1. Journalism
I INTRODUCTION
Journalism, gathering, evaluating, and distributing facts of current interest. In journalism,
reporters research and write stories for print and electronic distribution, often with the guidance
of editors or producers. The earliest journalists produced their stories for news sheets, circulars,
newspapers, and periodicals. With technological advances, journalism came to include other
media, such as radio, documentary or newsreel films, television, and the Internet.
Historical Survey
The earliest known journalistic effort was the Acta Diurna (Daily Events) of ancient Rome. In
the 1st century BC, statesman Julius Caesar ordered these handwritten news bulletins posted each
day in the Forum, a large public space. The first distributed news bulletins appeared in China
around 750 AD. In the mid-15th century, wider and faster dissemination of news was made
possible by the development of movable metal type, largely credited to German printer Johannes
Gutenberg. At first, newspapers consisted of one sheet and often dealt with a single event.
Gradually a more complex product evolved.
Germany, The Netherlands, and England produced newsletters and newsbooks of varying sizes
in the 16th and 17th centuries. Journals of opinion became popular in France beginning late in
the 17th century. By the early 18th century, politicians had begun to realize the enormous
potential of newspapers in shaping public opinion. Consequently the journalism of the period
was largely political in nature; journalism was regarded as an adjunct of politics, and each
political faction had its own newspaper. During this period the great English journalists
flourished, among them Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and Sir Richard Steele.
Also at this time the long struggle for freedom of the press began.
In the English colonies of North America, the first newspaper was Publick Occurrences Both
Forreign and Domestick, published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1690; it was suppressed, and its
editor, Benjamin Harris, was imprisoned after having produced the first issue. The trial of
publisher John Peter Zenger in 1735 set a key precedent regarding freedom of the press in
America more than 50 years before the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would

2. secure it. Zenger was acquitted of charges of criminal libel stemming from articles he printed
that were critical of the colonial authorities in New York, his defense being that his reports were
factual. Provisions for censorship of the press were, however, included in the Alien and Sedition
Acts, passed in 1798. After provoking a great deal of opposition, these acts were allowed to
expire. See also Trial of John Peter Zenger.
Journalism in the 19th century became more powerful due to the mass production methods
arising from the Industrial Revolution and to the general literacy promoted by public education.
The large numbers of people who had learned how to read demanded reading matter, and new
printing machinery made it possible to produce this inexpensively and in great quantities. In the
United States, for example, publishers Joseph Pulitzer, Edward Wyllis Scripps, and William
Randolph Hearst established newspapers appealing to the growing populations of the big cities.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, news agencies exploited the invention of the telegraph
by using it for the rapid gathering and dissemination of world news via wire services. These
services included Reuters, based in England; the Associated Press and United Press (later United
Press International), based in the United States; and the Canadian Press, in Canada.
At the same time, new popular magazines were made possible by new technologies, improved
transportation, low postal rates, and the emergence of national brands of consumer goods that
required national media in which to advertise. The Ladies' Home Journal, founded by Cyrus H.
K. Curtis in 1883, soon had a circulation of almost a million—a prodigious figure for that day. In
1897 Curtis bought for $1,000 the old Saturday Evening Post, which rapidly achieved a
circulation in the millions. Numerous other magazines appealing to the general reader appeared
in the 20th century, including Reader's Digest, Collier's, Life, and Look.
Over time, some general magazines became unprofitable and ceased publication when they lost
advertising to television and to more specialized magazines, such as Sports Illustrated and TV
Guide. The newsmagazines Time, Newsweek, Maclean’s, and U.S. News & World Report have
continued to occupy an important place in journalism, as have The Ladies’ Home Journal and
other so-called women's service magazines.

3. In the early 20th century two new forms of news media appeared: newsreels and radio. By the
1920s, newsreels in the United States alone reached about 40 million people a week in about
18,000 film theaters, but they were displaced by television in the 1950s. Radio news survived
more successfully. Stations in the United States and Canada started to report current events in the
1920s, borrowing most of their information from local newspapers. They soon developed their
own newsgathering facilities.
By World War II (1939-1945), radio had amassed a huge audience. American president Franklin
Delano Roosevelt appealed to his nation through his “fireside chats,” and radio was usually the
first to bring reports on the war to the public. Popular radio reporters and commentators were
heard by millions of people. Television later attracted much of radio’s audience, but radio has
retained a loyal following for music, news, and talk shows.
Television became commercially viable in the 1950s, and by the 1970s nearly every household
that wanted a television had one. (In 2000 there were 835 televisions for every 1,000 people in
the United States and 710 per 1,000 in Canada.) Network evening newscasts, originally 15
minutes long, were extended to 30 minutes, and local news broadcasts in major cities expanded
to an hour or more. Network newscasters gradually became national figures. Since the
introduction in 1951 of the first major documentary series, See It Now, featuring commentator
Edward R. Murrow, television documentaries and video newsmagazines such as 60 Minutes have
become important news sources. The Cable News Network (CNN), operating in a news-only
format 24 hours a day, reached 77 million U.S. and Canadian households by 2000, and its CNN
International broadcasts were relayed by satellite to more than 200 other countries.
Recent Development
Largely for economic reasons, including competition from television, the number of local daily
newspapers in the United States declined in number from 2,200 in 1910 to less than 1,500 in
2002. Canada, with just over one-tenth the population of the United States, had about 100 daily
newspapers in 2002. Weekly newspapers, which generally have lower circulation numbers than

4. daily newspapers, are more numerous: In 2002 more than 9,200 of them were published in the
United States, and about 900 in Canada.
A major trend affecting newspapers in the 1980s was their incorporation into newspaper chains
—ownership of a number of newspapers by a single company. By 2000 only about a dozen cities
in the United States had separately owned competing newspapers, and in 2002 Canada had only
eight cities with competing newspapers under different ownership. Similarly, major radio and
television stations, even when independently owned, have become affiliated with networks that
provide much of their news and other program materials.
The rise of cable television and public broadcasting has reduced uniformity of programming
somewhat. By 2000, 67.7 million U.S. households and 11 million Canadian households were
wired to receive cable television. Because cable can bring in more channels than are generally
available over the air, opportunities for the expression of diverse viewpoints increased. Public
television, also called educational television, is likewise gradually expanding its audience. In the
mid-1970s it accounted for only a small part of the time Americans spent viewing television; by
the 1990s, during the average week, public television was watched in more than half of all homes
with television sets.
New technologies continue to bring about changes in journalism. Television satellites, for
example, enable viewers in one part of the world to witness live events occurring in another (see
Communications Satellite) and facilitate new forms of video news distribution. Reporters can
summon from data banks information that previously would have taken them days or weeks to
assemble. Wire-service copy can be set in type automatically at a subscribing newspaper without
the services of a local editor or printer (see Office Systems).
In the mid- and late 1990s the Internet became a major force in journalism. Most of the major
journalism companies—including those involved in newspapers, periodicals, wire services, radio
stations, and television stations—began to publish material on the World Wide Web. One of the
advantages of the Internet is that readers can find continually updated information on a variety of
subjects, without waiting several hours for a new edition or the next news broadcast. Another
advantage is the ability of news organizations to publish more in-depth information on the

5. Internet, such as background documents, detailed maps, or previous stories. One of the
disadvantages of the Internet is that, because information can be published almost instantly,
companies occasionally release stories without subjecting them to the same quality controls and
fact-checking processes common in other media. Nevertheless, people have flocked to the
Internet as a news source. The percentage of Americans getting news from the Internet at least
once a week continues to grow, having surpassed 35 percent in 2000. More than 40 percent of
those obtaining news from the Internet say they go online to get more information about stories
they first encountered in other media.
Journalist As Social Critics
During the 19th century more and more newspapers and magazines began to campaign for
social and political reforms as a method of attracting mass audiences. William Randolph Hearst
and Joseph Pulitzer, while often engaging in sensationalism, also spoke out against social evils of
their day. Some of the mass magazines of the time, such as McClure's Magazine and
Everybody's, built their reputations largely on the exposure of abuses. Newspaper and magazine
editorials exerted some influence, but even more important was the ability of news stories to
focus public attention on social problems or political corruption. Crusading journalists, the so-
called muckrakers, helped to bring about a number of reforms—for example, antitrust legislation
(see Trusts) and the passage of pure food laws (see Pure Food and Drug Acts).
Journalists have continued to serve as watchdogs for the public. In the 1960s television brought
civil rights demonstrations in the United States—and the brutal means sometimes used to control
them—into people’s living rooms. Reporters covering the Vietnam War (1959-1975), having
become convinced that officials were not telling the truth about U.S. involvement there, were
instrumental in turning public opinion against the war.
In 1972 and 1973, led by investigative reporters from the Washington Post, the press exposed
links between the administration of President Richard M. Nixon and a burglary of the
Democratic Party national headquarters (known as the Watergate scandal, so-named for the
building that housed the burglarized office). Senate hearings on the scandal and preparations by
the House of Representatives for impeachment proceedings were carried live on television and

6. attracted large audiences. President Nixon resigned soon thereafter. Some investigative reporters
then turned their attention to alleged abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), charging, for instance, that these agencies had spied
illegally on American citizens.
Except during World Wars I and II, freedom of the American press was not seriously abridged in
the 20th century. Governmental efforts to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers (a
collection of secret documents on the Vietnam War) were struck down by the courts in 1971 as a
violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Broadcasting stations,
which must be licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate, have
generally been more cautious in their criticisms of government than have newspapers.
Journalist Education
Traditionally, reporters had learned their skills on the job, but this began to change in the 20th
century. The first school of journalism in the United States was established at the University of
Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri, in 1908, and a bequest from Joseph Pulitzer led to the creation
in 1912 of a graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, in New York City. More than
100 schools and departments of journalism now exist, and reporters frequently receive some of
their early training on school or college newspapers.
Not all journalism graduates seek employment in the news media. A substantial proportion
engages in public relations, advertising, teaching, or other communications occupations. Courses
in journalism education programs frequently include reporting, newswriting, editing,
broadcasting, new media, and related courses, as well as public relations, advertising, marketing,
and social science research dealing with the process and effects of mass communications.

7. Newspaper
Introduction
Newspaper, publication usually issued on a daily or weekly basis, the main function of which is
to report news. Many newspapers also furnish special information to readers, such as weather
reports, television schedules, and listings of stock prices. They provide commentary on politics,
economics, and arts and culture, and sometimes include entertainment features, such as comics
and crossword puzzles. In nearly all cases and in varying degrees, newspapers depend on
commercial advertising for their income.
Newspaper publishers estimate that nearly six out of ten adults in the United States and Canada
read a newspaper every day, and seven out of ten read a paper each weekend. By the time they
see a newspaper, most people have already learned about breaking news stories on television or
radio. Readers rely on newspapers to provide detailed background information and analysis,
which television and radio newscasts rarely offer. Newspapers not only inform readers that an
event happened but also help readers understand what led up to the event and how it will affect
the world around them.
The staff of a large newspaper works under the constant pressure of deadlines to bring news to
readers as quickly as human energy and technological devices permit. Reporters, photographers,
artists, and editors compile articles and graphics—sometimes in just a few hours. Page designers
assemble articles, photos, illustrations, advertisements, and eye-catching headlines into page
layouts, then rush their work to the printer. Printing technicians may work through the night
operating printing presses that can churn out more than 60,000 copies per hour.
Newspapers trace their roots to handwritten news sheets posted daily in the public marketplaces
of ancient Rome. The first printed newspapers appeared in China during the Tang dynasty (AD
618-907). These newspapers were printed from carved wood blocks. Precursors to modern
papers first appeared in Venice, Italy, in the middle of the 14th century. Newspapers as known
today, complete with advertising and a mixture of political, economic, and social news and
commentary, emerged in Britain in the mid-18th century.

8. Kinds Of Newspaper
Most newspapers are printed on grainy, lightweight paper, called newsprint, which comes in one
of two sizes. Broadsheet newspaper pages measure 33 cm by 55 cm (13 in by 21.5 in). The pages
of tabloid newspapers measure about 25 cm by 37 cm (10 in by 14.5 in). The term tabloid is
sometimes used to refer to newspapers that carry stories about celebrities, crime, or scandal
under sensationalized headlines. However, any kind of newspaper can be printed on tabloid-sized
pages.
Newspapers publish with varying frequency. Some come out every day or even twice a day.
Other newspapers print once a week, once a month, four times a year, or even less often.
Newspapers also differ in focus. General-circulation newspapers print news of interest to a broad
audience, while special-interest papers target a more specific audience.
A Daily Newspapers
Daily newspapers print at least one edition every weekday. Morning editions, printed in the
predawn hours, cover newsworthy events of the previous day. Evening editions are printed in the
afternoon and include information about events that happened earlier that day. Most dailies also
offer a larger weekend edition. In Canada, weekend editions generally come out on Saturdays. In
the United States, Sunday editions are typical.
Stories featured in dailies generally cover a wide range of issues that appeal to an audience in a
specific geographic region, such as a particular metropolitan area. Daily general-circulation
newspapers average about 65 pages during the week and more than 200 pages in the weekend
edition. Commercial advertising takes up about two-thirds of both weekday and weekend
editions, and news and features fill the remaining third.
Most daily newspapers divide their content into separately folded sections. Newspapers typically
have sections for local news, sports, arts and entertainment, business, and classified advertising.
The newspapers’ front page features eye-catching headlines and photographs that pique readers’
interests and direct them to stories featured in the inner sections. The first page of each section
follows the same general model to entice readers to explore that section’s contents.

9. In the United States in 2000, about 1,500 daily newspapers printed a total of 56 million copies,
and on average, each copy was read by at least 2 people. Canada, which has just over one-tenth
of the American population, had about one-tenth the number of daily papers. In 2001, 105
Canadian daily newspapers printed a total of more than 5 million copies each day.
The newspaper with the largest circulation in the United States is USA Today, with a national
circulation of about 2.3 million. Other newspapers with large circulation are the New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times. The Toronto Star is Canada’s most widely read daily newspaper,
followed by the national Globe and Mail.
Many large daily newspapers publish regional editions that cater to the population of a smaller
geographical area. For example, each weekday the Wall Street Journal publishes five different
editions—three national regional editions, an edition in Europe, and an edition in Asia. Dailies in
large metropolitan areas may publish a city edition as well as suburban editions to circulate
among readers who live outside the city. Dailies in large urban areas also may publish two or
more city editions, each delivering news and advertisements directed at different neighborhoods
or boroughs.
Most North American daily newspapers print one edition a day and circulate fewer than 100,000
copies. In 2000 about 100 newspapers sold more than 100,000 copies per day in the United
States, and 10 Canadian papers had daily sales of 100,000 copies or more. Some papers,
especially those in small towns or rural areas, circulate only a few thousand copies per day.
B Weekly Newspapers
Weekly newspapers publish once a week. General-circulation weekly papers often contain news
of interest to people in a smaller area than that of a daily paper, an area such as a small city,
town, or neighborhood. They feature less national or international news, focusing instead on
local happenings. High school sporting events, traffic accidents, and actions by local government
frequently make front-page news in weekly papers.
Many large metropolitan areas also have weekly papers. In urban settings, weekly papers often
provide more detailed analysis of local news and politics than daily papers do. They may contain

10. in-depth commentary on the local arts scene and include comprehensive schedules for music and
theater productions.
Almost 7,600 weekly newspapers circulated in the United States in 2000, each selling an average
of more than 9,000 copies every week. Canada had about 1,100 weeklies, a number that included
many community papers, which publish twice a week.
C Special-Interest Papers
Special-interest newspapers concentrate on news of interest to a particular group. An ethnic
community, for example, may have a newspaper that informs readers of news and events in that
community. Many special-interest newspapers are printed in a language other than English.
Corporations or divisions of corporations often publish their own newspapers, as do unions and
trade organizations, such as those for woodworkers, airline pilots, and people in the fashion
industry. Other special-interest papers feature news about a specific topic, such as rock music or
sports.
Special-interest papers may come out daily, weekly, monthly, or even less frequently. Daily
special-interest newspapers cover daily events from the perspective of members in that group.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, contains detailed financial news that appeals to members
of the business community. Ethnic communities in urban areas may have a daily special-interest
paper that examines local, national, and international news in terms of how it affects their
population. Large universities often have daily papers. Arts newspapers, such as newspapers
devoted to theater or music, often come out weekly. They include critiques of art exhibits,
performances, new music albums, and recently published books. They typically also publish
schedules of upcoming events, such as concerts and poetry readings.
III HOW A NEWSPAPER IS PRODUCED

11. Most newspapers follow roughly the same procedure when putting together an edition of the
paper. First, news editors assign newsworthy events to reporters. The reporters research the
events and write their own stories on computers. Copy editors edit the stories and write headlines
for them. The stories go back to the news editor, who checks over the stories and headlines.
Meanwhile, photographers shoot pictures to accompany the stories, and graphic artists create any
charts and diagrams that that will accompany the stories in the paper.
Advertising professionals raise money for operational costs by selling the space in the newspaper
to advertisers. Artists, working with computer representations of pages on which space has been
blocked out for advertising, determine placement of articles, photographs, and illustrations. They
send the finished computer layouts to the newspaper’s printing facilities, where printing
technicians use state-of-the art equipment to convert electronic files into finished newspapers.
People in the newspaper’s circulation department ensure that the freshly printed newspapers
arrive at newsstands, doorsteps, and newspaper dispensing machines as quickly as possible.
A Creating Articles and Features
News stories, illustrations, and features are the responsibility of the paper’s news staff. The news
staff of a major daily paper usually includes reporters, editors, photographers, and artists. Most
newspapers supplement the work of their news staff with content provided by news
organizations called wire services.
A1 Reporters
Reporters gather information about newsworthy events and write stories that describe them.
Some reporters routinely monitor particular areas of the news, such as happenings at city hall,
the police department, or in court. General-assignment reporters cover a wide variety of news
events. Investigative reporters search out and expose corruption in government, business, labor,
education, and other sectors of society. Many reporters cover only daily events—meetings of a
city council, press conferences, fires, and accidents—while others work for weeks to develop in-
depth articles.

12. A few of the world’s largest newspapers also have offices in their country’s capital that cover
news about their nation’s leader, the government, and national organizations. They may station
reporters in large cities around the country and foreign correspondents in important world
capitals. Other reporters travel to key world events, such as the Olympic Games and regions of
political unrest, where they spend extended periods reporting on events as they occur. These
correspondents send stories to their home offices via facsimile or the Internet, or dictate stories
over the telephone. Using these speedy methods ensures that news will appear in the hometown
newspaper as soon as the events happen.
A2 Wire Services
In addition to receiving reports from their own staffs, newspapers also subscribe to wire services,
such as the Associated Press (AP) or Reuters (see Reuters Holdings PLC). Wire services
distribute up-to-the-minute news stories and pictures to subscribing newspapers. Newspapers
may also run stories and features provided by newspaper syndicates. Like wire services,
newspaper syndicates offer their content to other newspapers for a fee. For example, the New
York Times Company and the Washington Post Company, among others, sell their news reports
and features to papers in the United States and abroad.
A3 Editors
Different types of editors contribute different aspects to news stories. An editor-in-chief
(sometimes called an executive editor) directs the news staff and assumes ultimate responsibility
for the newspaper’s news content. Managing editors handle the day-to-day operations of the
news staff. News editors work closely with reporters to identify which events merit coverage in
the paper and to determine the length of the stories. Most major dailies have several different
news editors. For example, the newspaper may have different news editors for local, national,
and international news, sports, business, and arts.
Copy editors check over reporters’ stories to ensure that they are understandable and free of
errors. They may request more information from the reporter if parts of the story are unclear or
cut back stories that are too long. The copy editors also write a short, catchy headline for the
story. Headlines attract readers and summarize the story’s contents.

13. Page editors determine where stories will appear in the paper. They usually place stories
covering particularly important or interesting events on the front page and usually relegate
stories of interest to fewer people to the paper’s inner pages. Using specialized computer
software, page editors finalize the placement of stories, headlines, and features on each page of
the paper.
Editorial page and opinion editors write editorials. Unlike news stories, which strive to present
the facts in an unbiased manner, newspaper editorials and comments reflect the opinions of the
paper’s editorial team, publisher, or owner. Large papers have several editorial writers. They
may also select additional writers to provide a balance of political and social views. The columns
of many of the best-known editorial writers are syndicated to hundreds of newspapers around the
country. The editorial pages also include a selection of letters from readers. Readers write letters
to the editor to express their own opinions about newsworthy events or about the way stories
were covered in previous editions of the newspaper.
A4 Graphic Artists and Photographers
A team of artists and photographers creates images to bring news stories to life. An art director
works closely with newspaper editors to identify illustrations and photographs that will help
readers conceptualize information contained in news stories. Graphic artists create any charts,
maps, or diagrams that are needed. Staff photographers take pictures of local people and events
featured in the news. When newspapers carry stories about events that happen in other cities,
they may hire freelance photographers stationed in that city or pay a fee to use photographs from
a wire service.
Artists that specialize in page layout and design also work on newspapers. An artist, or team of
artists, works with page editors to arrange news stories, headlines, photographs, illustrations, and
advertisements into pages. Page editors and designers strive to make newspaper pages both
visually appealing and easy to understand.
B Business Operations

14. The business division of the newspaper raises the money required to produce the paper and
oversees printing and distribution. Advertising accounts for approximately 65 percent of
American newspaper revenues, and income from circulation provides the remaining 35 percent.
In Canada, advertising revenues cover up to 70 percent of an average newspaper’s operating
budget. The biggest expense in the publication of large papers is newsprint, which amounts to
about one-third of the total budget. Other major expenses include computers and machinery,
salaries and benefits for newspaper employees, office space, equipment and supplies, utilities,
and advertising.
B1 Advertising
Advertisers spend more of their money advertising in newspapers than in any other medium.
Newspapers offer two different types of advertisements: display ads and classified ads. Display
ads share page space with news and features. They generally feature illustrations, photographs,
or catchy phrases in large print to attract the attention of readers. Teams of specialists sell
newspaper display ads to local and national businesses. Advertisers pay based on how much
space their ad requires on the page. They can purchase full-page display ads, which fill an entire
page of the newspaper, or fractions of pages. The price of an advertisement depends on the size
of the newspaper’s circulation. A full-page display ad in the Wall Street Journal, for example,
cost nearly $168,000 in 2001. Newspapers with smaller circulations charge less for display ad
space because companies assume that fewer people will see their advertisements. A full-page
display ad in a weekday edition of the Seattle Times, which had a circulation of about 226,000 in
2001, cost up to $24,000.
Classified advertisements are small notices with a variety of offerings, such as apartment rentals,
job opportunities, and personal property for sale. Classified ads also include personal ads—short
messages from individual people or groups. Personal ads may be directed at a single reader or at
multiple readers. Unlike display ads, which appear in-line with news stories and features,
classified ads appear in their own section, the classifieds. Many newspapers, especially small
weeklies and special-interest papers, offer their readers some types of classified advertising free.
Large newspapers charge by the word, line, or inch for classified advertising, and as with display
ads, prices depend on circulation. In 2002 the national edition of the Wall Street Journal charged

15. $588 for one inch of a column in their residential real estate classified section. The Seattle Times
charged about $183 for the same amount of space for residential real estate classified advertising
in their weekday edition.
B2 Printing
After the page designer determines the final page layout on the computer, the pages are ready to
be printed. Most newspapers use a printing technique called offset lithography, a method capable
of producing more than 60,000 copies of a 65-page paper per hour (see Printing Techniques:
Lithography).
The page editor sends electronic copies of the pages to a printing technician, who uses a special
computer to create film negatives for each page. The technician transfers the page images to
plastic or aluminum plates using a camera that shines ultra-violet light through the negative onto
the plate. The light penetrates the clear parts of the negative, exposing only the printing portions
of the plate. The technician then attaches the plate to one of the cylinders of a large printing
press.
When in operation, a printing press rotates continuously, first coating the plate with water, which
adheres to the nonprinting areas of the plate, then smearing the plate with ink that sticks only to
the nonwatered portions of the plate. The cylinders rewater and reink the plate as they spin,
pulling a long roll of newsprint, called a web, through the press as they do. When the plates roll
over the newsprint, they transfer quick-drying ink to its surface. A typical modern newspaper
printing press prints both sides of a newsprint web several pages wide. It also incorporates
automatic cutters and folders and may include an inserting machine that arranges sections one
inside the other.
Papers with multiple editions, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, send
computerized pages to two or more printing presses at a time, often in different geographical
regions. These decentralized printing facilities enable newspapers to distribute copies to cities
across the continent, and in some cases the world, at more or less the same time.
B3 Distribution

16. The circulation department supervises the distribution of the newspaper. Most newspapers offer
home delivery. Trucks carry freshly printed papers to regional distribution centers. Newspaper
carriers pick up bundles of newspapers from the distribution center, then deliver them to the
homes of paying subscribers along a predetermined route. In other cases, distribution trucks
deliver bundles of newspapers directly to the carriers. Carriers are paid based on the number of
papers they deliver. In some areas, especially small cities and rural areas, mostly middle and high
school students deliver papers, often on foot or via bicycle. In large cities, paper carriers are
usually adults, who travel their routes by car so they can deliver more papers per day.
Trucks deliver newspapers to newsstands and newspaper dispensing machines located in areas
where people congregate, such as airports, bus stations, and train stations. Newsstands and
newspaper dispensing machines also dot the street corners of medium- and large-sized cities.
Many retail outlets, such as grocery stores and coffee shops, also offer newspapers for sale. The
big, catchy headlines on a newspaper’s front page serve to catch the attention of passersby in
these and other public venues.
Circulation managers try to increase the number of people who buy the paper because
newspapers depend on selling copies of the paper for more than 30 percent of their revenue.
They may sponsor special promotional prices for subscription or give away copies of the paper
to attract new readers.
IV ORIGINS OF NEWSPAPERS
Before the invention of printing machines, people spread news by word of mouth, written letters,
or public notices. As more people learned to read and write, news reports gained added
reliability. Ancient Rome had a particularly sophisticated system for circulating written news. Its
publishing practices centered on acta diurna (daily events), handwritten news sheets posted by
the government in the public marketplace from the year 59 BC to at least AD 222. Acta diurna
announced news of politics, trials, scandals, military campaigns, and executions. In China, early
government-produced news sheets, called tipao, circulated among court officials during the Han
dynasty (202 BC-AD 220). At some point during the Tang dynasty (618-907), the Chinese used
carved wooden blocks to print tipao, making them the first printed newspapers in history.

17. A printing press that employed movable type was developed in Europe in 1450, and European
officials soon began using it to publish news (see Printing). Short pamphlets, called news books,
informed the public of royal weddings, victorious battles, or other newsworthy events. News
ballads recounted news events in verse form. News books and news ballads were circulated
sporadically in Europe and the American colonies, usually when officials wanted to inform the
public of important events.
V THE FIRST NEWSPAPERS
Newspapers published under the same name on a regular schedule first appeared in Venice, Italy,
in the 16th century. Handwritten newspapers called avisi, or gazettes, appeared weekly as early
as 1566. They reported news brought to Venice by traders, such as accounts of wars and politics
in other parts of Italy and Europe. Venetian gazettes established a style of journalism that most
early printed newspapers followed—short sets of news items written under the name of the city
they came from and the date on which they were sent. The oldest surviving copies of European
newspapers are of two weeklies published in German in 1609—one in Strassburg (now
Strasbourg, France) by Johann Carolus, the other in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, by Lucas Schulte.
Newspapers spread rapidly throughout Europe. One-page weeklies appeared in Basel,
Switzerland, by 1610; in Frankfurt, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, by 1615; in Hamburg,
Germany, by 1616; in Berlin, Germany, by 1617; and in Amsterdam, Netherlands, by 1618. The
first newspaper printed in England appeared in 1621, and France produced a newspaper in 1631.
However, printers in Amsterdam, a center of trade and of political and religious tolerance in the
early 17th century, exported weeklies in French and in English as early as 1620. The first
continuously published English newspaper was the Weekly News, published from 1622 to 1641.
Italy's first printed weekly appeared by 1639, and Spain had one by 1641.
Early English newspapers were generally printed in one of two formats: in the style of the Dutch
papers or in the style of the early German weeklies. Dutch-style papers compressed news stories
onto four or fewer pages, while news in German-style weeklies covered up to 24 pages. English
publishers first used the Dutch style but switched to the German style by 1622.

18. English newspapers were among the first in the world to use headlines to attract readers and
woodcuts to illustrate stories. English newspapers also set new business standards. They hired
women as reporters, printed advertisements as a source of revenue, and paid newsboys, or more
commonly, newsgirls, to sell papers in the streets.
The fledgling English press faced censorship throughout much of the 17th century. Early
newspapers called diurnals—the predecessors of today’s dailies—featured news from all over
Europe and occasionally America or Asia. However, government officials discouraged reporting
on local matters. In addition, the government tightly regulated print shops. In England, as in most
other European countries, the government required printers to have licenses to print the news.
Printers could lose their licenses if they published anything offensive to authorities.
The first major change in this arrangement came in the years before the outbreak of the English
Civil War (1642-1648). As Parliament, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, struggled with
King Charles I, national news assumed a new importance. Newspapers, liberated by the
breakdown in the king's authority, began to feel free enough to discuss domestic politics. The
first English newspaper to attempt to report on national news was the Heads of Several
Proceedings in This Present Parliament, a weekly that appeared in 1641. The public’s appetite
for domestic news grew steadily, and soon a number of papers covered national politics and
other previously censored topics. In 1644 writer John Milton articulated the ideal of freedom of
the press with great eloquence in his essay Areopagitica. However, when Oliver Cromwell
consolidated his power after Charles I was beheaded in 1649, he cracked down on the press. He
allowed only a few authorized newspapers to be printed.
After the monarchy was restored under King Charles II in 1660, the government gradually ended
licensing provisions and other restrictions. The English press published in an atmosphere of
considerable freedom—as long as it did not criticize the government. During the upheaval of the
Glorious Revolution in 1688 (when Parliament deposed King James II in favor of William of
Orange), the English press burst free of nearly all government restrictions. The law that required
printers to obtain licenses lapsed in 1695. Belief in the right of the press to question and criticize
government eventually took hold in England and migrated to its American colonies.

19. VI THE NEWSPAPER IN THE UNITED STATES
The first newspaper published in the American colonies, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign
and Domestick, launched in 1690 in Boston, Massachusetts. The colonial government suppressed
its publication after just one issue. Fourteen years passed before another newspaper was
published in the colonies.
A Colonial Papers
The Boston News-Letter, established in 1704 by John Campbell, became the first regularly
published colonial newspaper. The paper contained financial and foreign news from English
newspapers and recorded local births, deaths, and social events. It rarely challenged colonial
authority because the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony retained the right to censor any
of its contents.
The New-England Courant, first printed in 1721 by James Franklin, introduced coverage of
political debate in its first issue. The paper presented the controversy surrounding smallpox
inoculations, which were used for the first time in Boston that year to fight an epidemic. Cotton
Mather, a prominent Congregational minister and scholar, supported inoculation; Franklin did
not.
The next year, the Courant took on the colonial government, accusing it of failing to do enough
to protect the area from pirates. This crusade landed Franklin in jail. Later a court decreed that
Franklin be forbidden to print or publish the Courant. To evade this order, Franklin appointed his
younger brother Benjamin, then his apprentice, the paper's official publisher. Benjamin Franklin
made the most of this opportunity, publishing humorous social commentary under the pen name
Silence Dogwood along with reports on political events. He continued to learn the trades of
printer and publisher, and in 1729 he took control of the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia.
The first New York City newspaper, the Gazette, was founded by William Bradford in 1725.
Several others followed, 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 on charges of seditious libel.

20. Zenger was tried and found not guilty. The trial of John Peter Zenger created an important
precedent for the establishment of a free press in America.
B Revolutionary Period
In 1750, 12 newspapers were being published 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. Most of these papers were published weekly, contained
only four pages, and typically had a circulation of fewer than 400 copies. The papers printed
more essays than news. The essays emphasized the importance of individual freedom,
anticipating the American Revolution (1775-1783).
The major limitation on press freedom in Britain in the 18th century and the first half of the 19th
century was the stamp tax. This tax had the effect of raising the price of newspapers to the point
where few people could afford to buy them. By making newspapers more expensive, the stamp
tax reduced the number of newspaper readers. In this way the British government limited the
power of the press by limiting its circulation.
The Stamp Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1765, would have placed a similar tax on
American newspapers. This legislation required that American paper products, including
newspapers, bear a British government stamp as proof of tax payment. Many Americans rebelled
against the act, which was to take effect on November 1, 1765. As that day approached,
newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Journal ceased publication, announcing that they were
'EXPIRING: In Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again.' Then, cautiously, the newspapers began
appearing again, without the stamp. The Stamp Act proved unenforceable and was soon
repealed, but it had the unintended effect of uniting many editors and publishers in support of
independence from Britain.
During successive waves of colonial protest against the British, newspapers published woodcut
prints of divided snakes representing the weakness of the colonies if they remained divided, and
woodcuts of coffins (designed by American patriot Paul Revere) representing the victims of the
Boston Massacre. Colonial papers also published revolutionist essays by American patriots John
Dickinson and Thomas Paine. Papers further demonstrated their revolutionary zeal by

21. publicizing the names of people who weakened prospects for independence, such as those who
continued to import British goods in spite of organized boycotts.
In 1773 colonists gathered in the house of a newspaper editor, Benjamin Edes of the Boston
Gazette, to organize the Boston Tea Party—a protest against Parliament’s decision to tax tea
imported to the colonies. Among the other leading newspapers in the struggle against British
policies were the Massachusetts Spy, published by Isaiah Thomas, and John Holt's New York
Journal. Two women, Sarah and Mary Katherine Goddard, published the Providence Gazette,
another anti-British voice during these years. American patriot Samuel Adams, who often edited
the Boston Gazette, organized the Committees of Correspondence, groups of colonists who
garnered public support for independence. In 1776 the front pages of colonial papers carried the
Declaration of Independence, an official validation of the fight for independence that had
embroiled colonists and British soldiers for more than a year.
During the Revolutionary War, newspapers reported military developments to an increasing
number of readers. Business generated by the war brought advertising revenue to the papers.
While most newspapers were staunchly proindependence, not all the colonial papers espoused
anti-British sentiments. James Rivington's New York Gazetteer gave voice to both the Tory, or
pro-British, and the patriot side in the ongoing conflict in what Rivington called his 'Ever Open
and Uninfluenced Press.' Despite their professed allegiance to the principle of a free press, the
Sons of Liberty—a society of influential American patriots—were infuriated by Rivington's
paper. He responded by taking more openly Tory positions. After the Revolution, the New York
Gazetteer ceased operation, leaving a largely uniform press in the newly independent colonies.
The new press, however, soon found itself deeply divided after the war—first, concerning the
ratification of the Articles of Confederation and, later, when the Constitution of the United States
was adopted. The conservative Federalists directly opposed the Anti-Federalists, or Democratic-
Republicans, who advocated the rights of states over a central, national leadership. One issue,
however, united the newspapers of the country: All supported the First Amendment to the
Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, religion, the right of assembly, and the right
to petition Congress. The First Amendment has endured many challenges since its inception, but
it remains the cornerstone of the free press in the United States.

22. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 called into question the freedom of the press. The Sedition
Act provided that a person could be fined or imprisoned for publishing false or malicious
statements about the president or Congress. The Federalists, who supported the law, used it to
imprison editors who opposed their policies. However, the Federalists did not invoke the same
law against editors who attacked Democratic-Republican policies, such as those of Thomas
Jefferson. Reaction against this repressive law helped Jefferson win the presidency in 1800
before it expired in 1801.
C Penny Press
The Pennsylvania Evening Post and Daily Advertiser, the first daily newspaper in the United
States, began publication in 1783 in Philadelphia. By 1800, 20 daily papers were in operation.
The number continued to increase in the first three decades of the 19th century as the Industrial
Revolution spread and spawned a new working class in the nation's growing cities. Until the
1830s newspapers focused almost entirely on business and political news. Benjamin Henry Day
changed this approach in 1833, when he published the first edition of the New York Sun. Day
filled his paper with reports of local crime and violence, human-interest stories, and
entertainment pieces and sold it for one penny. This event marked the creation of the penny
press, which dominated American journalism throughout the rest of the 19th century.
The penny press owes much of its success to the invention of the cylinder press, which printed
newspapers quickly and cheaply (see Printing: Printing Presses). The cylinder press was first
used in the United States in 1825. Six years later New York industrialist Richard M. Hoe
improved the cylinder press by adding a second cylinder, and in 1846 he patented the first rotary
press, which employed several cylinders. By 1835 Day was using steam engines, first used in
1814 to drive the presses at the Times in London, to print his rapidly growing Sun. Steam-driven
rotary presses made it possible to push newspaper sales much higher. The old style printing press
could print perhaps 125 newspapers in an hour. By 1851 the Sun's presses printed 18,000 copies
in an hour. The New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times soon followed
the Sun’s model. The penny press quickly spread to other Eastern cities and across the country as
the nation expanded westward.

23. D Newspapers in the 19th Century
The invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1837 dramatically improved the speed and
reliability of news reporting. Newspapers became the major customers of the telegraph
companies. The high cost of telegraph transmissions led to the formation of telegraph wire
services, which distributed stories to many different papers. The Associated Press, now one of
the world’s leading wire services, was founded as a cooperative venture by New York
newspapers in 1848. The telegraph enabled newspapers to fill their pages with news that
happened the previous day in cities located hundreds, then thousands, of miles away. With the
successful completion of a transatlantic cable in 1866, American newspapers could print news
from Europe with similar speed.
The rise of the wire services also tended to reduce the emphasis on personal opinion in news
stories. In addition, as editors and reporters embraced the ideals of science and realism in the late
19th century, they began treating facts with a new respect. After Adolph Simon Ochs acquired
the New York Times in 1896, it became one of the world's foremost newspapers. Its reputation
was based more on the thoroughness of its reporting than on its editorials or positions on issues.
As newspapers competed with one another to increase circulation, publishers sought new
methods to attract readers. Publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began using
drawings and comic strips to enliven their newspapers. They also transformed their papers with
coverage of scandalous events and sensational stories. These tactics proved successful
immediately, and a number of other papers followed suit. Journalists and writers labeled papers
that relied on sensational stories or comic strips to attract readers yellow journalism, after the
popular Hearst comic strip The Yellow Kid.
Other changes also encouraged newspaper growth at the end of the 19th century. The
development of the first Linotype machine in the mid-1880s sped up typesetting by making
possible the automatic casting of entire lines of type (see Typesetting Equipment). The regular
use of photographs in newspapers, which began in 1897, also broadened readership.
Improvements to the rotary press drove newspaper circulation in large cities into the hundreds of
thousands. By 1900 daily newspapers in the United States numbered 2,326. Most large cities had
several papers each, and many smaller cities had at least two newspapers.

24. E Alternative Papers
Even in cities where a number of different papers were in circulation, many people felt
newspapers did not represent their interests or points of view. One solution for communities of
immigrants who spoke English as a second language was to publish newspapers in their native
language. From 1794 to 1798, French speakers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, published the
French-language newspaper Courrier Français. Early Spanish-language newspapers appeared in
New Orleans in 1808 and in Texas in 1813. Beginning in 1828 members of the Cherokee Nation
in northern Georgia published the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in
both Cherokee and English. The Jewish Daily Forward, printed in Yiddish, first appeared in
New York in 1897; by 1923 local editions were printed in 11 other cities. Waves of immigration
to American cities in the first decades of the 20th century increased demand for foreign-language
papers. According to one survey, the United States had 160 foreign-language dailies in 1914 and
a total of 1,323 foreign-language papers in 1917.
African Americans and their abolitionist supporters also sought alternatives to mainstream
newspapers. In 1827 John B. Russwurm and Reverend Samuel Cornish produced the first
newspaper published by African Americans in the United States, Freedom's Journal. 'We wish to
plead our own cause,' they wrote, 'too long have others spoken for us' (see African American
History: Free Black Population). Ten years later, Cornish became editor of the New York
newspaper Colored American. The abolitionist crusader William Lloyd Garrison founded the
Liberator in 1831 with the expressed purpose of producing a public backlash against slavery.
The great African American writer and activist Frederick Douglass started the North Star in 1847
to attack slavery. This publication later became Frederick Douglass’ Weekly and was followed
by Douglass’ Monthly, which originated as a supplement to the Weekly.
Women’s rights activists also formed alternative papers to champion their cause. American
reformer Amelia Jenks Bloomer published the Lily from 1849 to 1859. Women’s rights activists
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the Revolution from 1868 to 1871.
Socialist newspapers also boomed for a time in the United States, reaching a total circulation of 2
million in 1913. Many of these papers ceased publication during World War I (1914-1918),
when freedom of the press was severely curtailed. Many alternative publishers were tried under

25. the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917 and amendments passed in 1918, which prohibited
printed attacks on the U.S. government.
F Concentration of Ownership
The number of newspapers published in the United States declined in the first half of the 20th
century. In many cases, stiff competition from other papers in the same city led newspapers to
merge with the competing papers. For example, New York City once had 20 daily newspapers,
but by 1940 it had only 8. Also in 1940, 25 American cities with more than 100,000 residents
had only 1 daily newspaper.
Ownership of many of the newspapers that survived shifted from local citizens to national
chains. American newspaper publishers Edward Wyllis Scripps and Milton Alexander McRae
assembled the first large newspaper chain, the Scripps-McRae League of Newspapers, in 1894.
Three years later they developed the Scripps-McRae Press Agency (now United Press
International) to supply their chain with articles. Scripps also established the first newspaper
syndicate, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, to provide his papers with comics and feature
articles. By 1914 the Scripps-McRae League published 23 newspapers.
William Randolph Hearst assembled an even larger news media empire. Hearst owned 6
newspapers in 1904. He steadily acquired more newspapers and related businesses, and by 1922
he owned 20 daily papers, 11 weeklies, 2 wire services, 6 magazines, and a newsreel company.
Many people viewed the trend towards chains and consolidation with concern. Fewer newspaper
publishers meant fewer editorial perspectives, a problem that magnified exponentially when
newspaper publishers also controlled the content of other publications in the same region.
G Competition from Radio and Television
The rise of radio and television broadcasting posed new competitive threats to newspapers.
Radio began offering the American public another source of news and entertainment as early as
1920. By 1929, 10 million American households had radios. Despite early efforts by newspaper
publishers to prevent radio stations from using news and stories distributed by the Associated
Press, radio made significant gains as a news medium. Radio reached the height of its influence

26. during World War II (1939-1945), when it carried war news from the battlefronts directly to the
homes of millions of listeners.
The arrival of television after World War II ended nearly two centuries of news reporting
dominated by newspapers. In 1940 one newspaper circulated in the United States for every two
adults. Fifty years later, far fewer Americans relied on newspapers as their primary news source.
Cable and television network news reporting had largely supplanted newspapers in this capacity.
In one survey, only 9 percent of Americans said they kept up with news of the Persian Gulf War
(1990-1991) primarily through newspapers.
Television and radio stations had an advantage over newspapers—they could broadcast breaking
news stories minutes after they occurred. American newspapers struggled to maintain their place
in the world of news reporting. Realizing that most of their readers had already heard breaking
news stories on television, they began covering more news in greater detail than did television
and radio news. Newspaper articles provided historical context for current events and in-depth
analysis from two or more perspectives.
H Government-Press Conflict
In the 1960s Americans were divided over the wisdom of the Vietnam War (1959-1975). During
this period, unquestioned loyalty to the American cause fell under criticism. The concept of press
freedom expanded to assume an almost adversarial relationship between press and government.
This relationship climaxed in 1971, when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers.
This publication gave Americans a look behind the scenes at government planning and policies
that led to the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. When the government tried to prevent publication
of this material, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the right of the newspaper to
print it.
Publication of the Pentagon Papers heightened interest in investigative reporting. No longer
content to report only what the government said it was doing, newspaper reporters sought to
report with authority what the government actually did. Reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob
Woodward, then working at the Washington Post, showed the world how powerful investigative
reporting could be when they reported the details of the Watergate scandal to the American

27. public in 1973. Their story revealed a pattern of corruption in the administration of President
Richard M. Nixon. These revelations sparked a series of events, including a grand jury
investigation of the burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s national campaign
headquarters, that culminated with the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.
VII THE NEWSPAPER IN CANADA
The French colonial government in Canada did not permit printing presses to be established
during its roughly 100-year tenure. France formally ceded its Canadian territory to Britain in the
French and Indian War (1754-1763). Canada’s newspaper history dates to the early years of
British colonialism in the mid- to late 18th century.
A British Colonial Period
As the British gained control of the territories in Canada, a few American newspaper printers
moved north to set up shop in Canada. John Bushell, a printer originally from Boston, introduced
the first Canadian newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 23, 1752.
Two printers from Philadelphia established the first bilingual newspaper, Québec Gazette (now
the weekly Québec Telegraph-Chronicle), in Québec City, Québec, in 1764. Several other papers
followed, and by the end of the 18th century residents of eastern Canada had several newspapers
to choose from.
The earliest Canadian newspapers depended on the government for revenue. As did early
newspapers in Britain, colonial papers consisted primarily of foreign news and government
announcements. They took care not to publish material that might offend public officials for fear
of losing financial backing.
However, settlers from Britain and the United States brought changes to population
demographics in Canada in the early 19th century. Canadian newspapers grew at a rapid pace to
meet the demands of a rapidly emerging merchant class. Independent-minded editors began
turning to commercial advertisements as a revenue source rather than to the government. This
select group of newspapers grew less dependent on government approval of their publishing
practices.

28. B Confederation Debates
Many Canadian newspapers in the 19th century remained allied with political parties. The most
debated issue of this period was that of confederation—that is, the creation of a single dominion
(a locally autonomous state within the British Empire) uniting the British colonies in North
America (see Confederation of Canada). Canadian statesman and journalist George Brown
launched the Toronto Globe (now the Globe and Mail) in 1844 as a tool for propagating his
political views. Brown founded the Globe as a voice of the Reform Party (also called the Liberal
Party), which advocated changing Canada’s status to that of a dominion of Britain. The Globe
began with a weekly circulation of 300 and by 1853 had a daily circulation of 6,000. Several
other politicians followed Brown’s lead, and by the end of the 19th century, newspapers across
Canada espoused the political ideology of one political party or another. Most large cities
supported two newspapers—one liberal and one conservative.
C 20th Century
Newspapers across Canada remained strongly political into the 20th century. But while
partisanship remained, fewer papers relied solely on the government or political parties for
financing. Publishers turned increasingly to advertising as a revenue source, and by the close of
the first decade of the 20th century, large city daily papers covered as much as 80 percent of their
operating budgets with advertising revenue.
In 1873 there were 47 daily newspapers in Canada; by 1913 that number had increased to 113.
Canadian newspaper publishers benefited from rising literacy rates. To attract new readers,
Canadian newspapers emphasized local news and short human-interest stories. Sales grew even
higher as Canada’s railway network expanded, enabling publishers to distribute newspapers
across previously impractical distances.
After 1915, however, the number of daily newspapers in Canada dropped steadily. Competition
for readers and advertising dollars was fierce, and many newspapers struggled to make ends
meet. Publishers of failing newspapers merged operations with successful newspapers in their
towns, a phenomenon that accelerated markedly as the century progressed. By 1950 the four

29. largest publishing conglomerates controlled almost 40 percent of the newspapers circulated in
Canada.
In Canada, as in the United States, the introduction of radio in the 1920s, then television in the
1950s, derailed newspapers from the dominant position in the news media. Newspapers
responded by increasing analysis and historical background of the events that they covered.
Many also decreased their coverage of national and international news and expanded their local
news sections. Surveys show that Canadians prefer television for international and national news,
but most rely on newspapers for coverage of local events. Circulation of small community
newspapers grew substantially in the late 20th century. In 1971, 3.8 million Canadians read a
community newspaper each week. In 1999, that number topped 10.6 million.
VIII THE GLOBAL PRESS
In modern times, newspapers that share a similar structure and function are published all over the
world. This global press traces its origin to British papers of the 18th century. Though threatened
by censorship in the years preceding, during, and following the world wars, the global press
maintained the tradition of freedom of the press first established in London.
A The British Model
The first recognizably modern papers—depending on advertising and newspaper sales for
revenue and providing a mixture of political, economic, and social news and commentary—
emerged in Britain in the mid-18th century. As the first country to undergo the Industrial
Revolution, Britain was uniquely able to provide the complex system of distribution networks,
large urban markets, and advertisers necessary to make newspapers profitable enterprises.
By the mid-19th century, newspapers based on the British model circulated in many large cities
around the globe. Most of these papers were the products of an expanding British Empire. The
Toronto Globe launched in Canada in 1844, for example, and the Melbourne Age started up in
Australia in 1854. The British also exerted their newspaper influence on the Indian subcontinent.
The first local-language newspaper, the Urdu Akhbar, was first printed in 1836 in what is now
Pakistan. The British Empire in India sparked a range of English-language newspapers by the

30. latter half of the century, including the Times of India in Bombay, the Statesman in Calcutta
(now Kolkata), and the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. The British model also spread to
Latin America in the early 19th century. El Mercurio began circulation in Valparaiso, Chile, in
1827, and Peru’s El Comercio printed its first edition in 1839.
During the 19th century, the British model became far more than the technical process of
printing, financing, and distributing newspapers; it evolved into a political presence. The Times
of London set the standard for a global press. It defined the principle of freedom of the press—
the right to criticize the government and to campaign vigorously for its own political views.
The spread of literacy and primary education promised a larger audience. In addition, the
commercial success of the Times and its profits, essential to the maintenance of editorial
independence, inspired competitors to seek even larger profits. In an effort to attract a broader
audience, competitors of the Times featured brief stories written in a simple style, illustrations,
and more coverage of sports and local affairs. They also moved interesting news stories to the
front page of the paper. Most 20th-century general-circulation newspapers adopted these
modifications.
B Freedom of the Press Following World War I
After World War I ended in 1918, many governments sought to control or crush independent
newspapers. As Italy fell under the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, Milan’s Corriere della Sera
(Evening Courier) decried the dictator’s actions and policies. The paper launched a prolonged
investigation of the murder of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteoti by Fascist thugs and
eventually placed blame for the killing firmly on Mussolini himself. The paper’s offices were
firebombed, and newsstands that sold the paper were attacked. Advertisers received warnings of
official retaliation if they advertised in Corriere rather than in Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo
d’Itlalia (The People of Italy). In 1925 Mussolini forced Corriere’s publisher to resign. The
paper fell under the authority of Mussolini’s new press bureau, and like all the other Italian
newspapers of the time, tamely adhered to the bureau’s restrictions on press freedom.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler, who assumed power in 1933, appointed Paul Joseph Goebbels as
minister of propaganda and national enlightenment. In this capacity, Goebbels tightly controlled

31. the dissemination of all news. The Nazi Party seized control of the once-independent Wolff news
agency, renaming it the German Information Agency. Goebbels also ensured that the Nazi Party
newspapers, Völkischer Beobachter (the People’s Observer) and Der Angriff (the Attack), and
the virulently anti-Semitic journal Der Sturmer (the Stormer), received newsprint allocations and
official advertising.
The new model of the press as a tool of ideology and government, in direct contrast to the
independent tradition established by the Times of London, was perfected by Vladimir Lenin in
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As
the first leader of the USSR, Lenin argued that Soviet newspapers should be tools for social
control, and he strictly controlled the information they published.
C Post-World War II
After World War II, the victorious Allies established several major papers in the occupied
countries of Europe and Asia. To greater and lesser degrees, these papers became mouthpieces
for opposing sides in the Cold War, the 40-year period of hostility between the United States and
the USSR that followed World War II.
In Paris, after the Allies drove the Germans out in 1944, the new liberation government of
General Charles de Gaulle established Le Monde (the World) as France’s primary newspaper.
The French government supported the paper with generous subsidies of newsprint and
advertising. The ambiguity of the paper’s role–the fact that it promised freedom from
government control but also was the government-sponsored journal of France—raised serious
issues about press independence.
In Italy, members of the British and American armies reestablished Corriere della Sera after the
fall of Mussolini in 1943. The first editor of the new Corriere supported British interests in Italy
to such an extent that he took his early news columns verbatim from the foreign broadcasts of the
British Broadcasting Corporation.
In the aftermath of World War II, official news agencies—such as TASS in the USSR and the
German News Service in East Germany—strictly controlled news material throughout the

32. Communist world. The Soviet Army censored newspapers in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
East Germany, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Communist governments in these countries tolerated the
publication of several small, alternative papers, so long as they echoed the views of the
Communist party.
After the Communist armies under Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war in 1949, the
Communists imposed Soviet-style control over the press. In October 1949 all newspapers in
China were required to register with the national information ministry, which shut down most of
the papers. The few newspapers that survived this process did so with new editors appointed by
the Communist Party. Their editorial policies came under the authority of the party's department
of propaganda. Xinhua, the official news agency, provided their news. The one paper to survive
the Communist victory with its name and independence intact was the Tianjin daily Ta Kung
Pao, which specialized in financial news. Along with the party journal Renmin Ribao (People's
Daily), it was one of the few publications licensed for sale outside China.
D Newspapers in Postcolonial Governments
Even in countries not directly affected by World War II, newspapers endured challenges to their
independence. After India gained its independence from Britain in 1947, the Indian government
adopted restrictive press controls. The Objectionable Matters Press Law of 1951 forbade the
publication of defamatory content. The Indian government used its own heavy advertising
budget as a way to punish or reward particular papers for the way they portrayed government
issues. The Price and Page Law of 1957 regulated the size and price of newspapers and the
proportion of allowable advertising. While that law’s defenders advocated it as a way to help
small and regional papers compete with major dailies, the law had the effect of keeping the
Indian press financially weak and vulnerable to official pressures.
Newspapers in other developing nations also endured pressure from newly independent
governments. These regimes urged the press to play a patriotic role in nation building by
assuming a less critical view of the government. Such pressure was intense in Indonesia under
the leadership of President Sukarno, who governed from 1945 to 1968. In 1957 the Indonesian
government suspended 30 newspapers and arrested a dozen editors.

33. In South Korea, the government forbade newspapers to criticize President Syngman Rhee at any
time during his regime, which lasted from 1948 to1960. The South Korean press faced stricter
and more repressive government controls after Rhee was ousted in 1960. Press control finally
relaxed when democratic reforms were adopted under President Kim Young Sam, who led the
country from 1993 to 1998. In Pakistan, Article 8 of the nation’s constitution guaranteed freedom
of the press, but the penal code contained several clauses under which newspapers were
repeatedly punished for offenses against the government.
In South Africa the 1963 Publications Act permitted the government to censor any newspaper
that did not agree to a self-policing and self-censoring code of conduct. The Rand Daily Mail
chose to publish frequent criticisms of the Nationalist government and its policy of apartheid. As
a result, the paper faced government harassment, fines, the confiscation of its journalists’
passports, and advertising boycotts.
E Breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe
A dramatic expansion of press freedoms came in the 1980s in the country least expected to
produce them, the USSR. For most of the Soviet regime’s 70-year existence, the government and
the Communist Party rigidly controlled the Soviet press. At times, however, the press challenged
the limits of Communist Party power. Under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, which
lasted from the late 1920s to 1953, many journalists were executed or sent to labor camps in
Siberia. In the early 1960s Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev relaxed some controls, and the
Communist Party’s daily, Pravda (Truth), published a defense of exiled novelist Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, as well as an attack on censorship.
During the 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a policy of glasnost (openness),
which included increased freedom for the press to probe Soviet history and particularly Stalin's
crimes. Glasnost allowed the Soviet press to criticize and discuss foreign policy and to publicize
social problems such as crime, alcoholism, and poverty. The Soviet press had not enjoyed such
freedom since before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The press exposed the underworld of
organized crime. It informed the public of governmental policy changes initiated under
Gorbachev. Western politicians and journalists were invited to write commentaries in Soviet
papers. These and other freedoms created a new awareness among Soviet people, setting the

34. stage for the political reforms that ultimately resulted in the breakdown of the USSR in 1991 and
the ensuing collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe.
IX THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY TODAY
The newspaper industry today continues the trends of consolidation and concentration of
ownership first established in the 19th century. But a late-20th-century phenomena, the Internet,
promises to revolutionize the newspaper industry worldwide.
A Consolidation
The number of newspapers in circulation continues the steady decline that began at the turn of
20th century. Most U.S. and Canadian cities today have only one newspaper publisher. In
Canada, only 6 cities are served by two or more separately owned newspapers. In more than 170
American cities, a single publisher produces both a morning and an evening paper. Fewer than
30 U.S. cities have competing papers with different ownership.
Many people believe that the lack of competition compromises the integrity of news coverage in
those cities. Without immediate competitive threats to keep them in check, papers may be less
likely to present alternate views of public issues or may present the views of the publisher or
owner not as opinion, but as fact. In some areas, competition for advertising with radio,
television, and magazines may encourage newspapers to present all points of view. Many
newspaper publishers, however, own radio and television stations, often in the same city where
their papers are published.
B Newspaper Chains
The tendency toward newspaper chains—ownership of a number of newspapers by a single
company—which began with Hearst and Scripps in the United States in the late 1800s, has also
increased worldwide. In Canada about two-thirds of the total circulation is owned by five large
corporations, four of which operated internationally. The largest newspaper chain is Gannett Co.,
which owned 94 newspapers with a circulation totaling about 8 million worldwide in 2002.
C The Internet

35. The rapid and widespread expansion of the Internet has enabled millions of people to read a
variety of daily newspapers online, usually free of charge. This trend, along with the rise of 24-
hour cable television news networks, has caused subscription and circulation rates to decline.
The percentage of Americans getting news from the Internet grew rapidly during the late 1990s.
In 2002 some two-thirds of adult Americans were getting the news online. Roughly one fourth of
all Americans get news from the Internet on an average day.
Today almost all of the world’s major newspapers have online versions. Most medium- to large-
sized daily newspapers in the United States and Canada also publish on the Internet. These
developments have led some media experts to predict that the printed newspaper will give way to
fully electronic information services in the early decades of the 21st century. But whatever its
medium—electronic or print—the newspaper will likely remain an important feature in modern
society.
Communication
I INTRODUCTION
Communication, the process of sharing ideas, information, and messages with others in a
particular time and place. Communication includes writing and talking, as well as nonverbal
communication (such as facial expressions, body language, or gestures), visual communication
(the use of images or pictures, such as painting, photography, video, or film), and electronic
communication (telephone calls, electronic mail, cable television, or satellite broadcasts).
Communication is a vital part of personal life and is also important in business, education, and
any other situation where people encounter each other.
Businesses are concerned with communication in several special ways. Some businesses build
and install communication equipment, such as fax (facsimile) machines, video cameras, CD
players, printing presses, personal computers, and telephones. Other companies create some of
the messages or content that those technologies carry, such as movies, books, and software.
These companies are part of the media or telecommunications industries. Organizational
communication is important in every business. People in organizations need to communicate to
coordinate their work and to inform others outside the business about their products and services
(these kinds of communication are called advertising or public relations).

36. II ORIGINS
Communication between two people is an outgrowth of methods developed over centuries of
expression. Gestures, the development of language, and the necessity to engage in joint action all
played a part.
A Communication Among Animals
Humans are not the only creatures that communicate; many other animals exchange signals and
signs that help them find food, migrate, or reproduce. The 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin
showed that the ability of a species to exchange information or signals about its environment is
an important factor in its biological survival. For example, honey bees dance in specific patterns
that tell other members of the hive where to find food. Insects regularly use pheromones, a
special kind of hormone, to attract mates. Elephants emit very low-pitched sounds, below the
level of human hearing, that call other members of the herd over many miles. Chimpanzees use
facial expressions and body language to express dominance or affection with each other. Whales
and dolphins make vocal clicks, squeals, or sing songs to exchange information about feeding
and migration, and to locate each other (see Animal Behavior).
B Language
While other animals use a limited range of sounds or signals to communicate, humans have
developed complex systems of language that are used to ensure survival, to express ideas and
emotions, to tell stories and remember the past, and to negotiate with one another. Oral (spoken)
language is a feature of every human society or culture. Anthropologists studying ancient
cultures have several theories about how human language began and developed. The earliest
language systems probably combined vocal sounds with hand or body signals to express
messages. Some words may be imitative of natural sounds. Others may have come from
expressions of emotion, such as laughter or crying. Language, some theorists believe, is an
outgrowth of group activities, such as working together or dancing.
Over 6000 languages and major dialects are spoken in the world today. As some languages grow,
others disappear. Languages that grow also evolve and change due to class, gender, profession,
age group, and other social forces. The Latin language is no longer spoken but survives in

37. written form. Hebrew is an ancient language that became extinct, but has now been brought back
to life and is spoken today. Others, such as the ancient languages of native peoples in Central and
South America, the Pacific Islands, and some of the Native American peoples of North America,
which had no written form, have been lost as the speakers died. Today anthropologists are trying
to record and preserve ancient languages that are still spoken in remote areas or by the last
remaining people in a culture.
C Symbols and Alphabets
Most languages also have a written form. The oldest records of written language are about 5000
years old. However, written communication began much earlier in the form of drawings or marks
made to indicate meaningful information about the natural world. The earliest artificially created
visual images that have been discovered to date are paintings of bears, mammoths, woolly
rhinos, and other Ice Age animals on cave walls near Avignon, France. These paintings are over
30,000 years old. The oldest known animal carving, of a horse made from mammoth ivory, dates
from approximately 30,000 years BC and was found in present-day Vogelhard, Germany (see
Paleolithic Art). Other ancient symbol-recording systems have been discovered. For example, a
30,000-year-old Cro-Magnon bone plaque discovered in France is engraved with a series of 29
marks; some researchers believe the plaque records phases of the moon. A piece of reindeer
antler approximately 15,000 years old was also found in France, carved with both animal images
and “counting” marks. The ancient Incas in Peru, who lived from about the 11th century to the
15th century AD, used a system of knotted and colored strings called quipu to keep track of
population, food inventories, and the production of gold mines. Perhaps the earliest forerunner of
writing is a system of clay counting tokens used in the ancient Middle East. The tokens date from
8000 to 3000 BC and are shaped like disks, cones, spheres and other shapes. They were stored in
clay containers marked with an early version of cuneiform writing, to indicate what tokens were
inside. Cuneiform was one of the first forms of writing and was pictographic, with symbols
representing objects. It developed as a written language in Assyria (an ancient Asian country in
present-day Iraq) from 3000 to 1000 BC. Cuneiform eventually acquired ideographic elements—
that is, the symbol came to represent not only the object but also ideas and qualities associated
with it. The oldest known examples of script-style writing date from about 3000 BC; papyrus
sheets (a kind of early paper made from reeds) from about 2700 to 2500 BC have been found in

38. the Nile Delta in Egypt bearing written hieroglyphs, another pictographic-ideographic form of
writing. Chinese began as a pictographic-ideographic written language perhaps as early as the
15th century BC. Today written Chinese includes some phonetic elements (symbols indicating
pronunciation) as well. The Chinese writing system is called logographic because the full
symbols, or characters, each represent a word. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyph eventually
incorporated phonetic elements. In syllabic systems, such as Japanese and Korean, written
symbols stand for spoken syllable sounds. The alphabet, invented in the Middle East, was carried
by the Phoenicians (people from a territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, located
largely in modern Lebanon) to Greece, where vowel sounds were added to it. Alphabet
characters stand for phonetic sounds and can be combined in an almost infinite variety of words.
Many modern languages, such as English, German, French, and Russian, are alphabetic
languages.
III INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION
In every society, humans have developed spoken and written language as a means of sharing
messages and meanings. The most common form of daily communication is interpersonal—that
is, face-to-face, at the same time and in the same place.
The most basic form of interpersonal communication is a dyad (an encounter or conversation
between two people). Some dyads exist over a long period of time, as in a marriage or
partnership. Communicating well in a dyad requires good conversational skills. Communicators
must know how to start and end the conversation, how to make themselves understood, how to
respond to the partner's statements, how to be sensitive to their partner's concerns, how to take
turns, and how to listen. Together, these abilities are called communication competence. Shyness
or reluctance to interact is called communication apprehension. Persuasion is the process of
convincing others that one's ideas or views are valuable or important.
Communication may also occur in small groups, such as families, clubs, religious groups,
friendship groups, or work groups. Most small-group interaction involves fewer than ten people,
and the communicators need the same communication skills as in a dyadic conversation.
However, additional factors called group dynamics come into play in a small group. A group
may try to work toward a consensus, a general sense of understanding or agreement with others

39. in the group. Groupthink may occur, in which a group reaches consensus so quickly that its
members mistakenly ignore other good ideas. Small-group members may experience
disagreement or even conflict. Some members may be more persuasive than others and form
sides, or cliques, within the group.
A special case of small-group interaction occurs in organizations where there is work to do or a
task for the group to perform. Or several small groups may need to interact among each other
within a single organization. In these cases, the groups must communicate well, both among
themselves and with other groups, so that their members can perform their work effectively and
make good decisions. Problems sometimes arise in organizational communication between
supervisors and workers, or between different groups of workers who are responsible for
different parts of a task. Therefore, small-group communication skills can be as necessary as
conversation skills in the workplace or other organizational activities.
Interpersonal communication occurs with larger groups as well, such as when a speaker gives a
talk to a large crowd (a political candidate giving a speech at a campaign rally, or a teacher
lecturing to a large class). However, the audience can respond in only limited ways (such as with
applause, nodding, whistles, boos, or silence). The speaker usually wants to be persuasive or
informative, so the words chosen and the style of delivery or performance are very important. A
speaker who wants to reach an even larger audience than the people who can physically hear the
speech in one place must use communication technology or media to get the message across
distance and even time.
IV COMMUNICATION AT A DISTANCE
From the earliest times, people have needed to communicate across distance or over time. Since
the beginnings of writing, communication media have allowed messages to travel over distance
and time. A communication medium is a means for recording and transporting a message or
information. The word medium comes from the Latin word medius, meaning middle or between.
It is a channel or path for sending a message between communicators. A single channel—such as
radio, or a book, or the telephone—is called a medium; media is plural, meaning more than one
medium.

40. A Early Methods
Early societies developed systems for sending simple messages or signals that could be seen or
heard over a short distance, such as drumbeats, fire and smoke signals, or lantern beacons.
Messages were attached to the legs of carrier pigeons that were released to fly home (this system
was used until World War I, which started in 1914). Semaphore systems (visual codes) of flags
or flashing lights were employed to send messages over relatively short but difficult-to-cross
distances, such as from hilltop to hilltop, or between ships at sea. In the early 1790s the French
scientist and engineer Claude Chappe persuaded the French government to install a system of
towers that used semaphore signals to send visual telegraphs along approved routes throughout
the country. The system was copied in Great Britain and the United States.
Some ancient societies, such as the Roman or Byzantine empires, expanded their territorial
control far beyond their original boundaries, and traded with distant neighbors. To hold on to
their far-flung territories, they needed two technologies that have remained closely tied ever
since: transportation and the ability to record information. Recorded messages had to be carried
easily; therefore, lightweight forms of recording (such as papyrus or animal skins) were
desirable.
B Paper and Printing
The first lightweight medium was papyrus, an early form of paper used by the Egyptians that
was made from grasses called reeds. Later, in the 2nd century AD, the Chinese wrote on silk
fabric instead of wood, and developed paper made from silk fibers. (Today paper made from
cotton or linen fibers is still called rag paper.) From as early as the 2nd century BC, Europeans
wrote on thin layers of tanned and scraped animal skins called parchment or vellum, with quill
pens made from bird feathers. Parchment is not as light as papyrus but is very durable; many
parchment manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages still exist. The Arabs brought
papermaking to Europe from China in the 11th century AD. Paper gave European merchants, who
traveled across the continent, a portable and inexpensive way to keep records.
Until the 1400s in Europe, all documents were handwritten. Copyists and editors called scribes
recorded commercial transactions, legal decisions and pronouncements, and manuscript copies of

41. religious books—many scribes were monks working in monasteries. By the 15th century,
however, the need arose for an easier way to duplicate documents. In Asia, block printing had
already been developed by Buddhist monks in China in about the 8th century (see Prints and
Printmaking). A similar technique was later used in the 15th century by Europeans to make
illustrations for printed books.
An early version of movable type was first developed in China around 1045, and was
independently developed by Koreans in the 13th century AD. In 1450 the German printer
Johannes Gutenberg perfected movable metal type and introduced the first reliable system of
typesetting, a key invention in the development of printing. With movable type, a raised,
reversed image of each letter can be hand-set, word by word, into a frame that holds the pieces
together. The raised letters are inked, a sheet of paper laid over them and pressed down on the
letters with a screw-driven press, creating a correct image of the text. When enough copies are
printed, the letters can be taken apart and reused. The technique made printing numerous copies
of textual material much easier, and the number of printing shops grew dramatically over the
next century.
As more books became available, more people learned to read. Books were printed in the local,
or vernacular, languages as well as classical Greek and Latin. With literacy came exposure to
new ideas; some historians believe that the 16th-century Protestant Reformation (a revolution in
the Christian church that divided it into factions) might not have occurred if European thought
had not been prepared by ideas introduced and circulated in printed books. Printers published
other things besides books, including newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides (sheets of paper
printed on one or both sides). These cheaper works helped spread news throughout Europe and,
in the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout the British colonies in America (see Journalism).
During the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, printing technologies
evolved rapidly. The steam-powered press was invented in Germany in the 19th century, and the
rotary press, which prints images onto a continuous sheet of paper from a rotating drum, was
introduced in the United States in 1846. The Linotype typesetting machine was patented by the
German-born American inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884. It permitted typesetters to set
text by typing on a keyboard rather than hand-setting each letter individually. Together, the

42. Linotype machine and the rotary press transformed the speed of printing. These so-called hot-
metal or letterpress printing technologies dominated the industry until the 1950s, when
phototypesetting and photo-offset printing were introduced (see Typesetting Equipment).
Photocopying was another technology that made document duplication easier. Invented by
American physicist and inventor Edwin Land in the 1950s, photocopying transfers an image
from one sheet of paper to another very rapidly (see Office Systems). A more recent advance is
computer typesetting and printing. Computers and word-processing and graphics software are
used today to set type and compose pages on the screen just as they will look in the final print, in
either black and white or color. Page layouts can also be transmitted digitally (numerically coded
into electronic pulses) via fax machines, computer modems, telephone networks, and satellite
systems to other locations for editing, redesign, or printing.
The spread of computer-based word processing and graphic design has led to the growth of
desktop publishing. Today almost anyone can publish newsletters, newspapers, or magazines for
medium-sized audiences. Business communication has been transformed by computer and
information technologies: letters, memos, reports, or other documents can be transmitted almost
anywhere at the speed of light. Early advocates of business computers predicted the paperless
office, an office where paper would be made obsolete by computer technology. Experience,
however, has shown that the ease of copying, printing, and document transmission made possible
by computer technology has produced more demand for paper, not less.
C Postal Services
Different societies have also devised systems for transporting messages from place to place and
from person to person. The earliest were courier-type services; messengers carried memorized or
written messages from one person to another, and returned with the reply. The Persian and
Roman empires and some Asian societies sent couriers regularly along planned routes to retrieve
reliable and timely information about trade and military affairs from distant areas.
In Europe, similar systems were established by commercial concerns and merchants who needed
to exchange information about trade routes and goods. The ruling aristocracy used trusted
messengers to carry confidential or sensitive information from capital to capital or kingdom to

43. kingdom, but they were typically soldiers or servants. Over time, these arrangements evolved
into government-operated systems for any citizen or subject to post messages to any other,
financed by charging users a tax or fee for postage (verified by postage stamps).
In the United States, the postal service was established by the government in 1789, and the
postmaster general's office was created to supervise the mail service. The first postmaster general
of the United States was Samuel Osgood. In the late 19th century, as the United States expanded
its territory west beyond reliable roads or rail lines, the U.S. Post Office started the Pony
Express, reviving courier-style services in the new territories. Pony Express riders carried sacks
of mail through rugged and remote territory, relaying their loads from one rider to the next. The
Pony Express quickly became renowned for its speed of delivery.
Over time, the U.S. Post Office took advantage of new transportation systems. Huge volumes of
mail were sent across the country on trains, and the Post Office started its own postal security
force to prevent the mail from being stolen in railroad holdups. They were also the first postal
service to hire pilots to fly mail to distant or rural locations within the United States and
overseas. By the 1930s every small town and rural route had carrier service; in many places,
deliveries were made twice a day. As demand for postal services grew, the U.S. Post Office
developed systems for coding and sorting the mail more quickly, notably the neighborhood ZIP
Code system in the 1960s.
The U.S. Post Office became a private operation in the 1970s under the supervision of the U.S.
federal government, and was renamed the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Today the USPS is self-
supporting, and is exploring a number of new technologies that will allow it to offer better
service at lower cost, including electronic document delivery services and new electronic sorting
systems.
D Telegraphy
The first truly electronic medium was the telegraph, which sent and received electrical signals
over long-distance wires. The first practical commercial systems were developed by the physicist
Sir Charles Wheatstone and the inventor Sir William F. Cooke in Great Britain, and by the artist
and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States. Morse demonstrated the first telegraph