A Short History of Newspapers. Types of Newspapers

A Short History of Newspapers

Newspapers have been a part of public life since Roman times, prospering in Europe, and coming to the Colonies in the 1690s. The newspaper was at the heart of the American Revolution, and, as such, protection for the press was enshrined in the First Amendment. The penny press brought the paper to millions of “regular people, ” and the newspaper quickly became the people’s medium.

Broadsides (or broadsheets) - are single-sheet announcements or accounts of events imported from England, that were posted at bookseller/print shops.

At the turn of the 19th century, New York City provided all the ingredients necessary for a new kind of audience for a new kind of newspaper and a new kind of journalism. The city was densely populated, a center of culture, commerce, and politics, and especially because of the wave of immigrants, demographically diverse. Add to this growing literacy among working people, and conditions were ripe for the penny press, one-cent newspapers for everyone. Benjamin Day’s September 3, 1833, issue of the New York Sun was the first of the penny papers.

Drawing its name from the Yellow Kid, a popular cartoon character of the time, yellow journalism was a study in excess—sensational sex, crime, and disaster news; giant headlines; heavy use of illustrations; and reliance on cartoons and color. Yellow journalism originated over the New York City newspaper market between major newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

Types of Newspapers

1. Some publish zoned editions —suburban or regional versions of the paper— to attract readers and to combat competition for advertising dollars from the suburban papers.

2. Small-town dailies operate much like their suburban cousins if there is a nearby large metropolitan paper; for example, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune publishes in the shadow of Boston’s two big dailies.

3. Many weeklies and semi-weeklies have prospered because advertisers have followed them to the suburbs.

4. African American papers, as they have for a century and a half, remain a vibrant part of this country’s ethnic press.

5. Another type of paper, most commonly a weekly and available at no cost, is the alternative press. The offspring of the underground press of the 1960s antiwar, antiracism, pro-drug culture, these papers have redefined themselves. The most successful among them—the Village Voice, the L. A. Weekly, the Boston Phoenix, and the Seattle Weekly—succeed by attracting upwardly mobile young people and young professionals, not the disaffected counterculture readers who were their original audiences.

6. Modeled after a common form of European newspaper, free dailies designed for commuters are becoming commonplace in America’s biggest cities. Typical of the successful commuter papers are the Washington Post’s Express and the Tribune Company’sNewYork.

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