Newspapers
Newspapers
The State of the Industry. In 1850 about 10 percent of the adult population in the United States subscribed to one of the 254 daily newspapers, which usually cost a penny per issue, though in New York a paper cost three cents by the time of the Civil War. Newspapers could be distributed by mail without charge in the county of publication until 1856, and in cities newsboys hawked papers on street corners. The rural population was poorly served, especially before the Civil War. Before the war most news was local because reports from distant locations were hard to gather. Papers were filled with opinion, and much, if not most, of the space in the paper was devoted to prose other than reportage. The average paper was six columns wide and eight pages or fewer. There were few illustrations, though different sizes and fonts of type introduced some variety to the newspaper page. As many as three pages of an eight-page paper were typically devoted to classified advertising, and local merchants took advantage of newspaper advertising space with increasing frequency. As circulation of newspapers grew, especially in large cities, publishers were faced with limits on the capacity of their presses. The introduction of Richard Hoe’s revolving press in the late 1840s alleviated the problem. By the time of the Civil War, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald was able to print 20,000 newspapers per hour using a Hoe press. On the Sunday after the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861 Bennett printed 135,000 papers, the most ever produced in a single run. The fast web-perfecting press, which printed both sides of a paper at the same time from a continuous roll of paper, was patented in 1863 and became a standard piece of equipment after the Civil War.
Telegraphic Reporting. In the decade before the Civil War the telegraph had already begun to transform the daily newspaper. The Associated Press, formed in 1848 by a group of New York newspaper editors to share news sources, had spread to other cities, and journalism became more uniform from city to city as many newspapers printed the same reporter’s account of an event. The most successful papers responded to reader interest in national news by sending out their own news correspondents. By 1860 there were twenty-three Washington correspondents assigned to the U.S. Senate and fifty-one correspondents in the House of Representatives. As the telegraph became a central part of a reporter’s work, it affected the content of reports. Opinion was less common in telegraphed reports because the cost was so expensive that only the facts could be transmitted. Objectivity became a practical matter.
Politics of the News. On the pressing issues of the time, however, editors spoke their minds. Papers were typically associated with political positions, and the editors vigorously used their clout to promote their parties’ causes. Abolitionist papers such as Horace Greeley’s weekly New York Tribune (which had a circulation of two hundred thousand copies and was distributed in the West) and Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune were important voices in both supporting Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency and promoting the war effort. The urgency of events during the Civil War increased readers’ reliance on daily newspapers. At the outset of the war,
Gen. George McClellan called a press conference, at which he made editors promise in writing not to publish information of military value to the enemy in return for his promise to provide them reports on matters of public interest. In February 1862 Secretary of War Edwin Stanton issued an order requiring journalists to submit their reports to provost marshals for censorship on matters related to military actions.
Confederate Newspapers. When the Civil War began, eight hundred newspapers, of which about eight were dailies, were published in the eleven Confederate states. Most Southern papers had a small circulation and were printed on hand presses. When the war began, a consortium of editors formed the Press Association of the Confederate States of America to report the war, and most Southern battle reports came from the PA, as it was called. The chaos of the war played havoc with the newspapers. By 1863 many Southern newspapers were no more than a single sheet because of paper shortages. Publication was irregular, and extras printed on one side only were common. By the war’s end papers were printed on whatever material was available, including wallpaper. By 1865 only twenty Southern newspapers survived.
A NEW-FANGLED WRITING MACHINE
In 1850 all writing was done with pencil or pen and ink. Offices employed scribes to keep records, and the only practical way to make a copy of a document was to rewrite it longhand. For individuals, this practice was rarely a hardship. For business, state and federal governments, and the courts, copy work was tedious and time-consuming.
As early as 1829 there were working models of awkward typing machines developed by inventors in the printing business, but they were more significant as curiosities than as working tools. The modern typewriter was not introduced until 1867, when Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer, Carlos Glidden, a lawyer, and Samuel Soule, a draftsman and engineer, introduced a refinement of a machine that Sholes had been using in his print shop to print page numbers. Their typewriter, which featured a keyboard with the familiar “qwerty” arrangement of letters used today, was patented in 1868.
In 1873 the Remington Arms Company, seeking to replace revenues lost from the sale of guns after the war ended, bought the typewriter patent for $12,000, and began producing what were called kitchen-table typewriters—that is, machines small enough to set on a kitchen table—in 1876. Despite being displayed at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the new machine failed to capture the attention of potential buyers. Only about four thousand typewriters were sold in the first four years, including one unit to Mark Twain in 1874. It was not until the turn of the century that the typewriter had its enormous impact on the American workplace.
Source: Richard N. Curent, The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954).
Postwar Developments. In the decade after the war the Northern press flourished, and the foundations of national reporting were firmly laid. The number of newspapers in the United States doubled during that time, and the quality of the best newspapers, which is to say, for the most part, those published in large cities, increased accordingly as journalistic standards were established. The breadth of reportage was a particularly notable improvement. An increase in telegraph cable allowed easier access to remote news sources, and the development of railroads allowed the most prosperous papers to send correspondents to distant locations for on-the-spot coverage. By the end of Reconstruction, the circulation of daily newspapers was more than 3.5 million.
Source
Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, seventh edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992).