McCarthy followed a pattern of launching vague charges shortly before deadlines so they could not be questioned.

The growing disenchantment with newspapers by the public during the Cold War intensified during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s as a generational divide among Americans was duplicated in newsrooms. Young reporters pushed editors to challenge authority on such controversial topics as civil rights, the counterculture, and antiwar activities. New forms of journalism included personalized and activist reporting, which led to even more public dissatisfaction with newspapers. The "new journalism" and criticism by government figures caused a steep decline in public respect for the media accompanied by circulation declines. In 1968 the pollster George Gallup reported that the media had never been as poorly regarded by the public.

Then came Watergate. The press reported events in the investigation of a break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic Party national headquarters in Washington's Watergate Hotel that culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, and public dissatisfaction with the press grew. Nixon's popularity had reached a peak of 68 percent after a Vietnam peace treaty was signed in 1973, and many Americans felt the media was out of touch.

The growing use of computers dramatically changed how newspapers were produced, with significant savings in labor and improvement in quality. Computers added depth to coverage and increased the use of color and graphics, especially after the 1980s. Serious reporting during Watergate was notable, as was the courage of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret report detailing governmental decisions during the Vietnam War.

Continued newspaper consolidation coupled with more media companies going public resulted, in the view of many, in a thirst for high profit margins and caused continued concern in the industry, especially as the number of independent metropolitan dailies declined to fewer than the fingers on one hand by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Circulation actually was rising, but at a rate far less than that of the population. In an attempt to reverse the circulation weakness, the industry turned to consultants. A study in 1979 for the American Society of Newspaper Editors changed the kinds of news covered. It spotlighted as hot areas economic news, business news, financial news, health news, personal safety, technology, and international news. Many newspapers changed to include more of those areas, cutting coverage of more traditional areas, such as government. Other studies added to the changes in news focus, and the influence of market research reached its peak with the founding in 1982 of USA Today, a five-day-a-week national newspaper published by Gannett Corporation behind the guiding light of its chairman Allen Neuharth. Gannett's research indicated that readers wanted short stories that would not "jump" (would not continue on another page). Readers liked sports, charts, and graphs and wanted information presented in ways that could be absorbed quickly. The paper's success led many other newspapers, especially those with continued readership weakness, to copy the USA Today formula. After Neuharth's retirement, USA Today changed some of its emphasis and by the twenty-first century was garnering the journalists' praise that had eluded it earlier.

The new century found the newspaper industry in the same position as at the founding of the nation, facing uncertainty and change. New challenges to its prime product, news, came from the Internet and all-news cable television channels. Most newspapers established online publications, but as with the Internet in general, few had figured out how to make a consistent profit. Change started the newspaper story, and change ends it.

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Stephen R.Byers

See alsoNew York Times ; Press Associations ; Publishing Industry .

newspaper publication issued periodically, usually daily or weekly, to convey information and opinion about current events.

Early Newspapers

The earliest recorded effort to inform the public of the news was the Roman Acta diurna, instituted by Julius Caesar and posted daily in public places. In China the first newspaper appeared in Beijing in the 8th cent. In several German cities manuscript newssheets were issued in the 15th cent. The invention and spread of the printing press (1430–50) was the major factor in the early development of the newspaper. The Venetian government posted the Notizie scritte in 1556, for which readers paid a small coin, the ( gazetta ).

England

In England in the 17th cent., journalism consisted chiefly of newsletters printed principally by Thomas Archer (1554–1630?), Nathaniel Butter (d. 1664), and Nicholas Bourne (fl. 1622). The London Gazette, founded (1665) in Oxford, is still published as a court journal. The first daily paper in England was the Daily Courant (1702). Thereafter many journals of opinion set a high standard of literary achievement in journalism—the Review (1704–13) of Daniel Defoe ; the Examiner (1710–11) edited by Jonathan Swift ; and the high society periodicals , Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12) of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele .

The first English periodical essay was published in the Tatler. John Wilkes , the 18th-century outspoken journalist, challenged Parliament's efforts to punish the press for the reporting of Parliamentary debates. After Wilkes's successful battle for greater freedom of the press, British newspapers began to reach the masses in the 19th cent. Of several present-day London papers born in the 18th cent., The Times, founded in 1785 by John Walter, the Manchester Guardian, now printed in London, and the Financial Times are internationally known. Other prominent London newspapers include the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail.

The Continent

The continental newspaper also developed in the 17th cent. in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Censorship was common throughout Europe, and Sweden was the first country to pass a freedom of the press law in 1766. One of the oldest papers, Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, appeared in Germany in 1609; the Nieuwe Tijdingen was published in Antwerp in 1616; the first French newspaper, the Gazette, was founded in 1631.

Major French newspapers today include Le Figaro, France-Soir, Libération, and Le Monde. Among newspapers of contemporary Germany are Tagesspiegel (Berlin), Die Welt (Hamburg), Rheinische Merkur (Coblenz), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Frankfurter Rundschau. Other well-known European newspapers include the Irish Independent (Dublin), Popolo (Rome), Corriere della Sera (Milan), Osservatore romano (Vatican), and Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zürich).

Newspapers have played an important historical role as the organs of revolutionary propaganda. The most notable of such revolutionary newspapers was Iskra, founded by Lenin in Leipzig in 1900. In the USSR, Izvestia and Pravda were the largest-circulation official newspapers. After the Soviet Union's disintegration, Izvestia became an independent newspaper involved in joint ventures with the New York Times and the Financial Times.Pravda, which the new government briefly banned (1993), remained aligned with the former Communists. In 1994 an editorial faction at Pravda opened a rival paper with the same name, and in 1998 the original Pravda changed its name to Slovo ( "the word" ).

Asia

In Asia the leading newspapers include Renmin Ribao (Beijing), Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo), the Straits Times (Singapore), the Times of India (Delhi), and the Manila Times. Japan's first daily newspaper, Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun, appeared in 1870, although printing from movable type was introduced in Japan in the late 16th cent. Today, Japan has a very high newspaper readership.

The United States

The existence in the United States of an independent press, protected by law from government authority and responsible to the public can be traced back to the libel trial (1735) in the colony of New York of John Peter Zenger . A single number of a newssheet, Publick Occurrences, was issued in Boston in 1690 and was then suppressed by royal authority. John Campbell 's Boston News-Letter endured from 1704 to 1776. James Franklin launched the New England Courant in 1721, and seven years later his younger brother, Benjamin Franklin , founded the Pennsylvania Gazette. Other colonial papers include the American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia), the New York Gazette, and the Maryland Gazette.

The first American daily, the Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser, appeared in Philadelphia in 1784. The Independent Journal (New York) carried the famous Federalist essays. Two rival political organs were Alexander Hamilton 's Gazette of the United States and Thomas Jefferson 's National Gazette, edited by Philip Freneau . The first New York daily newspaper was the Minerva (1793), edited by Noah Webster . Under other names it survived into the 20th cent.

Alexander Hamilton was among the founders (1801) of the New York Evening Post, for many years edited by William Cullen Bryant . As the New York Post, it is the oldest newspaper in the United States with a continuous daily publication. William Lloyd Garrison made the Liberator a powerful organ for the abolitionists. The New York Sun (1833) achieved national fame under Charles A. Dana . The New York Herald, launched (1835) by James Gordon Bennett , was famous for its foreign news coverage and later established a Paris edition.

Horace Greeley , one of the best-known figures in American journalism, was proprietor and editor of the New York Tribune from its inception in 1841 until 1872. The Tribune was influential in the Civil War period. The New York Times was founded (1851) by Henry J. Raymond, and under the supervision of Adolph S. Ochs it achieved worldwide coverage and circulation, which it has retained. The rotary press, a huge automated roll-fed printing press made high production rates possible to increase circulation. Newspaper circulation increased to keep up with growing population.

The New York World became enormously influential after its purchase by Joseph Pulitzer . When it issued the first colored supplement in the United States in 1893, the paper's critics dubbed it "yellow journalism." The term stuck and it came to represent a more sensational handling of the news, for which Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are considered by many to be main instigators.

Other major U.S. newspapers include the New York Daily News, the Providence Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, the Nashville Tennessean, the Kansas City Star, the Atlanta Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor (Boston), the Dallas News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post, the Miami Herald and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

A number of American newspapers are published in languages other than English. An example of a foreign-language paper published in an urban area is El Diário in New York. Several other newspapers are oriented toward professional interests: Variety, for example, deals with show business. Although the Wall Street Journal is primarily concerned with commerce and finance, in 1990 it had the largest daily circulation of any U.S. newspaper.

Newspapers Today

As the U.S. population in the latter half of the 20th cent. shifted from cities to suburbs and as competition from other media grew, many large city newspapers were forced to cease publication, merged with their competitors, or were taken over by newspaper chains such as the Gannett Company or Knight Ridder. (In 2006 the latter was itself taken over by the McClatchy Company chain.) In England large newspaper-publishing empires were built up by Lords Rothermere, Northcliffe , and Beaverbrook . More recent media empires with major operations on both sides of the Atlantic have been created by Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell . The great American chains were founded by Joseph Pulitzer, J. G. Bennett, William Randolph Hearst, F. A. Munsey , E. W. Scripps , the McCormick-Pattersons, Frank E. Gannett, Charles L. and John S. Knight, and Hermann Ridder.

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. 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.

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. Modern newspapers are supported primarily by the sale of advertising space.

Computer technology also has had an enormous impact on the production of news and newspapers, and by the 1990s when the first independent on-line daily appeared on the the Internet , it also had begun to affect the nature of newspapers. 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. Meanwhile, independent Internet-based news sources proliferated. The growth of on-line editions of established newspapers, other on-line news sources, and on-line venues offering free classified ad space also affected newspapers' sale of advertising space and the production of vital advertising revenue. In the early 21st cent., as newspaper owners devoted more and more attention to their Web editions, print advertising was increasing by small increments while sales of on-line advertising were surging ahead. Concurrently, as print readership declined, many newspapers were experiencing cuts in their budgets, buyouts, staff layoffs, and reductions in physical size.

The extent to which the editorial policy of a paper is affected by the interests of its advertisers has been a subject of frequent controversy. More broadly controversial is the entire question of corporate ownership wielding vast influence through controlling interests in newspapers, radio, and television.

For discussion of newspaper censorship, see press, freedom of the . See also journalism and periodical .

Bibliography

See F. L. Mott, American Journalism (3d ed. 1962); J. C. Merrill, The Elite Press (1968); A. K. MacDougall, The Press (1972); A. M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (1937, repr. 1972); E. Case, The Press (1989); P. Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper (2004); A. S. Jones, Losing the News (2009); D. Kindred, Morning Miracle: Inside The Washington Post (2010); J. O'Shea, The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers (2011); D. Folkenflik, ed., Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism (2011).

newspapers. The earliest newspaper to be published in Ireland was probably An Account of the Chief Occurrences of Ireland printed in Dublin in February 1660. This was succeeded by a number of ephemeral journals until the early 1690s, when the Dublin Intelligence was the first of a number of papers to be supported by Dublin Castle and to publish both English and Irish news.

In the first half of the 18th century 165 newspapers were launched in Dublin. Richard Pue started Pue's Occurrences in 1703; Faulkner's Dublin Journal was begun by George Faulkner (c.1703–75) in 1725, and the Freeman's Journal was established in 1763. Early Dublin newspapers recognized the commercial importance of advertisements; their contents are an important source for the social and commercial history of the period. Many papers were an extension of their proprietor's interests: Pue's Occurrences specialized in sale notices for country estates, the Dublin Courant (founded 1724) in booksellers' advertisements.

In 1774, later than in England, taxes were imposed on newsprint, advertisements, and paper. After the Act of Union, the Irish press was more heavily taxed than that in England and proprietors had to lodge securities for good behaviour. These duties lasted until 1865—again rather later than in England. Continuing a practice of the Irish parliament, secret service moneys were voted to buy support for the Castle, and contracts to publish proclamations and official advertisements became valuable subsidies. The Freeman's Journal was a prime example of a ‘patriotic’ paper purchased by these means. In the face of such opposition, the founding of their own newspaper, the Northern Star, was an important part of the United Irishmen's drive to build up popular support.

Daniel O'Connell made ‘a cheap and enlightened Press’ one of the aims of the Catholic Association, which spent part of the Catholic rent on advertisements in both the English and Irish press. Later repeal reading rooms were established in provincial towns to spread the movement's propaganda but were suppressed after the rebellion of 1848. The establishment of Nation was likewise crucial to the rise of Young Ireland, first as an adjunct, later as a rival, to the repeal movement. The Tenant League was, however, the first political association in Ireland to understand how to use the press to its fullest extent. Newspaper owners like Charles Gavan Duffy and John Gray of the Freeman's Journal organized the conference which founded the league in 1850. John Francis Maguire (1815–72) of the Cork Examiner (1841– ) and James M'Knight (1801–76) of the Banner of Ulster (1842–70) were acute analysts and strong supporters of the league's programme.

Fenianism came late to the use of newspaper propaganda. After initial hesitation, James Stephens founded the Irish People in Dublin in 1863 as the official Fenian paper, but it was suppressed in 1865 and succeeded by the Irishman (1858–81), owned by Richard Pigott (see ‘Parnellism and Crime’). During the Land War Pigott used his paper to attack the leadership of Parnell. To silence him, the Nationalist party in 1881 purchased the Irishman, along with another Pigott paper, the Flag of Ireland, which under the new title United Ireland (1881–98) became Parnell's main support. Following the split precipitated by the O'Shea divorce, United Ireland was captured for the Parnellites by the forcible occupation of its offices. In 1891 Parnell founded the Irish Daily Independent, but this was challenged by William Martin Murphy, who financed the anti‐Parnellite National Press (1891–2), which amalgamated with the Freeman's Journal. Murphy founded tha Daily Nation (1897) which, when it merged in 1900 with the Irish Daily Independent, became a cheap mass circulation daily imitating the ‘new journalism’ of the Northcliffe Press in Britain. After some difficulties, it became the Irish Independent (1905– ), which later supported Cumann na nGaedheal. It is now the largest‐selling morning newspaper in Ireland. The Irish Times, the bulwark of Protestant ascendancy, was founded in 1859.

In 1853 Gladstone abolished the tax on advertisements; he went on to abolish taxation on newspapers in 1855 (although Irish newspapers sent by post had to be printed on stamped paper until 1865) and on paper in 1861. The consequent drop in prices, together with increasing literacy and a rise in consumer spending, led to an explosion in the number of titles. In 1850 there were 68 newspapers published outside Dublin; by 1879 there were 127. The provincial press was influential in the spread of nationalism and its editors were important figures in their communities. Early provincial proprietors had been stationers and patent medicine vendors, but in the 19th century local and national politicians often ran the press. The transition from elite to mass politics meant a sharp rise in the number of nationalist provincial papers. In 1861 there were no nationalist papers outside Dublin; by 1891 there were 34. Many provincial newspaper editors went on to figure in national politics, including John Francis Maguire of the Cork Examiner and Edward Harrington and Timothy Harrington (1851–1910) of the Kerry Sentinel (1878–1918).

With the exception of the liberal Belfast Northern Whig, 19th‐Century Ulster newspapers reflected the sectarian divide. The Belfast Telegraph (1870–) group of papers were founded to further the interests of the Orange Order; the short‐lived Banner of Ulster was the organ of the Presbyterian church. This division of allegiance continues today, with the unionist Belfast News‐Letter and the nationalist Irish News (1891– ). From the mid‐19th century, newspapers began to print columns in Irish and An Claidheamh Soluis was founded by the Gaelic League as its official newspaper. However, there has never been a successful mass circulation Irish‐language paper.

In the Republic today there are two national morning dailies, a regional daily, and four Sunday papers. Dublin and Cork have evening papers and there are about 50 local papers, mainly published weekly. Belfast has four morning papers and one evening paper. Sales of English newspapers, the backbone of the Irish wholesale business in the mid‐19th century, had declined by the 1880s, expanded in the early 20th century, but declined again under protectionism. Since 1965, with the use of air transport, English titles have had an increasing share of the Irish market.

Bibliography

Aspinall, A. , Politics and the Press c.1780–1850 (1946)
Inglis, Brian , The Freedom of the Press in Ireland 1784–1841 (1954)
Munter, R. J. , The History of the Irish Newspaper 1685–1760 (1967)

Marie‐Louise Legg

NEWSPAPERS

Stop the Presses!

During the 1920s, now-legendary writers worked on papers that aggressively competed for news and readers. The Front Page, the 1928 hit play by exreporters Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, established the public's idea of how newspapers operated. In 1920 there were 2,042 English-language dailies in 1,295 American cities; their total circulation was 27.8 million. Americans habitually read newspapers, which cost two cents; many households took morning and evening papers. Most cities had papers with different ownerships and editorial policies—usually, Republican and Democrat.

Tabloids

The most influential innovation in Jazz Age journalism was the successful introduction of tabloid or sensationalized journalism by Joseph Medill Patterson's The New York Daily News in 1919. It was followed by William Randolph Hearst's The New York Daily Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden's New York Evening Graphic in 1924. There were also nonsensational tabloids that used the tab size for the sake of convenience. The Graphic, the most blatantly vulgar of the tabloids, was inevitably known as the "Porno-Graphic." It ignored most national or world events to concentrate on the coverage of sex and crime—preferably sex crime. Two of the crimes that sold tabloid papers were the 1922 Hall-Mills case (an unsolved lover's-lane murder of a minister and a choir singer) and the 1927 Snyder-Gray case (the murder of a husband by an adulterous wife and her corset-salesman lover). Tabloid journalism also fed on the Kip Rhine-lander divorce/miscegenation trial and the antics of Daddy Browning and his child bride, Peaches. The most egregious feature of the Graphic was the "composograph"—a faked photograph, such as the depiction of actor Rudolph Valentino's arrival in heaven. Jazz journalism was not restricted to New York. The Denver Post was not a tabloid, but it was sensational and successful in the 1920s.

Comics

Comic strips (also known as the funnies) were effective circulation builders, especially for the tabloids. The Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate and Hearst's King Features syndicate developed some of the most widely printed strips during the 1920s. Three long-running popular strips began in 1919: Frank King's Gasoline Alley, Billy DeBeck's Barney Google, and E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre—which introduced Popeye in 1929. Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie began in 1924, as did Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs, the first adventure strip. Other popular strips that began during the decade were Martin Branner's Winnie Winkle (1920), Russ Westover's Tillie the Toiler (1921), and Frank Willard's Moon Mullins (1923). Older comic artists whose work remained popular included Rube Goldberg, George McManus, and Tad (Thomas Aloysius Dorgan).

The World,

By general consent The New York World was the best paper in America during the decade, and it had a national influence. Under Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor from 1920 to 1929, the World was regarded as "the newspaperman's newspaper." The World did not try to provide broad coverage of the news; instead, it relied on good reporting and writing; "THE WORLD does not believe that all the news that is fit to print is worth reading." The independently liberal editorial page was edited by Walter Lippmann, who became one of the most influential political writers in America. The editorial page featured the drawings of Rollin Kirby and H. T. Webster, two of the most widely admired cartoonists of their time. But the glory of the World was its op-ed page (the right-hand page opposite the editorial page), featuring Heywood Broun ("It Seems to Me"), Frankin P. Adams ("The Conning Tower"), the theatre reviews of Alexander Woollcott, and other columns. The sale of the World to the Scripps-Howard chain by the Pulitzer family and the paper's merger into the World-Telegram in 1931 was a black day in newspaper history.

The Trib

The glory years of the World coincided with the great years of the New York Herald Tribune—formed when the Tribune purchased the Herald in 1924—an acquisition that included The Paris Herald, the best of the three American dailies published in Paris. Although the Trib was regarded as the best-written and best-edited paper in New York, it could not match the circulation or advertising revenue of The New York Times.

Grantland Rice

The sports department of the Trib featured columns by W. O. McGeehan and Grantland Rice. McGeehan was an exponent of what city editor Stanley Walker called the "Aw-Nuts" school of sportswriting; Rice wrote "Hurrah" columns, and it was remarked that he covered games as though he were reporting on the Trojan War. Rice's account of the 1924 Notre Dame-Army football game had the most famous lead in American sports writing:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.

He also wrote the most widely recognized couplet of sports verse:

For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name.

He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.

By-Lines

Columnists and feature writers were celebrities during the 1920s. The lineup included Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, O. O. Mclntyre, Floyd Gibbons, Paul Gallico, Will Rogers, Arthur Brisbane, West-brook Pegler, Ring W. Lardner, Franklin P. Adams (F.P.A.), Heywood Broun, Walter Lippmann—all of whom had national reputations.

Sources:

Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism: The Story of Tabloid Newspapers (New York: Dutton, 1938);

Sidney Kobre, Development of American Journalism (Dubuque, Iowa: Braun, 1969);

Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960, third edition (New York: Macmillan, 1962);

Jerry Robinson, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (New York: Putnam, 1974).

NEWSPAPERS

The first news sheet issued with some regularity in Russia was Sankt Peterburgskie vedemosti (St. Petersburg Herald ), a biweekly published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, beginning in 1727. Until the Great Reforms of 1861–1874, nearly all newspapers in Russia were official bulletins issued by various government institutions. To the extent that there was a print-based public sphere in pre-Reform Russia, it was dominated by the "thick journals" that published literary criticism and philosophical speculation.

The relaxing of censorship and limits on private publications during the Great Reforms, advances in printing technology, and the spread of literacy in Russian cities led to the development of a mass-market, commercial press by the 1880s. Daily papers targeting various markets covered stock-market news and foreign affairs, as well as the more sensational topics of crime, sex scandals, and natural disasters. As Louise McReynolds has demonstrated, Russian commercial mass newspapers resembled their counterparts in North America and Western Europe in appealing to and fostering nationalist sentiment.

By World War I "copeck" (penny) newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg achieved circulations comparable to those of mass circulation organs in the United States and Western Europe. The most popular newspaper in the Russian Empire in 1914 was Russkoe slovo (Russian Word ), with a circulation of 619,500.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they created an entirely new kind of mass press. By the summer of 1918 the Soviet government had shut down all non-Bolshevik newspapers on their territory. Bolshevik newspapers during the years of revolution and civil war (1917–1921) aimed to mobilize the populace in general and Party members in particular for war. Resources were scarce, and typical civil war newspaper editions were only two pages long. The state funded the press throughout the Soviet era.

The Bolsheviks shared with most Russian intellectuals of the revolutionary era a profound contempt for the sensationalistic urban copeck newspapers that aimed to entertain a mass audience. They created a mass press that was supposed to educate, guide, and mobilize readers, not entertain them. Other important functions of Soviet newspapers were the gathering of intelligence on popular moods and the monitoring of corruption in the Party or state apparatus. To fulfill these tasks, the newspapers solicited and received literally millions of readers' letters, some of which were published. The editorial staff also forwarded letters denouncing crime and corruption to the appropriate police or prosecutorial organs. They used letters to compose reports on popular attitudes that were sent to all levels of party officialdom.

The role of direct censorship in Soviet newspaper production has been overemphasized. Agenda-setting by party and state organs was more important. The role of official censors in controlling press content was negligible. Soviet journalists were generally self-censoring, and they followed agendas set by the Communist Party's Central Committee and other official institutions.

Illegal newspapers were central to Bolshevik Party organization in the prerevolutionary years. This heritage of underground political culture contributed to a Soviet fetishization of newspapers as the mass medium par excellance. As a result of this fetishization, Communist propaganda officials and journalists were slow to understand and effectively use the media of radio and television. By the 1970s, Soviet means and methods of mass persuasion and mobilization were far inferior to those developed by advertising agencies and governments in the wealthy liberal democracies.

See also: censorship; izvestiya; journalism; pravda; thick journals

bibliography

Brooks, Jeffrey. (2000). Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hopkins, Mark. (1970). Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus Books.

Kenez, Peter. (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McReynolds, Louise. (1991). The News Under Russia's Old Regime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Matthew E. Lenoe

newspaper Periodical publication, usually daily or weekly, conveying news and comment on current events. Handwritten news-sheets were posted in public places in ancient Rome under such titles as Acta Diurna (Daily Events). In Europe, the invention and spread of printing in the 15th century facilitated the growth of newspapers. The earliest examples were printed in German cities, soon followed by Venice, the Low Countries and other states in the 16th century. The first daily newspaper in England was the Daily Courant (1702).

news·pa·per / ˈn(y)oōzˌpāpər/ • n. a printed publication (usually issued daily or weekly) consisting of folded unstapled sheets and containing news, feature articles, advertisements, and correspondence. ∎  the organization responsible for producing a particular newspaper. ∎ another term for newsprint.

Newspapers. See Journalism.

newspaper •clapper, crapper, dapper, flapper, grappa, kappa, knapper, mapper, nappa, napper, rapper, sapper, scrapper, snapper, strapper, tapper, trapper, wrapper, yapper, Zappa •catalpa, scalper •camper, damper, hamper, pamper, scamper, stamper, Tampa, tamper, tramper •Caspar, jasper •handicapper • kidnapper •whippersnapper •carper, harper, scarper, sharper •clasper, gasper, grasper, rasper •leper, pepper, salt-and-pepper •helper, yelper •temper •Vespa, vesper •Culpeper • sidestepper •caper, draper, escaper, gaper, paper, raper, scraper, shaper, taper, vapour (US vapor) •sandpaper • endpaper • flypaper •wallpaper • notepaper • newspaper •skyscraper •Arequipa, beeper, bleeper, creeper, Dnieper, keeper, leaper, peeper, reaper, sleeper, sweeper, weeper •gamekeeper • gatekeeper •greenkeeper (US greenskeeper) •peacekeeper • innkeeper •wicketkeeper • timekeeper •shopkeeper • storekeeper •housekeeper • goalkeeper •zookeeper • bookkeeper • treecreeper •minesweeper