Illustration by Matt Herring

CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America's newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some publications “must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.” With many American papers declaring bankruptcy in the past few months, their readers and advertisers lured away by cheaper alternatives on the internet, this doom-laden prediction sounds familiar. But it was in fact made in May 1845, when the revolutionary technology of the day was not the internet—but the electric telegraph.

It was only a year earlier, in May 1844, that Samuel Morse had connected Washington, DC, and Baltimore by wire and sent the first official message, in dots and dashes: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT”. The second message sent down Morse's line was of more practical value, however: “HAVE YOU ANY NEWS”. (There was no question-mark in Morse's original alphabet.) As a network of wires spread across the country, referred to as “the great highway of thought” by one contemporary observer, it was obvious that this new technology was going to have a huge impact on the newspaper industry. But would the telegraph be friend or foe?

James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald and author of the gloomy prediction of May 1845, concluded that the telegraph would put many newspapers out of business. “In regard to the newspaper press, it will experience to a degree, that must in a vast number of cases be fatal, the effects of the new mode of circulating intelligence,” he wrote. He returned to his theme in another editorial in July. “All those papers which serve merely as vehicles of intelligence will be destroyed,” he declared. “The scissors-and-paste journalism of the country will be annihilated.”

The telegraph posed a threat to the newspapers' hard-won control of the news, itself a relatively recent development. In the early 1800s newspapers were astonishingly slow. They received news by post, some as reports from correspondents but mostly by copying old stories from other newspapers as part of an exchange system. The Weekly Herald, recalling the 1820s, noted that “the newspapers of that day relied altogether upon their exchanges for news, and, of course, the intelligence which they gave the readers was meagre, stale and unsatisfactory.” Foreign news, if any, was usually several weeks old. Some local papers even varied publication schedules to suit the editor's social life.

The most avid collectors of news were businessmen, some of whom acted as correspondents to papers. But merchants who passed on news in this way would already have made use of it, and they kept anything that was still commercially valuable to themselves. Some merchants exchanged information with each other in special clubs, called newsrooms, in which items of interest (the arrival of particular ships, say, or reports from abroad) were recorded in shared books to be accessed by paying subscribers only. Journalists would sometimes frequent such newsrooms to pick up stories. But they rarely sought out news themselves.

Things began to change in the late 1820s as two New York papers, the Journal of Commerce and the Courier and Enquirer, began to compete for business readers. Both started to use pony expresses to deliver news from other cities, and fast boats to meet incoming vessels and get foreign news a few hours early. In the 1830s competition intensified with the establishment of the “penny press” papers, which were cheaper than the business ones and catered to a much wider audience. Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald, agreed to pay one of his sources $500 for every hour by which he beat other papers in getting news from Europe.

Elaborate ruses involving fast boats, carrier pigeons, express trains and even semaphore systems meant that papers, not businessmen, started getting the news first. Editors boasted about the timeliness of their news, and how they had beaten other papers to it. When the Journal of Commerce arrived in Boston by mail, merchants would fight to see it: one eyewitness reported seeing “crowds, in Topliff's News-room in Boston, disagreeably elbowing each other around the file of the Journal of Commerce, on the arrival of the New York mail.” Newspapers were democratising information. Bennett once declared that “speculators should not have the advantage of earlier news than the public at large.”

The telegraph, it seemed, would put an end to this productive rivalry. Raw news and market information would now arrive first at the telegraph office; papers, along with merchants and everyone else, would have to queue for it. Telegraph firms would establish a new monopoly over news delivery, and would sell early access to the news to the highest bidder. Papers would be unable to compete. Circulation would decline and advertisers would flee. The democratisation of news would be undone.

There was hope, however. Bennett believed that a few papers which provided commentary and analysis (including the Herald) would survive. “The telegraph may not affect magazine literature, nor those newspapers that have some peculiar characteristic,” he predicted. But he warned that “mere newspapers”, which simply reported the news, were doomed. He was not alone in this view. The Alexandria Gazette opined that the telegraph would henceforth deliver the raw news, leaving newspapers to “examining causes, tracing effects, enlightening the judgments, and directing the reflections of men.” It seemed that the only way to survive was to offer analysis and opinion, or to focus on events in a narrow field, too obscure to merit coverage by telegraphic news services. A reshaping of the entire industry appeared to be imminent.

Not such bad news after all

The telegraph did indeed reshape the newspaper industry, but not in the way that Bennett and others had predicted. For although telegraph wires could deliver news more rapidly than ever, they had a “last mile” problem: they could not disseminate news quickly to thousands of people. Only printed newspapers could do that. Far from putting papers out of business, the telegraph actually made them more attractive and increased their sales.

For the first time it became possible to read up-to-date business and political news within hours of its occurrence. “We live in a transition period of society,” declared the New York Herald on May 7th 1846. “In yesterday's paper we published the intelligence of the proceedings of Congress of the preceding day, simultaneously with the newspapers which are published in Washington city itself—220 miles distant.” For fast-moving stories, papers would print “extra” editions with updates sent by telegraph.

Predictions that newspapers would henceforth favour analysis and opinion over news also got things exactly backwards. Instead, the balance tipped towards the latest news. In 1851 Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, told a British parliamentary committee that “the quickest news is the one looked to.” Did that mean, he was asked, that “the leading article has not then so much influence as it has in England?” No, said Greeley. “The telegraphic dispatch is the great point.”

When the first transatlantic telegraph link was established in 1858, one of the first messages sent from America was “PRAY GIVE US SOME NEWS FOR NEW YORK, THEY ARE MAD FOR NEWS.” The quicker the news could be delivered, and the more distant the events it described, the better. “To the press the electric telegraph is an invention of immense value,” one journalist observed in 1868. “It gives you the news before the circumstances have had time to alter. The press is enabled to lay it fresh before the reader like a steak hot from the gridiron, instead of being cooled and rendered flavourless by a slow journey from a distant kitchen.”

Predictions that papers would favour analysis and opinion over news were exactly backwards

But some felt the obsession with speed went too far; there were concerns that the freshness of news, often from far away, was taking precedence over relevance. The Alpena Echo, a small newspaper in Michigan, cut off its telegraph service because “it could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia, a missionary banquet in Madagascar, the price of kangaroo leather from Borneo, and a lot of nice cheerful news from the Archipelagoes—and not a single line about the Muskegon fire.”

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1891, W.J. Stillman, a journalist and critic, decried the effects of the telegraph on his profession. “America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence,” he moaned. “The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.”

What of the fears that telegraph companies would establish a monopoly over news? These too proved to be unfounded: there were one or two attempts by telegraph companies to set up news services, but telegraph operators made pretty hopeless journalists, and stringing up wires and operating networks turned out to be a very different business from collecting news. Instead, the newspapers themselves took control of delivering news over the wires, with the formation of the Associated Press. It grew out of a scheme, established in 1846, to share the costs of reporting on the Mexican war between several New York papers. Those papers also agreed to co-operate in the gathering of news from approaching ships, in order to reduce their costs. All this had the effect of reducing the degree of competition between newspapers.

At the same time, the delivery of news by telegraph, and the need for reports that could be shared and printed in any newspaper, whatever its political position, gave rise to a new writing style: brief, to the point and neutral in tone (or what is now called “telegraphic”). The high cost of sending telegrams, at least in the early days of the technology, led to starker, simpler prose. The main points of a story were summarised, followed by layers of additional detail, in declining order of importance, in an “inverted pyramid”. Whether wire reports were truly more neutral than the more partisan reporting of the pre-telegraphic era is still the subject of academic debate, but they did give the semblance of neutrality. In the mid-19th century America's papers were, in any case, shifting towards being less political, in order to appeal to more readers, rather than just those of a particular political persuasion.

This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit. Horatio Seymour, the governor of New York and Democratic nominee for president in 1868, was fond of saying that the art of reporting had killed the art of oratory. “And we have to agree that it has at least very much modified the style of public speaking,” noted the New York Times in 1901, in an article considering how journalism had changed in the previous century.

An end to speculation?

Moreover, the advent of the telegraph did away with much of the speculation that had previously been a staple of American newspapers. The transition was not always smooth. President James Polk's declaration of war on Mexico, reported “by Electric Telegraph”, appeared on the front page of the New York Herald on May 12th 1846, for example. But on the next page was a letter from Washington, already overtaken by events, speculating about what the president might do. In the edition of June 7th, a telegraphic report told of the American victory at Matamoros; but in the same issue there were reports ruminating about the Americans' difficult position in the battle.

The telegraph “may help speculation in commercial affairs, but it will interfere very often with the speculations of the newspapers”, observed the Public Ledger in 1858. “This being brought into contact, daily, with facts, will upset a great many fancies, and give a pre-eminence of the factual over the imaginative.” Speculation about the course of the second opium war between Britain and China, based on reports several months old, was rendered obsolete overnight by the completion of the transatlantic cable, which had delivered the news that the war was over. “Some of the comments, compared with the actual facts, were found not to be so sagacious as they were supposed to be.” This would, said the Public Ledger, make journalism “more cautious in its comments upon public events abroad”.

Illustration by Matt Herring

Politicians also had to be watchful once their words were circulated by telegraph. Offhand comments could not be disclaimed and they could no longer alter speeches for local consumption. “By the power of the telegraph…the public utterances of public men in the furthest sections of the Union are…subjected to the criticism of the great centres of population and political activity in all their details,” noted the New York Times in September 1859. “The telegraph gives the speaker in the furthest East or West an audience as wide as the Union. He is talking to all America…immediately, and literally with the emphasis of lightning.”

What lessons does the telegraph hold for newspapers now grappling with the internet? The telegraph was first seen as a threat to papers, but was then co-opted and turned to their advantage. “The telegraph helped contribute to the emergence of the modern newspaper,” says Ford Risley, head of the journalism department at Penn State University. “People began to expect the latest news, and a newspaper could not succeed if it was not timely.”

Today, papers are doing their best to co-opt the internet. They have launched online editions, set up blogs and encouraged dialogue with readers. Like the telegraph, the internet has changed the style of reporting and forced papers to be more timely and accurate, and politicians to be more consistent. Again there is talk of news being commoditised and of the need to focus on analysis and opinion, or on a narrow subject area. And again there are predictions of the death of the newspaper, with hand-wringing about the implications for democracy if fewer publications exist to challenge those in authority or expose wrongdoing.

The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. The news business will survive

The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. For society, what matters is that people should have access to news, not that it should be delivered through any particular medium; and, for the consumer, the faster it travels, the better. The telegraph hastened the speed at which news was disseminated. So does the internet. Those in the news business use the new technology at every stage of newsgathering and distribution. A move to electronic distribution—through PCs, mobile phones and e-readers—has started. It seems likely only to accelerate.

The trouble is that nobody knows how to make money in the new environment. That raises questions about how much news will be gathered. But there is no sign of falling demand for news, and technology has cut the cost of collecting and distributing it, so the supply is likely to increase. The internet is shaking up the news business, as the telegraph did; in the same way, mankind will be better informed about his fellow humans than before. If paper editions die, then Bennett's prediction that communications technology would be the death of newspapers will be belatedly proved right. But that is not the same as the death of news.