History of Journalism

1. History of Journalism

2. News reporting goes back thousands of years, perhaps to the first humans or even the first animals that could communicate to one another about such things as approaching predators.

3. The potential for "mass media," however, was not realized until the middle of the 15 century, when German inventor Johannes Gutenberg's development of movable type gave people a relatively fast, inexpensive means of producing hundreds or thousands of fliers, books, and eventually newspapers.

4. Gutenberg, William Caxton, and the American printers who followed them made or purchased small metal blocks, each with an individual letter, punctuation mark, or other symbol on it. They then arranged these blocks in trays to spell words.  By applying ink to the letters and then pressing large sheets of paper down on them, they could print pages, which they then cut to create fliers or assembled into books or other publications.

5. Shortly after English settlers set up colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts, America got its first press, which was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1630s.  Although a number of books issued from this press over the next half century, the American colonies did not produce their own real newspaper until the 18th century.  Colonists in Massachusetts were preoccupied with survival, could read news coming from the Mother Country (England), and lacked the type of industry and commerce that would have created a demand for advertising… funding?

6. History of American Journalism Newspapers have not always been the sophisticated, full-color extravaganzas we know today. American journalism had its humble beginnings in the Colonial period with the publication of Benjamin Harris’Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was shut down after its one and only issue on Sept. 26, 1690.

7. This newspaper was printed on three sheets of stationery-size paper and the fourth page was left blank so that readers could add their own news before passing it on to someone else.

8. By modern standards, colonial newspapers were small publications featuring out-of-date, often toothless coverage of a small range of subjects.  A typical publication might consist of four pages of stories about government and foreign affairs, the weather, and disasters such as fires or diseases.  Illustrations were rare, and headlines generally were nonexistent.  It could take weeks for the news of an event to appear in one of these papers, particularly if it took place abroad, and inaccuracies were common. 

9. Journalists, for the most part, simply stayed out of trouble by printing innocuous coverage or even giving government officials the chance to approve material before publication.  Things changed somewhat when James Franklin, brother of Benjamin, established the New England Courant in 1721.

10. The Courant was the first American newspaper to supply readers with what they liked and needed, rather than with information controlled by self-interested officials.  Its style was bold and its literary quality high.  Franklin even challenged religious and political authorities, setting a precedent for journalists to come.  The press was still far from free, however, as Franklin's own case illustrates: some two years after he began his fiesty newspaper, authorities banned him from publishing it. 

11. Perhaps the most famous name in early American journalism is that of Peter Zenger. Publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, Zenger was charged with sedition after his paper had criticized colonial authorities, and he was tried for libel against the colonial British government in 1735. In this picture, Zenger is arrested and his printing press is burned by Colonial authorities.

12. Zenger was found innocent with the help of noted attorney Andrew Hamilton, and this verdict was that one verdict that paved the way for a free and independent press in America. For the first time it was considered proper for the press to question and criticize the government. This is a pillar of a free press in the United States and any country that is free. Journalists have to be able to question the actions of the government in order to make them accountable.

13. An invention that helped speed news along was the telegraph. Reporters were able to send encoded news back to their papers as it was happening.

14. Abraham Lincoln became the first president to direct armies in the field directly from the White House.

15. During the darkest days of the terrible war Lincoln would pace back and forth in the telegraph office awaiting news of the fate of the nation that would emerge from the new telegraph invention.

16. Because the telegraph wires kept going down on a regular basis, sometimes the story that a reporter was trying to send got cut off before it was finished.

17. To alleviate this situation, reporters developed the “inverted pyramid” form of writing, putting the most important facts at the beginning of the story.

18. This way, the most important part of the story would most likely reach the newspaper, and if anything got cut off, it would be the lesser important details of what happened.

19. Newspapers began to evolve and grow into a major industry. Men mostly dominated the field, but in 1868 the New York Sun hired their first female reporter, Emily Verdery Bettey. The Sun hired Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd as a reporter and fashion editor in the 1880s; she was one of the first professional female editors, and perhaps the first full-time fashion editor, of any American newspaper.

20. As newspapers began to compete more and more with one another to increase circulation and obtain more advertising revenue, a different type of journalism was developed by publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

21. In the mid-1890s, Pulitzer (in the New York World) and Hearst (in the San Francisco Examiner and later 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.

22. After William Randolph Hearst moved to New York, he and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readers by making their papers more and more sensational.

23. In 1895, Hearst purchased the New York Morning Journal and entered into a head-to-head circulation war with his former mentor, Joseph Pulitzer, ownerof the New York World.

24. To increase circulation both started to include articles about the Cuban Insurrection.  Many stories in both newspaper greatly exaggerated their claims to make the stories more sensational. 

25. The American public purchased more newspapers because of the sensational writing, and this strongly encouraged Hearst and Pulitzer’s newspapers to write more sensationalized stories. 

26. This form of journalism in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact. Moreover, the practice of yellow journalism involved sensationalism, distorted stories, and misleading images for the sole purpose of boosting newspaper sales and exciting public opinion. The endless drive for circulation, unfortunately, often put publisher's greed before ethics. It became known as Yellow Journalism, named after “The Yellow Kid” cartoon.

27. Drawn by R.F. Outcault, the popular (if now-unfunny) strip became a prize in the struggle between Pulitzer and Hearst in the New York newspaper wars.

28. Outcault moved the strip to Hearst's papers after nine months, where it competed with a Pulitzer-sponsored version of itself.

29. Yellow Kid cartoonist Richard Outcault

30. Muckrakers are journalists who seek out and expose the misconduct of prominent people or of high-profile organizations; they emerged on the American scene in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Crusaders for social change, muckraking journalists wrote articles not about news events, but about injustices or abuses, bringing them to the attention of the American public. Sometimes criticized for their tactics, their work succeeded in raising widespread awareness of social, economic, and political ills, prompting a number of reforms, including passage of pure food laws and antitrust legislation.

31. One of the most popular reporters of era was a woman named Elizabeth Cochrane who wrote under the name “Nellie Bly.” She wrote with anger and compassion. She wrote to expose the many wrongs that developed in nineteenth century cities after the industrial boom. Most of her reporting was on women.

32. She directed her articles to upper class women to open their eyes and hearts to their impoverished, hungry, hopeless sisters. She felt very strongly that women and their issues were not represented in newspapers or any where else.

33. She wanted people to know different women’s plights and understand why some became “fallen women." She hoped that by reading her articles other women would want to help their sisters. She wanted people to realize the unfairness that women were afforded at the turn of the century.

34. Shegot a job on the Pittsburgh Dispatch when she wrote a furious letter complaining about an editorial that claimed that women were good for little but housework. She covered social questions such as divorce, slum life, and conditions in Mexico for the paper.

35. In 1887 she moved to Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, for which she exposed the conditions in which the insane lived by pretending to be mad and getting herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. She also investigated sweat-shops tenements, the world of petty crime and Corps de Ballet by the same methods.

36. The high point in her life, however was the round-the-world trip, which she made in 72 days, 6 hours,11 minutes and 14 seconds. Joseph Pulitzer sent a special train to meet her return to San Francisco, and she was greeted by fireworks, gun salutes, brass bands and parade on Broadway.

37. In 1895 Nellie Bly married a millionaire, Robert Seaman, 50 years older than herself, and retired. She lost most of his money after he died and in 1919 tried unsuccessfully to make a comeback. She died in 1920.

38. Journalism does not stop with newspapers…

39. Upton Sinclair is actually responsible for the journalist term Muckracker when he brought about important changes in American society.

40. His novel, "The Jungle," filled it with page after page of nauseating detail he had researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished nation in 1906.An instant best-seller, Sinclair's book reeked with the stink of the Chicago stockyards. He told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as "potted ham."

41. In short, "The Jungle" did as much as any animal-rights activist of today to turn Americans into vegetarians.But it did more than that. Within months, the aroused -- and gagging -- public demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry.President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened after reading an advance copy. He called upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection standards for meat.

42. Roosevelt was so taken with Sinclair that he coined the term “muckrakers” to describe him and other reformist crusaders, even though the president’s phrase was not meant to be wholly complimentary.

43. Sinclair wanted to pave his way in the literary world, but instead he opened the door to a new type of journalism that continues today. He said, “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.“ He was the first American author to win Nobel prize for literature!

44. Magazines are also an important part of journalism, and Henry Luce is an important name in the magazine industry.

45. Luce, who once held the role of a newspaper reporter, broke away from the world of newspaper. He is the founder of Time magazine, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated! With the exception of Life, these magazines are still in high circulation today!

46. As the U.S. population in the latter half of the 20th century has shifted from cities to suburbs, and with the growth in competition from other media, many large city newspapers have had to cease publication, merge with their competitors, or be taken over by a chain of newspaper publishers such as the Gannett Company or Knight-Ridder Inc.

47. In 1982, using satellite transmission and color presses, the Gannett chain established a new national newspaper, USA Today, published and circulated throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

48. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today are read all over the country; small towns and rural districts usually have daily or weekly local papers made up largely of syndicated matter, with a page or two of local news and editorials. These local papers are frequently influential political organs.

49. As the U.S. population in the latter half of the 20th century has shifted from cities to suburbs, and with the growth in competition from other media, many large city newspapers have had to cease publication, merge with their competitors, or be taken over by a chain of newspaper publishers such as the Gannett Company or Knight-Ridder Inc.

50. Since the invention of the telegraph, which enormously facilitated the rapid gathering of news, the great news agencies, such as Reuters in England, Agence France-Presse in France, and Associated Press and United Press International in the United States, have sold their services to newspapers and to their associate members.