Newspapers

The first newspaper published in British North America, Publick Occurences, lasted just one issue. Printed by Benjamin Harris in Boston in 1690, the four-page serial drew fire for its criticism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Indian allies and was immediately suppressed. Fourteen years elapsed until printers tried again, establishing the Boston News-Letter in 1704. Its format and content borrowed heavily from the London weeklies, offering local readers a compendium of warmed-over reports on military, diplomatic, and court matters from Europe. The NewsLetter was joined by two similarly tame rivals in 1719, William Brooker’s Boston Gazette and Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury, printed in Philadelphia.

Newspapers again became a subject of official scrutiny in the 1720s, when James Franklin attempted to differentiate his New England Courant from its competitors by staking out a series of political positions anathema to Boston’s elites and critical of the city’s government. When such stands landed Franklin in jail in 1722, he transferred legal ownership to his apprentice and younger brother, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin published the Courant until his brother’s release, then fled to Philadelphia when James tried to reassert the terms of Benjamin’s original indenture. In 1729 Benjamin Franklin took control of the Pennsylvania Gazette, quickly turning it into one of the most important institutions in the city. Another controversy arose in 1734, when John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel for criticizing the government in the New-York Weekly Journal. His case and acquittal have been recognized as one of the first political trials in early America.

By 1749 there were 13 newspapers in the colonies, most of which were clustered in port cities where commercial and information networks converged and where proprietors could raise revenue by advertising the arrival of the latest goods from Europe and the Caribbean. Newspaper printers also supported themselves by publicizing notices describing runaway wives, servants, and slaves; in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, for example, more than a quarter of all advertising concerned unfree labor.

For much of the 18th century, domestic news was confined to the margins of newspapers. While the activities of the colonial governors usually made the front page, other notices—typically a mixture of commercial information and sensational stories—appeared on inside pages or clustered along side back-page advertisements. Local news was consistently neglected, a fact that most scholars have attributed to the vitality of face-to-face communication networks in the towns and cities in which newspapers sold. Only as newspapers proliferated did the proportion of domestic news begin to rise as American editors began to exchange papers and copy freely from one another.

The state of the American newspaper industry in the 1760s was decidedly mixed. Most newspapers lasted only a few issues before folding, while their hardworking printers (including female entrepreneurs such as Cornelia Smith Bradford and Ann Smith Franklin) struggled to turn a profit through advertising, sales, and subscriptions. Despite such hardships, the number of newspapers in the colonies continued to grow. By 1765, 26 papers published regularly, not only in port cities but also in a growing number of inland locations. While print runs rarely topped more than a thousand copies per issue before the Revolution, the pervasive presence of newspapers in taverns and coffeehouses ensured that cumulative consumption was vastly higher.

Further reading: William David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams, The Early American Press, 1690-1783 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994).

—Richard J. Bell