The Telegraph

Sources

Hoopla. When the telegraph came into widespread use in the mid nineteenth century, predictions about its effects on society were mixed. Editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald wrote that the paper that published news it received by telegraph was “such a specimen of journalism as has never before been equaled, from the creation of the world up to this morning, in the history of mankind. It ... is enough to ... bring us actually to believe that either the end of the world or the beginning of the millennium is at hand.” In contrast, his contemporary Henry David Thoreau, contemplating the profusion, of insignificant news made possible by the miraculous technology, wrote: “We are in great haste to constructa magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” The question of whether the telegraph would be an actual improvement or a diversion from more consequential matters was quickly forgotten as the technology spread along burgeoning railroad lines. Small-town papers were revolutionized, and formed press associations to share the costs of the dispatches.

THE DAILY GRAPHIC

In 1872 David Croly of New York launched the first pictorial daily newspaper. The Daily Graphic ran eight pages, three and one-half of which were covered with illustrations. The rest consisted of short news items. Since the halftone process that allowed mechanical reproduction of photographs had not yet been invented, Daily Graphic illustrators had to make engraved copies of photographs. On 4 March 1880 the art editor of the Daily Graphic, Stephen H. Horgan, made history by printing the first legible halftone. “Shantytown” was a picture of the impoverished upper Fifth Avenue. The newspaper also printed explicit pictures of crime scenes, including the murderer William Foster on the gallows. Samuel Langhorne Clemens thought that the Daily Graphic was a “marvelous paper” and wrote in appreciation: “I don’t care much about reading (unless it be some tranquilizing tract or other), but I do like to look at pictures, and the illustrated weeklies do not come to me as often as I need them.”

Nevertheless the paper had a brief life span of only sixteen years. Its circulation never exceeded ten thousand. In 1884 the New York World began printing illustration, and for five years the Daily Graphic fought a losing battle against the competition. Financial mismanagement and poor investments also hastened the demise of the paper. However, it left a lasting impact on journalism by proving the value of pictures to news coverage.

Source: Sidney Kobre, The Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1964).

Thoroughly Modern Business. In 1866 the three largest telegraph companies in the country merged to form Western Union. It was the first modern nationwide business enterprise in the United States, and it enjoyed a powerful advantage over potential competitors. Railroad magnate and financier Jay Gould mounted the only real challenge to Western Union. In the late 1870s he began to organize the telegraph subsidiaries of railroad companies under his control. After acquiring the Union Pacific Railroad, Gould canceled its contract with Western Union and began to use the services of the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph Company. In 1879 he created the American Union Telegraph Company, which soon monopolized

telegraph service in the southwestern United States’. After Western Union stock plunged in 1881, Gould became its largest stockholder.

Press Associations. As early as 1848 a group of seven New York daily newspapers formed the Associated Press (AP) to take advantage of the new telegraphic technology and to cooperate in news gathering. In 1875 the wire between New York and Washington transmitted more than twenty thousand words a day. Between 1880 and 1900 the miles of telegraph lines covering the United States quadrupled, and AP wire service extended to Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Denver. Other cities received news reports through express messengers or regular mail delivery. During this time the AP moved to consolidate its control over which newspapers benefited from their wire service. In conjunction with West-em Union it provided member papers with special treatment and rates. The AP also prohibited its members from using any other news service. By 1880 only 50 percent of the morning dailies and 25 percent of the evening papers had access to AP service. The only serious competitor was the United Press (not. the twentieth-century wire service of the same name), founded in 1882. It went bankrupt in 1897 and merged with the AP.

Objectivity. The wire service soon became the primary source of national news. Its dispatches were collected from hundreds of contributors around the country, who were independent from political parties and local institutions. Reporters for the services were told to send “bare matters of fact” because the AP client papers represented the entire spectrum of political allegiance and interest. News was a “salable commodity” like any ocher. Wire service coverage thus produced impersonal, national, standardized news. For this reason historians have called it the originator of the journalistic notion of objectivity, as well as a powerful force for the creation of a national American consciousness that replaced earlier, regional indenties.

Sources

Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994);

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977);

Mitchell Stephens, A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988).