HISTORY OF THE PRESS

Part 1: Before the Headlines

How Americans Got Their News Before Modern Journalism

Before newspapers landed on doorsteps. Before radios crackled to life in living rooms. Before television anchors looked into the camera and said, “Good evening.” Before the internet put the entire world’s information into the palms of our hands — how did people actually know what was happening?

The answer reveals something profound about human nature: we have always craved information. We have always wanted to know what’s happening beyond our own street, our own town, our own horizon. The tools have changed. The hunger never has.

The Town Crier: America’s First Breaking News

Imagine it’s 1720 in colonial Boston. You have no phone. No television. No newspaper on your porch. If something important has happened — a ship arriving with goods, a law passed by the governor, a fire, a death, a declaration — how do you find out?

You hear a bell.

The town crier — an official, government-appointed position — would walk through the streets ringing a handbell and shouting the news of the day. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” (a Norman French phrase meaning “Hear ye!”) was the traditional call to attention. What followed could be anything: tax announcements, weather warnings, deaths of prominent citizens, proclamations from the king.

This was not just quaint theater. In a society where most people could not read, the town crier was the only reliable source of public information. To interfere with a town crier — or to mock one — was a criminal offense. Information was power, and those in power controlled it.

Sound familiar? The tools have changed. The instinct to control information has not.

Colonial Pamphlets: The Social Media of the 1700s

Long before Facebook and Twitter allowed anyone to broadcast their opinions to the world, colonists had pamphlets.

A pamphlet was a small, inexpensive printed document — often just a few pages — that could be produced quickly, distributed cheaply, and read aloud in taverns to those who couldn’t read. They were opinionated, passionate, and often anonymous. Writers used pen names to protect themselves from retaliation, not unlike today’s anonymous social media accounts.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, is perhaps the most famous pamphlet in American history. In a colony of roughly 2.5 million people, it sold an estimated 100,000 copies within three months. Adjusted for today’s population, that would be the equivalent of a piece of writing going instantly viral to tens of millions of readers.

Paine argued in plain language — language ordinary people could understand — that independence from Britain was not just practical, but morally necessary. His pamphlet didn’t just report the news. It helped shape the future.

That’s a tradition that has never died.

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of American Print

No story of early American media is complete without Benjamin Franklin — who was, before he was a diplomat, a Founding Father, or the man on the hundred-dollar bill, a printer.

A typical printing press of the 18th century. Religious enthusiasm and the great demand for bibles and other religious works is largely what promoted the first printing efforts in the American colonies. Before and during the American Revolution colonial printers were also actively publishing newspapers and pamphlets expressing the strong sentiment against British colonial policy and taxation.

Franklin began his career as an apprentice in his brother James’s print shop in Boston. James Franklin published The New-England Courant, one of the first newspapers in the colonies to operate without the approval of British authorities. The paper was bold, satirical, and controversial — and young Benjamin secretly contributed to it under a pen name: Silence Dogood.

The Silence Dogood letters were the musings of a fictional middle-aged widow, written by a sixteen-year-old boy. They mocked Harvard elitism, commented on fashion and morality, and advocated — remarkably — for freedom of speech. Franklin knew that his brother wouldn’t publish them if he knew the real author. So he slipped them anonymously under the door at night.

Later, Franklin would purchase the Pennsylvania Gazette and transform it into the most widely read newspaper in the colonies. He understood something that media professionals are still learning today: content is only as powerful as its distribution.

Franklin didn’t just write. He printed, distributed, and networked. He helped establish a chain of printing partnerships up and down the East Coast — effectively the first American media network.

The Press and the Revolution

By the time the American Revolution began, printers were not bystanders. They were participants.

Colonial newspapers were essential tools of the resistance movement. They published lists of British abuses, reprinted speeches, spread news of battles, and rallied public opinion. The British understood this perfectly — which is why, when British troops occupied colonial cities, one of their first acts was often to shut down the local printing presses.

The relationship between the press and political power was already well-established: those who controlled the printing press had enormous influence over public opinion. And public opinion, the founders were beginning to understand, was the foundation of self-governance.

Why the Founders Protected the Press

When the First Amendment was written in 1791, its authors were not being idealistic. They were being practical.

The founders had lived under a system where the press was licensed, controlled, and censored by the crown. They had seen — firsthand — what happened when governments could punish printers for publishing criticism. They knew that a democracy could not function if citizens did not have access to accurate, uncensored information about what their government was doing.

James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, wrote: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

The protection of a free press was not a gift to journalists. It was a structural requirement of democracy itself. Without informed citizens, the whole experiment falls apart.

Looking Ahead

The story of the American press is, at its heart, the story of a perpetual struggle — between those who want information to flow freely and those who want to control it.

Between truth and propaganda. Between the powerful and the public.

In Part 1, we’ve seen that struggle begin: with a bell in the street, a pamphlet slipped under a door, and a sixteen-year-old apprentice printer who would one day help shape a nation.

In Part 2, we’ll meet a man most Americans have never heard of — whose courtroom battle helped establish the very principle that governments cannot silence their critics. His name was John Peter Zenger, and his story reads like a thriller.

— End of Part 1 —