The content of newspapers was also transformed by the speeding up of communication, which allowed news to be gathered instantly from distant cities via the telephone or even from foreign countries through the seabed cables laid between Dover, England, and Calais, France, in 1851 and across the Atlantic in 1866. In 1815, when the mounted courier and the packet boat represented the chief means of getting news, it ordinarily took four days before news of an event as near as Brussels could be reported in London. The railway and other improvements in communications, such as the telegraph, revolutionized the news reporter’s conception of time and space. The railway networks not only moved reporters rapidly to and from their destinations but also helped to distribute newspapers, thus making them a more urgent and attractive commodity. Rapid and widespread delivery, especially in Britain and France, gave the larger newspapers based in capital cities a national status. Foundations of modern journalism
The creation of new industrial occupations in society as a whole was reported by a new set of newspaper reporters who had far more specific jobs than their 18th-century predecessors. Earlier journalists might write, edit, and print each copy of the paper by themselves. Even in the 19th century, James Gordon Bennett handled nearly every aspect of publishing a daily newspaper when he founded the New York Herald in 1835. With the expansion of newspapers, full-time reporters, whose job was to go and get the news, were recruited, and they replaced many occasional correspondents, although there was always room for the stringer, a part-time reporter based in a small town or a remote region. William Howard Russell, a reporter for the London Times during the Crimean War (1853–56), became famous as one of the first war correspondents, and his writings inspired Florence Nightingale to take up her mission to Crimea. More than 150 war correspondents reported on the American Civil War (1861–65). The reporter could become as celebrated as the soldier, and vigilant reporting could perhaps prevent some of the atrocities perpetrated in wartime. In peacetime the fearless on-the-spot reporter hoping to “scoop” rival papers for a big story also became a folk hero, and his byline (the name or nom de plume published with the article) could become better known than that of the editor.
The expense of employing a large team of reporters, some of whom could be out of the office for months, proved impossible for smaller papers, thus paving the way for the news agency. The French businessman Charles Havas had begun this development in 1835 by turning a translation company into an agency offering the French press translated items from the chief European papers. His carrier-pigeon service between London, Paris, and Brussels followed, turning the company into an international concern that sold news items and that, eventually, also dealt in advertising space. Paul Julius Reuter, a former Havas employee, was among the first to exploit the new telegraphic cable lines in Germany, but his real success came in London, where he set up shop in 1851 as a supplier of overseas commercial information. Expansion soon led to the creation of the Reuters service of foreign telegrams to the press, an organization that grew with the spread of the British Empire to cover a large part of the world. In the United States, meanwhile, a very different type of agency—the newspaper cooperative—had arisen. Six New York City papers were the founding members; they suspended their traditional rivalries to share the cost of reporting the war with Mexico (1846–48) by establishing the New York Associated Press agency. Between 1870 and 1934, a series of agency treaties divided the world into exclusive territories for each major agency, but thereafter freedom of international operation was reinstated. The press agencies ensured a continuous supply of international “spot news”—i.e., the bare facts about events as they occur—and raised standards of objective news reporting. For their feature pages, American newspaper editors came to rely on the feature syndicates, which supplied ready-to-use material that could range from medical columns and book reviews to astrological forecasts and crossword puzzles. Growth of the newspaper business in the English-speaking world
Advances in newspaper production matched a quickening in the pace of life for the millions of people who read newspapers in the late 19th century. The railways, which transported newspapers rapidly from town to town, contributed to the breakdown of rural isolation, while the steamship and the telegraph brought nations closer together. Mass-produced newspapers with a broad appeal became available for the newly literate or semiliterate industrial worker. Circulations of some popular papers were climbing toward one million by the end of the century, and newspaper publishing and advertising had become profitable and influential commercial enterprises. The United States
The movement toward a popular and politically independent press was spearheaded in the United States, where many potential readers were refugees from European political and religious persecution. The teeming immigrant population of New York City was the seedbed for several of the newspapers that were to shape the character of modern journalism. In 1835 the New York Herald was founded as the first American newspaper to proclaim and to maintain complete political independence. Its publisher, James Gordon Bennett, announced that the Herald would endeavour to record news, “with comments suitable, just, independent, fearless and good-tempered,” while supporting no political party. The popularity of the Herald, with its exciting amalgam of news, views, and social commentary presented in brief and frequently sensational articles, was soon represented by a print run of more than 30,000 copies. New York’s appetite for news was a substantial one, and in 1841 Horace Greeley introduced the New York Tribune. Whereas Bennett was an entertainer, Greeley was a campaigner, the first of the many idealists and crusaders who were to occupy American newspaper offices. Many pieces in the Tribune reflected the proprietor’s fierce opposition to slavery and ultimately influenced opinion well beyond the bounds of New York City. In the rough-and-ready frontier territories of the Midwest, crude sensationalism was a characteristic of the new popular press under editors such as Wilbur F. Storey of the Chicago Times (founded 1854), while painstaking investigation and exposure of political corruption was used by William Rockhill Nelson of the Kansas City Star (1880) as new evidence of the independence of the press. In the South newspapers helped in rebuilding civic consciousness after the desolation of the Civil War through the efforts of men like Henry W. Grady at the Atlanta Constitution (after 1880) in Georgia and Henry Watterson at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky (after 1868).
The character of a newspaper could change radically under a new owner or editor. In New York City, an individual stamp was put on the influential Evening Post by its scholarly editor, Parke Godwin. The New York Sun had started life in 1833 as the first of the inexpensive popular papers known as the “penny press,” with its founder, Benjamin H. Day, successfully exploiting a vein of demand for inconsequential “human-interest” stories. Later, under Charles A. Dana (after 1868), the Sun rose in style and prominence. The New York Times (1851), long in the shadow of the more vigorous Herald and Tribune, struck an important and lasting blow for the independence of the press by exposing an attempted bribe of the Times’ editor by Tammany Hall politician William Magear (“Boss”) Tweed; the reported $5 million sum offered and rejected was an ample indication of the growing power of the press. Great Britain