A Brief History of the Last Two Times Newspapers Dealt with Tech

As a medium of outward bound communication, Newspapers are about as old as the book.  The first agreed upon Newspaper was the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, published in 1605 by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, not much later than the invention of the Gutenberg Press , somewhere between 1439 and 1450

Since then, the press industry has has two instincts approaching technology- swallow it via adoption, or run and hide.  Lucky for the press, most major technological changes have proven beneficial.  The creation of lithography, for example, allowed for a much easier way to insert images into print.

However, certain technological changes, ones that change society as a whole, tend to befuddle newspapers at first. In 1837, Samuel Morse sent the first electric telegraph. The United States was actively settling west of Mississippi, which was a point of contention politically, at the time.  There were 1200 newspapers, most of which were extremely partisan,all over the country by 1835, advocating various positions  about what to do involving when States come into the Union with or without Slavery. (In 1840, the US had 12,866,020, including slaves.  That’s about 1 newspaper to every 11,000 people in an era when most did not have running water.)   First Dibs on news from settlements out West was a high priority for Newspapers out east, and for the mover and shakers who read them, started to force upper-crust Newspaper editors, such as the old New York Sun, the New York Herald, and The Journal of Commerce, to go meet the Pony Express, ships, and telegraph wires in order to have the News first.

On the eve of the Spanish-American War, The New York Sun came together with some other East Coast Establishment newspaper to form the Associate Press, when its editors realized they needed a formal set of cooperative rules to share news coming in from steamships and telegraph wires.  Similar stories help found Reuters: a guy who discovered that between normal telegraph and carrier pigeons he could cut at least a week from getting news across parts of the European Continent.  He then managed to open the first telegraph office for the intercontinental telegraph line, and secured an exclusive contract to deliver the news from it to the London Stock Exchange in 1850.  Meanwhile, AFP was originally an advertising company, started in 1835, which sidelined as a news providing company through telegraph offices in its advertising agency offices throughout Europe.

Running in parallel to these developments, in 1880, the halftone print, a form of screen-printing for photography, was introduced.  Newspapers, by co-opting these technologies,  were essentially the form we see them today in print;  Four to five columns, a headline, with important pictures on the front that are captioned.

Guglielmo Marconi collapsed any distances by 1896 when he presented his Wireless Telegraph to the British Academy.  Newspapers officially captured Telegraph as an instantaneous way of capturing news.  By 1921, telegraphs made its final move to seal its place in News history- the wirephoto service.  First pioneered by Western Union, AP officially launched an all wirephoto service in 1935, just in time for the breakout of World War Two.

This was the Golden Age of Newspapers.  It left them totally unprepared for television, a far more engaging media than the descriptions and photographs inside a newspaper.  Television placed the viewer inside the news as near participants.  Much like wire services, they now also could view the breaking story as it happened.   As a result, moments in history in the post television age are memorable for being viewable on television, such as the landing on the Moon.  We saw it on TV  together  with Walter Cronkite.  The photography and the analysis the next day were in comparison, to the average viewer, unimportant.  Newspaper could not repeat nor co-opt this experience.  They fought bey being better at analysis, or by becoming very tabloid-like, but this still did not hold readership.  Since the seventies, as TV viewership rose, the N value for newspaper subscriptions, the most vital way for advertisers to measure a newspaper’s health, has continually dropped  year after year.

From these heights to this tumble, enter the Internet.  The average newspaper has yet to sort out what the Internet means in this new world- how radically different is it from before from telegraph, and how radically different is it from television?  Is it co-optable, or a fight that needs to be fought against, or an entirely new creature all together?

Next: The real for News on the Internet.

NB: One of the reasons I wrote this up was because I don’t think many people realize that there was a network of telegraph wires hanging around being developed and that a bunch of people decided to get together and develop a bunch of companies that we all know very well today.  Thinking that way might help think about new solutions for Newspapers.

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