- Popular culture would insist that the rise of the American newspaper is the history of big urban dailies.

But today's guest says that misses the point, that newspapers emerged in the 19th century because of the will and innovation of countless local publishers and editors across the young and growing country.

He's Alex Wright this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Alex Wright, a writer, designer, startup founder, and more, he's the author of a new book, "Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper."

He's joining us today from New York City.

Alex, thank you so much for being with us and congratulations on the new book.

- Oh, thanks so much and thanks for having me.

It's great to chat with you.

- It is a terrific read, but the newspaper industry itself is so intimately intertwined with the actual founding of the republic.

Do you want to sketch just a little bit about what that history is?

Then we'll get into the full scope of what you're talking about in the book.

- Yeah, sure.

So the book really explores the evolution of American newspaper starting in the colonial era and up through about the end of the 19th century.

But one of the things that I really kind of try to explore in the book is just how intertwined the press and the early American government were really from the get go and the interesting sort of intertwined role that they played in shaping each other and just how much influence the press had in the formation of the country and the structure of the Constitution and some of the foundational laws.

So it was a very symbiotic relationship in a lot of ways that I think has continued in ways that are a little bit unique to the United States, I think.

- Well, and so you trace, you basically argue that the mythology around the big urban daily paper sort of shaping journalism in the 20th century sort of ignores this really rich history from the founding, through the 1900s about the weekly local papers.

What gave those papers life?

- Well, yeah, I think you're right and that is one of the major themes of the book is that I'm really trying to explore what came before the era of the mass media.

I think a lot of conventional histories of journalism sort of start in the gilded age, the era of the Pulitzers and the William Randolph Hearst and the yellow journalism, I think people hear a lot about those stories, but we tend to focus, you know, those traditional histories of journalism focus a little bit less on the landscape of the press that preceded that, which was for the most part a very rural, like the rest of the country, it was a very rural sort of culture.

For most of the 19th century, the vast majority of Americans lived in small towns or rural areas and the press reflected that and they were mostly fairly small papers.

There were a lot of them from at the end of the Revolutionary War, there were 37 newspapers in the former colonies.

By the year 1900, that number had exploded to 20,000.

- Wow.

- So it was an incredible proliferation of newspapers all over the country and they were mostly these little small town papers and that was sort of the character of American journalism.

And that also was sort of unique to the US.

Mostly in Europe and elsewhere, you kind of tended to have big national papers or big regional papers.

And there was something about the US that had this kind of very homegrown, sort of local community aspect to it.

And that's what a lot of these papers were, they were just kind of vehicles for communities to understand themselves.

- And central to those local outlets are the publisher/editor who you describe as really playing a giant, both not just a publishing role, but a civic role.

- That's right, especially in the early part of the 19th century.

The way we tend to think of, you know, I think today and really throughout the 20th century, there's been this sort of ideal of the newspaper and reporters as these kind of neutral observers of events.

And that really wasn't the case certainly in the first part of the 19th century, newspaper publishers were political actors, they were essentially politicians in many cases who had a ton of influence in who came to power and the priorities of the political parties.

They were really kind of central actors in their communities and, in many cases, these were people who wore multiple hats.

They were both journalists, but they were also business people, they were also political actors.

I mean, many cases, especially in these small towns, the newspaper publisher was kind of a central figure in the community who played a lot of different roles.

And often they were also kind of craftspeople, they would set the type, they would gather the news, they would write the stories, and then they would agitate for political action.

So it was a very different kind of way of practicing journalism than maybe we think of in the 20th and 21st centuries of this kind of model that maybe a lot of us have in mind of these kind of big city papers where the reporters and the business side of the paper are pretty different.

It was all kind of muddled together in an interesting way for much of the 19th century.

- So throughout the book, you talk about how publishers and editors shared content.

Tell us how that worked and what was its impact on the newspaper industry as a whole as time went on?

- Sure, I think this was, to me, one of the most interesting things I learned in writing the book was just how networked these papers were in an era before the telegraph, before telephones, before anything like computers, these papers were really sharing information in a very active way with each other.

By one estimate, there was a guy, Ryan Cordell, who's done a sort of big data mining study of all these newspapers.

And by his estimate, about half of the material that appeared in any given newspaper in the 1830s was material that was copied from elsewhere.

And that was also a really kind of distinguishing feature of these papers is that a lot of information was flowing back and forth, even though they were in these small kind of isolated towns, they were stitched together in this kind of information sharing network that enabled them to produce and distribute more stuff more quickly.

And there were really two main reasons for that, one, and it goes back to the founding of the country, there were really two kind of critical developments that happened early on.

One was the copyright law, and the founders made a very conscious decision to exclude newspapers from copyright law.

So material that appeared in a newspaper could not be copyrighted and by law could be copied freely.

And the reason for that was the founders saw news as kind of a public good, like a public commons, the same way people maybe used to graze their sheep on the public commons in the ground, news was seen as a shared resource for the community and that it should be enabled to flow freely.

The other part of the equation were these very generous postal subsidies that newspaper publishers enjoyed where they could basically send, they could send news through the mails at an incredibly low rate compared to other kinds of mail, by one estimate, about 90 plus percent of the volume of mail in the US postal system in the early 19th century was newspapers.

And they could also send their wares for free to each other.

And so, newspaper publishers were really encouraged to share information with each other and it was seen by and large as a good thing, not something that they felt overly territorial about.

It was kind of like almost a kind of gift economy where people were encouraged to share what they were learning and they were publishing and sort of drinking from each other's wells of news in a kind of ongoing way.

And that also helped really fuel the explosion of newspapers.

- Did content sharing help build circulation for these newspapers?

- In some ways, it enabled the readers of these papers to get news from all over.

So you could be in Dubuque and be getting news from Philadelphia and Boston and Providence and wherever.

So these local country newspapers, even though they were very, in many cases, very rural kind of small town operations, they were also kind of a window into the wider world.

And that was a lot of the value that they provided was not just telling you what was going on in your neighborhood, but really giving you dispatches from all over the place.

And that was, in a way, they served as kind of a front door to the rest of the world for a lot of people in these communities.

So yeah, I think it did, and it also enabled the newspaper publishers to produce their content more cheaply and affordably because half the content was basically given to them for free from elsewheres.

- Alex, I wonder, in writing this and researching this, did you begin to think at all about what newspapers meant to their consumers?

Personal aside here, when I was working on my PhD, reading the stacks and stacks and stacks of books, I began to start thinking of these books as little portals to different universes.

How did the consumers of news view these sheets coming into their homes or wherever they were accessing them?

- Well, it's a great question.

We can sort of speculate a little bit about how they were received.

I think, in many cases, this was sort of the primary reading material for people.

And so one of the distinguishing features of the early American landscape was that actually there weren't a ton of books being produced in the US.

Most books were actually printed and published in Europe and were imported and were pretty expensive.

Newspapers were this kind of fairly accessible, easily available source of reading material.

And if you look at what's in the pages of many of these early papers, they don't look all that much like what we might think of a newspaper today where you have your world headlines on the front page and maybe some editorials or opinion pieces on the inside and the stock listings, it wasn't like that.

What you would often see was you would often see a poem on the front page or sometimes you would see an excerpt from a novel or you would see an essay that somebody in the community had contributed or like a sermon sometimes from a local preacher.

And you would get news too, often the news was actually sort of buried in the back pages because it was the last, because all of the newspapers were set by type, I'm sorry, set and typed by hand, the publishers would wait to get the news, the latest news and set that at the very end.

So often, page four was where the latest news was sometimes.

That changed over time, but it was very interesting to see just the kind of structure of these papers.

And they really were seen as kind of like this is what people read and they would create scrapbooks and sort of hold onto things.

And it wasn't just about, quote, news, there was a lot of different stuff floating around in there.

- So you write about how early in the 19th century, there was an emerging ecosystem, if you'll accept that word, of newspapers that were run by and served Native Americans.

- Mm-hm.

- Women and African Americans, talk about that.

I found that extremely interesting that that would happen.

- Yeah, yeah, and that was to me, I think, a super interesting aspect of the story, especially as you go further back.

Even though it was like the culture was dominated by landed white people who owned property, there were these other voices that were starting to take advantage of the freedom of the press and the technologies of printing to kind of, there's a historian named Benedict Anderson who has a great term, imagined communities, they started to sort of imagine themselves as a community.

And I think one of the really interesting early examples he alluded to the Cherokee Nation in what's now Georgia published a very early newspaper in the 1920s called, I'm sorry, in the 1820s called the Cherokee Phoenix.

And what was really fascinating about that, it was the first Native American newspaper, and it was produced by a community that up until just a few years earlier had no written language, they had only recently, thanks to the efforts of a gentleman named Sequoyah, who was this polymath genius Cherokee fellow who invented a written language for the Cherokee, and it was very easy to learn and it spread very quickly.

And there was a missionary who was stationed with the Cherokee tribe at the time, he was a reverend named Samuel Worcester, who worked with them to secure a printing press and brought it over the hills into Georgia and they started producing a newspaper.

And it became quite influential, not just for the Cherokee people to read about their shared experiences, but it also became widely read in the state capital and it became a vehicle for the Cherokee to sort of advocate for their own interests with the sort of political classes.

So that's one example, there were others that followed.

There was also early African American papers, there was a paper called... Well, early on, there was a paper called The Liberator, which was published by a guy named William Lloyd Garrison, he was a Boston area fellow.

But soon enough, there were also papers that were being published by African Americans.

One was called Freedom's Journal that was published starting in 1827 by a guy named John Russwurm and a reverend named Samuel Cornish, both African Americans.

It's believed to be the first Black-owned paper written for that community.

And others followed, eventually Frederick Douglass, famous abolitionist, started his own, he started out as a newspaper publisher, published a paper called The North Star, and that's sort of how he rose to prominence.

And so these are some examples of these communities that started to discover the power of the press to advocate for themselves.

And there were many other examples of ethnic communities, language papers, the Dutch, the Germans.

As they started to become a presence, early Jewish papers, they started to publish their own papers, and that became a big part of the cultural landscape.

- So quick question, do copies of that Cherokee newspaper still exist?

And for that matter, newspapers in general from that era, are they still around somewhere?

- The Cherokee Phoenix has been largely digitized, you can find it online.

And it's super interesting because they published in both English and Cherokee, so you can sort of read it both ways.

- Oh, wow.

- It's very cool, the typography, you see this alphabet they invented and they had to create their own type, you know, their own fonts to publish it and stuff.

But those are online, many of these early papers though have not been digitized.

I was very fortunate to have access to the American Antiquarian Society over in Worcester, which is the world's premier collection of early American newspapers.

They are sitting on a gold mine of material, a lot of which is not online yet.

A lot of it is, but there's still a lot of work to be done in digitizing some of this material.

- Alex, I wanna talk about Benjamin Day and his newspaper, The Sun, because they were party to something called the Moon Hoax.

I want you to explain briefly what the Moon Hoax was, but I want to maybe reflect on, what does that story tell us about newspapers in that era?

- Yeah, so Benjamin Day is an interesting figure.

He's I guess what you would maybe today call a disruptor, he came in to shake things up.

And at the time, a lot of the sort of established newspapers in New York were what they called the six penny papers, these kind of respectable papers that were read by the political class and the kind of moneyed class and they were very influential, but they were a little bit stodgy.

And Benjamin Day came in and he thought he saw an opportunity to create a different kind of paper that was more geared towards the workers.

He saw this growing urban population and felt like nobody was really reaching this audience who he thought would probably not be likely to pay six cents for a paper.

So he introduced what has come to be known as the penny press.

So his paper, his goal was to go for scale and produce a very affordable paper for one cent, that his theory was that, if he could do that and attract an audience, the economics of it, the economics of scale would make up for it.

And he turned out to be right, he produced a wildly popular paper, but the kinds of material that he published were very... It was very tabloidy, it was very much a little bit sensationalist, he was fearless and sort of attacking people in power.

And he really became kind of demonized by the establishment press who felt this lacked scruples and he would publish anything.

And they flung all kinds of wild accusations at him, and he decided to essentially play a prank on these other papers.

He decided to publish the story about the discovery of life on the moon by this astronomer.

And he published a series of articles about how a real English astronomer who had not in fact discovered anything, but it was a real guy, and he claimed that this guy looked through his telescope and saw four foot tall people on the moon who had bat wings and weird quadrupeds and strange trees, and how this whole elaborate fantasy of all this crazy life on the moon.

He knew it was a hoax, he wasn't actually trying to fool his readers, he was trying to fool the other papers.

And he did because they all then ran with the story and reported it as their own without attributing him.

And then, he basically said the joke was on them, he basically pranked them.

But it's gone down in history as like an early example of fake news, which it kind of was, but it was really a prank.

- Fake news and aliens, I mean, come on, that's very 21st century.

(both laughing) - A good alien special, yes.

- I think there are people today who still look at the moon and can see those things.

- I mean, you turn on your cable TV, that story still sells.

- But, Alex, there's a ton that we could still talk about in the 19th century, but I kept going through this book and just seeing sort of anecdotes and examples of 19th century phenomena that seemed to repeating themselves, whether it's the content sharing that Wayne was asking about, there's a whole host of sort of independent digital media outlets in the United States right now that are building collaboratives and sharing content across platforms.

There are lots of other analogs to what you were writing about in the 19th century that seem to be very current now.

And so, I'm wondering, from your perspective, what does this history that you've so skillfully recounted tell us about the world we're living in right now?

- Well, yeah, it's a great question.

I think, first, I'll just offer the standard historian's disclaimer, which is that you have to be careful of pushing the parallels too far.

But that said, I think there are some really interesting echoes that we can see today of things that were happening back then.

I think what really stood out to me is that, during this era, so many of these papers were produced by one person proprietors.

So these people who were basically kind of jack of all trades, publisher, editor, salespeople, entrepreneurs who had a mix of skills.

They could set type, they could write stories, they could sell subscriptions, they just had to do it all.

And I think, at the time, they would often refer to this figure as the able editor, the editor who was able to do it all.

And I think if you look at what's happening today with the changing media landscape, we're seeing a kind of modern day version of that with, you could look at sort of influencers or people who have to figure out how to tell a story using different tools at their disposal, using their video or their podcast, and then they have to figure out how to find an audience and monetize it and get it out there.

So a lot of the people who are, I think, sort of thriving in this ecosystem have this kind of hustle and this ability to wear multiple hats.

And I think that's, to me, the most interesting parallel because throughout the 20th century, journalism became very professionalized and you started to see this division of labor where you had the production workers working in the print shop, you had the business people selling the ads and selling the subscriptions, and then you had the newsroom, the editors and reporters in the newsroom.

And in many traditional news organizations, there was a really clear boundary, what they call the church and state boundary between those functions.

And so, the people in the newsroom, by design, didn't really talk to the people selling the ads because they thought there was a lot of risk to that, and I think rightly so.

But I think now we're really seeing a changing landscape where we're seeing much more of these kind of entrepreneurial kind of one person operations commanding a lot of audience.

And I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, I think there was a lot of value in that church and state separation and that sort of journalistic ideal for a long time.

But I think that model is changing in front of our eyes in a lot of ways, even within newsrooms.

- Do you see any parallel with the demise of legacy newspapers today?

I've been a journalist for a very long time and I've witnessed it firsthand.

Is there a parallel between what happened to the eventual disappearance of most of these papers and what's happening today?

- Well, I think we're definitely seeing another era of a big disruption happening in the business model and the technology.

So in the sense that there's a big sort of, I think what you could call a social technical transition happening, society's changing, the technology is changing, and those things are sort of bound up with each other.

But I think, in a way, what we're seeing with the mass media today, I actually, again, I wanna be careful of over forcing the parallels too much, but I think we are seeing kind of a growing sort of bifurcation where you're seeing maybe some of the bigger, more national players are starting to maybe consolidate their influence and reach.

And I think there is actually a very healthy ecosystem of very small news providers, one person publishers or local blogs or if there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with local news nonprofits and things like that.

It's really, I think, the organizations in the middle that are feeling the disruption more than anybody right now.

And I think it's very interesting to see how that's gonna play out and what sort of new forms of engagement are gonna happen.

But I think what is interesting to me is a lot of the experiments happening with news organizations trying to reclaim that role as sort of conveners of the local community and trying to figure out how to invite people into shaping the coverage and having a voice, while at the same time, preserving some journalistic authority and credibility.

But it's hard to predict how this will all play out, but it's an interesting time for sure.

- Hey, Alex, we've got about a minute left here.

One of the through lines throughout the book is the life of one Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain.

And it's a fascinating history in and of itself sort of in the literally minute that we have left, sketch that very quickly for us and then tell me why isn't there a movie about that part of his life on its own?

- Yeah, so Twain pops up throughout the book and he's such an endlessly fascinating figure, he's almost like this kind of Zelig-like figure who pops up at these different sort of pivotal moments in the history of the press.

He started life as a so-called printer's devil, he was a typesetter and like apprentice in a local newspaper in Missouri.

And then he went on a journey where he was a journeyman printer, what was sometimes called a tramp printer going from shop to shop up and down the East Coast and then back to the West, and then took a left turn to his famous career as a riverboat pilot.

But then, eventually, he resurfaces as a reporter in the Nevada territories at the territorial enterprise where he christens himself Mark Twain, and then he goes on his literary path and becomes like this famous novelist.

But later in his career, he never lost, he always had this kind of drive to innovate and try, he was fascinated by publishing technologies and printing technologies.

And towards the end of his life, he became an investor in this device called the page compositor, an automated type setting machine that proved to be a massive boondoggle.

He thought it was going to be the thing that would make him rich once and for all.

It turned out to be the thing that bankrupted him and really a great story.

- It's a wild story, the book is tremendous.

"Empire of Ink," Alex Wright, thank you for spending some time with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

If you want to know more about the show, you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (upbeat music)