1. History of Print Journalism
in America

2. Identify the following:
The first continuously published newspaper
The first newspaper affordable to the masses
The case that set a precedent for freedom of the press
The first nationally published daily newspaper

3. JOURNALISM
It is a discipline of collecting, analyzing, verifying, and presenting information regarding current events, trends, issues and people. Those who practice journalism are known as journalists.

4. History of Print Journalism
American journalism had its humble beginnings in the Colonial period with the publication of Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was shut down after its one and only issue on Sept. 26, 1690.
The World Association of Newspapers recognizes Johann Carolus’s Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historie, published in 1605, as the world’s first newspaper.
In 1702, the first daily newspaper called The Daily Courant was published.

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

6. Unfortunately, the essays which this paper contained did not please the authorities, and Harris had not bought the required license, so the paper was shut down after just one issue.

7. The first continuously published American newspaper did not come along for 14 more years. The Boston News-Letter premiered on April 24, The publisher was John Campbell. The paper originally appeared on a single page, printed on both sides and issued weekly.

8. One of the most sensational stories published when the News-Letter was the only newspaper in the colonies was the account of how Blackbeard the pirate was killed in hand-to-hand combat on the deck of a sloop that had engaged his ship in battle.

9. Perhaps the most famous name in early American journalism is that of Peter Zenger. Publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, Zenger was accused and tried for libel against the colonial British government in In this picture, Zenger is arrested and his printing press is burned by Colonial authorities.

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

11. All that is needed for newspapers to become a mass medium is a good idea. Along comes Benjamin Day in Day opened the New York Sun and created the Penny Press, charging only one cent per issue, making newspapers affordable, for the first time, for the masses.

12. He also changed the content of newspapers to make it more sensational and more popular to the lower class. He hired boys to sell the newspapers on street corners. It was the Penny Press that also began using advertising as a way to bring readers information, but advertising also helped by paying for the printing and distribution of newspapers.

13. The Civil War era brought some “new” technology to the publishing industry. Photography became a popular addition to newspapers. Matthew Brady set up a camera on the battlefields and photographed the soldiers at war. One of his photographs appears above.

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

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

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

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

18. Identify the following:
Meaning of yellow journalism.
How it began.
The person who first included comics in newspapers.
Name a famous yellow journalist
Name of news agencies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32. Improvements in photocomposition and in printing (especially the web offset press), have enhanced the quality of print and made possible the publication of huge editions at great speed. Computer technology has also had an enormous impact on the production of news and newspapers.

33. By the 1990s this technology had also affected the nature of newspapers, as the first independent on-line daily appeared on the Internet. By the decade's end some 700 papers had web sites, some of which carried news gathered by their own staffs, and papers regularly scooped themselves by publishing electronically before the print edition appeared.