Newspapers

I

Introduction

Newspapers, publications usually issued on a daily or weekly basis, the main function of which is to report the news. Newspapers also provide commentary on the news, advocate various public policies, furnish special information and advice to readers, and sometimes include features such as comic strips, cartoons, and serialized books. In nearly all cases and in varying degrees, they depend on the publication of commercial advertising for their income.

Despite the development of cinema early in the 20th century, radio broadcasting in the 1920s, television in the 1940s, and the Internet in the late 20th century, newspapers remain a major source of information. As of 2007, in the United Kingdom there are 10 major national daily newspapers with a total daily circulation of around 12 million copies. There is a similar picture to be drawn in many developed nations. In the United States in 2000, for example, 1,500 daily newspapers printed a total of 56 million copies; on average, each copy was read by at least 2 people.

II

Early History

Before the development of movable metal type in the mid-15th century and for some time thereafter, news was disseminated by word of mouth, by written letters, or by public notices. Not until 1609 were the earliest known newspapers published. These papers, printed in northern Germany, were called corantos, and they dispensed “tydings”, often about events in other countries. The word news was not coined until a century later.

Within 20 years newspapers were being published in Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg, Germany; Basel, Switzerland; Vienna; Amsterdam; and Antwerp, Belgium. The Amsterdam papers, printed in both English and French, soon found their way to London, where the first newspaper was published in 1621, and to Paris, where a newspaper was begun in 1631. By 1645 Stockholm had a court paper, which is still published.

Early newspapers were small in size, usually consisting of only one page. They had neither headlines nor advertising and looked more like newsletters than today's broadsheet papers with their bold headlines and numerous pictures.

III

Development

The first continuously published English newspaper was the Weekly News (1622-1641). The earliest newspapers in England printed mostly foreign news, but in 1628 the first papers giving domestic news were begun by clerks who reported the debates of the English Parliament. These papers were called diurnals.

Censorship was a problem faced by the fledgling English press throughout much of the 17th century. Beginning in the 1630s, under King Charles I, heavy restrictions (including licensing) were placed on the press; these restrictions continued during the civil wars of the 1640s. In the mid-1600s, under the government of Oliver Cromwell, limitations on the press were maintained. With the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, licensing provisions and other restrictions were gradually ended, and the English press was able to publish in an atmosphere of considerable freedom as long as it refrained from criticizing the government. In 1702 the first daily newspaper in England, the Daily Courant, was founded in London.

A raft of other papers were launched in subsequent years, until the oldest surviving daily paper, The Times, was founded by John Walter in 1785. The paper was called the Daily Universal Register at first, but was shortened to the Register of the Times, and then simply The Times, later that same year. The paper became the first in the United Kingdom to employ foreign correspondents, when it engaged H. Crabb Robinson to cover the Peninsular War. Ownership of The Times stayed with the Walter family until 1908, when Lord Northcliffe became proprietor, following a fierce battle with C. Arthur Pearson.

The abolition of the government tax on newspapers in 1855 brought about a general reduction in their prices and an increase in their circulation. The Daily Telegraph was launched immediately the tax was abolished, at which time there were ten daily papers already in existence in London. The Times was sold at sevenpence, and most of the others, which included the Standard and the Daily News, were sold at sixpence. The Telegraph was launched at twopence. Prices were further reduced at the end of the 19th century when cheaper paper and improved printing machinery became available. As circulation grew, so did the practice of advertising, giving publishers an important source of revenue apart from that obtained by sales. These developments finally resulted in the general establishment of the halfpenny daily newspaper in Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century.

Not until 1690 was anything resembling the early European newspapers printed in the American colonies. The Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick, a three-page paper, was published that year in Boston, but it was suppressed by the government after one issue.

The first continuously published American newspaper was The Boston News-Letter, established in 1704 by John Campbell. The paper, which was censored by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, contained financial and foreign news and also recorded births, deaths, and social events. In 1721 James Franklin founded The New England Courant in Boston; his staff included his younger brother Benjamin Franklin who in 1723 went to Philadelphia, where he subsequently published The Pennsylvania Gazette and The General Magazine.

The first New York newspaper, founded in 1725, was called The Gazette; it was soon followed by several others including The New York Weekly Journal, edited by the German-American printer John Peter Zenger. When Zenger published criticism of the British colonial governor of New York and his administration, he was arrested and jailed on charges of seditious libel. Zenger was tried and found not guilty, and his case created an important precedent for the tradition of a free press in America.

In 1750 there were 12 newspapers in the American colonies, which then had a total population of about 1 million. By 1775 the population had increased to 2.5 million, and the number of newspapers had jumped to 48. They were published weekly, contained only four pages each, and typically had a circulation of no more than 400 copies. The papers printed more essays than news and were distinctly libertarian in tone, anticipating the American War of Independence. When the British Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a heavy tax on paper, the pre-revolutionary press denounced the act and refused to pay the tax. Even though the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, it had united many editors and publishers in support of the cause of independence.

The first daily newspaper in the United States, The Pennsylvania Evening Post and Daily Advertiser, had begun daily publication in 1783 in Philadelphia. By 1800, 20 daily papers were in operation, and the number continued to increase in the first three decades of the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution spread, spawning a new working class in the nation's growing cities. Until the 1830s newspapers were concerned almost entirely with business and political news; thus they appealed largely to the privileged classes. Benjamin Henry Day changed all that in 1833, when he published the first edition of The New York Sun, creating the penny press that would dominate US journalism throughout the rest of the 19th century. In The New York Sun, Day expanded the definition of news to include crime and violence, feature stories, and entertainment items. The modern newspaper with its appeal to a mass audience was born, and the newspaper cost only 1 cent.

An instant success, The New York Sun was soon followed by The New York Herald, The New York Tribune, and The New York Times. The penny press spread to other eastern cities and across the country as well, as the nation expanded westward. Newspaper circulation quickly climbed into the tens of thousands. Technological advances that made possible the production of cheap paper from wood pulp and the development of fast rotary presses to replace the traditional flatbed press also contributed to the rapid expansion of US newspapers.

In 1848 another significant development had occurred. Six New York newspapers had joined together to share the cost of bringing news to New York by telegraph from Washington and Boston. This informal organization soon became the Associated Press (AP), the country's first news agency. After the Civil War, the AP expanded rapidly, serving newspapers with many different political views. The AP was thus forced to present news in a non-partisan, objective manner, a standard that is still sought by many US papers.

The middle and later years of the 19th century saw the emergence of a number of outstanding publishers and editors in the United States, and anticipated the rise of the press baron in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. One of them was James Gordon Bennett, who in 1835 founded The New York Herald. He made it into one of the most widely read newspapers of the time, at first by emphasis on lurid and scandalous news items and later by a notably thorough coverage of foreign news. The most distinguished editor of the period—noted for editorials in which he supported the rights of labour and women, fought slavery, and backed the Union cause in the Civil War—was Horace Greeley, who founded The New York Tribune in 1841.

As newspapers began to compete more and more with one another to increase circulation in order to obtain more advertising, a different type of journalism was developed by the publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Pulitzer, in The New York World, and Hearst, in The San Francisco Examiner and The New York Morning Journal, transformed newspapers with sensational and scandalous news coverage, the use of drawings, and the inclusion of more features such as comic strips. After Hearst began publishing colour comic sections that included a strip entitled The Yellow Kid, this type of paper was labelled “yellow journalism”.

Further technological advances helped to encourage the growth of newspapers. The development of the first Linotype machine in the mid-1880s speeded up typesetting by making possible the automatic casting of type in lines. Rotary presses were also improved, and newspaper circulation in large cities climbed into the hundreds of thousands.

The 19th century also saw the development of newspapers in Japan and countries that formed part of the British Empire. In Japan the first English-language newspaper, The Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertiser, was launched in 1861, and this was followed after the overthrow of the shogunate in 1867 by the first modern Japanese papers, which replaced the ancient tradition of Kawara bans. The Koko shimbun was the first of these, while the first daily paper, the Yokohoma Mainichi, was launched in 1870, followed in 1874 by what is still a very popular paper in Japan, Yomiuri Shimburi.

In India the first national paper, The Times of India, evolved out of The Bombay Times, which was founded in 1838. In Australia a scattering of very small regional titles, notably The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (1803), managed to survive in business until censorship was ended in 1824 and the Stamp tax abolished in 1830. The first of the modern papers, The Sydney Morning Herald, was launched in 1831.

IV

20th-Century Developments

The 20th century saw a new breed of proprietor come to dominate the press in the United Kingdom. The first and greatest of these was Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, who at one time controlled the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, The Times, and The Observer. He launched the Daily Mail in 1896 as the first paper whose revenue projections were based largely on advertising income and found that within three years it was selling half a million copies. In 1903 he launched the Daily Mirror as the first paper that targeted women. It was selling 1.2 million copies by the outbreak of World War I and continued to grow after it was converted into the first UK tabloid in 1934. The tabloid differs from the standard paper in its size, the depth of its news coverage, and the number of illustrations; the tabloid is usually about half the size of a standard paper, reports in more condensed or shortened versions, and offered many more illustrations.

Northcliffe's brother, Lord Rothermere, the Canadian entrepreneur Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, and the Berry brothers, the Viscounts Kemsley and Camrose, came to dominate ownership of the national and regional press in the United Kingdom as it embarked on a period of hectic growth after World War I and the severe newsprint shortages that had accompanied it. The combined circulation of national dailies grew from five million in 1920 to 10.6 million in 1939, and these five press barons controlled half of it. All the proprietors used their papers to further their political aims and ideologies, provoking the prime minister Stanley Baldwin to rebuke them for exercising “power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages” in a speech in 1931, a rebuke he had borrowed from his cousin, Rudyard Kipling.

Circulations were driven by the first promotional offers. In 1933 The Daily Herald offered its readers a sixteen-volume Dickens set for 11 shillings plus Herald coupons. The Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the News Chronicle immediately responded by offering similar sets for 10 shillings. A total 11 million of these sets were sold.

The period since the end of World War II has been a difficult one for newspaper circulations in many countries. In the United Kingdom the number of national newspapers has been halved. The principal reasons for the discontinuation of many dailies appear to have been loss of advertising revenue to competing papers or to television or other media; labour difficulties; and rising costs of equipment, labour, and material. Three more news agencies—United Press, International News Service, and Universal News—were begun; in 1958 they were consolidated into United Press International (UPI).