In North America, publication of newspapers was deterred during colonial times by the long arm of the British law, but after independence the United States could boast one of the world’s least restrictive sets of laws on publication. A first attempt at publishing, albeit abortive, was made in Boston by a radical from London, Benjamin Harris, in 1690. His Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, intended as a monthly series, was immediately stopped by the governor of Massachusetts. It was clear that free speech and a nonofficial press were not to be tolerated in the colonies. Boston was also the site of the first official newspaper, The Boston News-Letter (1704), with which the authorities replaced the proclamations, pamphlets, and newsletters previously used to convey news from London. In 1719 the original title was replaced by the Boston Gazette, printed by Benjamin Franklin’s elder brother, James, who soon produced the first independent American newspaper, the New-England Courant of 1721. William Bradford founded the first New York City newspaper, the New-York Gazette, in 1725, and his son Andrew was the first newspaper proprietor in Philadelphia. Further expansion of the colonies created 37 different titles by the outbreak of the American Revolution.
Colonial editors were aware of their responsibilities in creating a historical record of what was to be the new nation, and they cooperated in passing news to one another. In the absence of municipal offices, the printing office and newspaper headquarters often became a vital centre of community life. But frontier tensions led to passionate arguments, and newspapers became closely involved with political change. The Boston Tea Party (1773) itself is said to have been planned in a back room of the Boston Gazette, already nicknamed “Monday’s Dung Barge” by loyalists. After independence the burning issues created with the new republic were aired in many new papers, most of which took up highly partisan stances. Thomas Jefferson and the first Republicans (later Democrats) were supported by the Philadelphia Aurora (1790), while Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists benefited from the support of the Gazette of the United States (1789–1818). Many city papers moved from weekly to daily publication, the first of these being the Pennsylvania Evening Post in 1783. The Pennsylvania Packet changed its name to Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser when it became a daily in 1784, indicating a new source of revenue for newspapers; and this was confirmed by the New-York Daily Advertiser (1785), the first to be published as a daily from the beginning.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically guaranteed “the freedom of speech or of the press.” The right to criticize the government had been established as early as 1735, however, when John Peter Zenger, the publisher of the New-York Weekly Journal, was acquitted of criminal libel. After the temporary Alien and Sedition Acts (1798–1801), which included censorship clauses, were repealed, newspapers in the United States returned to polemics and public campaigns and set off on a course that was to help shape the modern character of the popular newspaper worldwide. Early newspapers in Japan
A long tradition of news publication existed in Japan in the form of yomiuri (“sell and read,” as the papers were sold by reading them aloud) or kawara-ban (“tile-block printing,” the method of production). The kawara-ban broadsheets appeared continuously throughout the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), reporting popular festivals, natural disasters, important events such as the siege of Osaka Castle in 1615, and personal scandals—notably the double suicides fashionable during the Genroku period (1688–1704). Although much reporting concerned fairly innocuous occurrences, most writers preferred to remain anonymous for fear of the punishments that could be imposed by the shogunate officials for unauthorized public discussion of political and social problems. Era of the Industrial Revolution
By 1800 educated citizens of most European countries and the United States could expect some access to independent news coverage and political comment, even if it was only to be found in clandestinely published newssheets. The basic formulas for serious newspapers and commercially successful, if sensational, popular newspapers had been worked out by shrewd writers and editors—members of the new profession of journalism. These formulas were to be elaborated throughout the 19th century, and by the end of the century the modern pattern of newspaper ownership and production had already been set in the United States and Britain, with newspapers passing from the realm of literature to that of big business. Technological advances
New technology influenced newspapers both directly, through the revolution in printing techniques, and indirectly, through the rapid developments in transport and communications. In printing technology, necessity determined invention when the demand for newspapers exceeded the few thousand weekly copies required of the most popular titles. In 1814, the steam-driven “double-press” was introduced at The Times" class="md-crosslink">The Times in London, allowing an output of 5,000 copies per hour. The higher output was a contributing factor in the rise of The Times’s circulation from 5,000 to 50,000 by the middle of the century. The hand-operated wooden press used for books, newspapers, and single sheets alike was further pushed into obsolescence by the invention of mechanical lead type, the Fourdrinier machine (which produced cheap cellulose paper in rolls), curved printing plates, automatic ink-feeds, and, in 1865, the cylindrical rotary press.
The main breakthrough, however, did not take place until the end of the century, with the introduction of automatic typesetting on Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine. Until then, each line of words to be printed had to be lined up and justified (made to fill exactly the allotted space between margins) by hand. After printing, the letters were replaced in alphabetical order by hand for reuse. The new machines were operated by a keyboard which selected a matrix for the correct letter from a channel in the magazine; the line of text was automatically justified (made to fill the line exactly by adjusting the space between words); the line of lead type was cast; and the matrices were automatically returned to the correct channels, thus saving the need for the lengthy process of manual distribution. The first Linotype machines were introduced at the New York Tribune in 1886 and in Britain at the Newcastle Chronicle in 1889. By 1895 every publisher in Fleet Street (then the centre of London newspaper publishing) was using the new machines. Linotype keyboard operators could set copy six times faster than the hand compositor. Electricity, introduced in 1884, was also a spur to the printing industry, as were machines that could not only print but could also cut, fold, and bind together newspapers of any size.