- Two Questions about the Hartford Courant
- The derivation of the name Courant, as in Hartford Courant: It just so happens that the Courant has a discussion of that and other newspaper names on its web site: “Courant, which first appeared in 1621, and Courier, from 1382, also are cousins. They come from a Latin word meaning to run, and both originally were terms for a messenger. That's still what Courier means, but over the years, Courant came to signify the message itself, and later a collection of messages.” See the full story on newspaper names at https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1993-09-05-0000005091-story.html
- For a brief discussion of newspaper “firsts,” including the Courant, please see “Innovation and Firsts” in on the Class Notes page.
- An absence of newspapers A comment came up at the very end of class today that bears a little discussion. In the map showing the path of newspaper publication of the Declaration of Independence, it looked like North Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware, or Georgia. That doesn’t mean papers in those states did not publish the Declaration, it simply means we don’t have – or have yet to find – an example from each state. One of the great frustrations in media history is that the newspapers and other ephemera we need to study often don’t survive. They’re fragile; the one you have in your hands today doesn’t seem to have historical significance; they present storage problems; the library had a fire. The miracle is that so many HAVE survived.
- Collections of old newspapers And that brings me to another question, where can we find these papers? Most of the papers I’m looking at can be found at the America’s Historical Newspapers, a database in the Archive of America Collection of an outfit named Readex. This is a huge, searchable collection starting with 1690, but the problem for most people is that it’s a subscription service and only available, I suspect, through university libraries and really big public libraries. However, another huge, searchable collection is available free at the the Chronicling America site at the Library of Congress. Either of these would be useful in genealogical work as well as regular historical research. Another site I’ve used quite a bit is Accessible Archives, though it, too, is a licensed subscription site. It’s nice because it has transcriptions of the stories as well as digital images, although the transcriptions are a bit random at times.
Many of the journal articles and quite a few of the books I locate on academic search engines like JSTOR and Project Muse. Again, I’m afraid you’d need academic library privileges to get on these sites.
Comes the day we can move about more freely, there are still a lot of microfilm collections at the colleges and universities, and at state archives.
Home delivery
Several of my colleagues and I were surprised to see that home delivery of newspapers seems to have been introduced with the very first continuing newspaper, John Campbell’s Boston News-Letter.
In examining early editions of the News-Letter, I came across an advertisement Campbell inserted in the January 11, 1721, News-Letter advising readers that “on reasonable terms,” they could have their copy “left at any House in the Town, Seal’d or Unsealed; and for the advantage of the Post Office an Entire Sheet of Paper to write their Letter on, may also be had there for any one that pleases to have it every Monday.” I consulted some experts and they agree that we must take Campbell at his word and credit him with the first home delivery in America. If he wasn’t the first, the idea wasn’t long in coming. I’ve seen mention of home delivery in newspapers of the 1750s. (You can read a little bit more on this in “Innovations and Firsts” at the Class Notes page.)
Penny Press and home delivery
Now, did the proprietors of the Penny Press of the 1830s use home delivery? I have yet to find a definitive answer to that but all indications are that they did not. Here’s why: Home delivery entailed a subscription, usually sold for a year. The penny papers were designed to be hawked by newsboys on the street; a point-of-purchase sale, if you will. In addition, the bookkeeping was simpler and the cash instant. Some of the traditional papers in this period were sold mainly by subscription but occasionally on a spot basis, usually at the newspaper office. The penny papers, however, would be sold only in the streets by newsboys or at news stands. In time, the lessons of the penny press sales model would be adopted by the mainstream media, with street sales in combination with subscriptions.
The telegraph and news dispatches
The telegraph may not have influenced the geographic sources of news – newspapers in America had been clipping news from foreign capitals from the time of Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences in 1690 – but the invention surely made a huge difference in the speed at which news traveled and the nature of the reporting. To a certain degree, I’d argue that the telegraph also influenced the news budget in opening up and solidifying running channels to the centers of government
In the earliest days, of course, news traveled by mail, either in correspondence that made its way into the news columns or in newspapers via the exchange press. If you weren’t a postmaster allowing you postage-free mail privileges, franking, that could be expensive. I talk a little more about this in several of the essays in to “Class Notes” section.
Once the telegraph was available, journalists immediately saw its value in transmitting news and they made use of it as soon as they could. But the telegraph was expensive, and it could only take so many messages at a time. If one newspaper’s news was being transmitted, another’s could not be at the same time. These factors – price and volume – contributed to the founding of press collaborations, notably the Associated Press in May 1846, membership organizations that negotiated rates and handled transmission of news via the telegraph.
Scholars have noted several consequences of the telegraph’s constraints. Comparing stories from the eighteenth century with those of, say, the mid-nineteenth, we find that the writing is a lot less florid. Words cost money, as more than one AP executive would point out, and so the writing was tightened. The telegraph news also had to be tamed, too. When it was being sold – or at least shared – with newspapers of varying political stripes, one size had to fit all and so the stories were written in a more nonpartisan, neutral tone, as my colleague Donald Shaw of UNC-CH established in his studies. (See, in particular, Donald L. Shaw, “News Bias and the Telegraph: A Study of Historical Change,” Journalism Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 1967): 3-31.)
Two developments and one phenomenon took the lid off some newspapers’ circulation. First, faster, more sophisticated presses meant that the big newspapers that could afford them could print many more copies, satisfying an ever-increasing number of readers. Second, distribution improvements gave readers in a far larger area access to these newspapers. Along with that, the penny paper sold on the streets attracted a new and growing readership that supplied demand for all the presses could print.
The phenomenon I have in mind as a major contributor to the growing circulation is the exponential growth of the population in general, particularly through immigration to the East Coast from Great Britain and Europe and the emigration of people from the coast westward. The railroads facilitated that movement to the West and then brought them the eastern press behind them.
When did UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism program get started?
Boy, I sure whiffed at this marshmallow. Good grief, I even was a proofreader on Tom Bowers’ Making News: One Hundred Years of Journalism & Mass Communication at Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2009). At any rate, the university’s first journalism class was in the English Department, starting September 9, 1909. Journalism became a department in the 1924-25 school year, and the department became the School of Journalism on Sept. 1, 1950.
As I mentioned, the profession for some time was resistant to journalism education, and the first school of journalism was established at the University of Missouri in 1908. (See, Betty Houchin Winfield, ed., Journalism 1908: Birth of a Profession (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).) Even as late at the 1980s, there was debate over whether collegiate training in journalism was as valuable as a liberal arts degree and experience on the college newspaper.
What caused the change in voting status of freed blacks in the 1830s?
This comes out of a comment in the “Research Surprises” handout by one of my undergraduates who said she was surprised that “Even when slavery was legal in North Carolina there was a sizable free black population in the state. More than 20,000 of the free blacks even had the right to vote until 1835.”
Whew, my student did us no favors by linking her comment simply to http://docsouth.unc.edu. It took a bit of digging to unearth R.H. Taylor, “The Free Negro in North Carolina,” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1920), accessed at https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/taylorrh/taylorrh.html.
“20,000” black voters? I’m still working on that but welcome partners if anyone wants to track number this down. Taylor reports that suffrage was accorded some free black men until 1835, but the voting turnout had always been limited and really only notable – in a small way – in a few counties.
(a) In 1835 there were 300 black voters in Halifax county, 150 in Hertford, 50 in Chowan, and 75 in Pasquotank. [page 15].
Taylor says that “white people came more and more to resent the participation of the free negroes in politics. They had been disfranchised in the neighboring States, Virginia having disfranchised her free negroes in 1723. … consequently North Carolina in 1835 was the only one of the slaveholding states that allowed the free negro to exercise the franchise. … [but] the free negro's support of any aspirant for political office finally came to be regarded as a sort of reproach to the candidate.” [page 14]
(b) Why 1835? That was the year North Carolina had a constitutional convention that among other things abolished the franchise for free black people.
It might be interesting to explore North Carolina exceptionalism by teasing out just how big the pluralities were in these disenfranchisement votes (there were several in the convention) but that’s for another day.