Excerpt from the 23
February 1811 Boston Columbian Centinel (Click image to enlarge. Image copyright the City Record and Boston News-Letter, all
rights reserved)
24 April 2006 will mark the 302nd anniversary of the first issue of the Boston
News-Letter, published in Boston
by John Campbell. The Boston News-Letter
holds the distinction of being the first regularly published newspaper in America.
We here at The City Record and Boston
News-Letter feel a certain kinship to the Boston
News-Letter, having stolen the title
of our publication from a publication that stole the title of the Boston
News-Letter. The anniversary of the
founding of the Boston News-Letter has led us to think more
about this blog and blogging in general and we will be posting about Boston
newspapers for the next week or so. Also, after careful consideration, we are
prepared to claim that the 24th of April will mark the 302nd anniversary of the
spiritual start of this blog, making us the oldest blog in existence. How can
the City Record and Boston News-Letter
make such a claim? Read on.
Years after first encountering Allan Pred's Urban Growth and the Circulation of
Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840, it remains one
of my favorite obscure history books. Its obscurity is no fault of its author,
who does an admirable job making a very technical statistical argument, and it
deserves to be more widely known among the general public. Published in 1973
during the first great wave of the “new” urban history (see Note 1 below)
Pred's book attempts to describe the flow of information in the United States
for the fifty year period preceding the success of the electronic telegraph. In
our own time, when information can be transferred almost instantaneously,
Pred's analyses of the time elapsed from an event happening to widespread
knowledge of its occurrence opens a window on a very different United States.
Pred sought to show some urban centers became “information capitals” (my term)
and to outline the information gap by looking at newspapers, postal service,
interurban commodity flows, and travel between cities. The ability of
individuals and groups in some cities to exploit these information gaps for
economic advantage allowed for the growth of a system of cities, with primary,
secondary, and tertiary ranks.
Pred writes, “In absolute terms, the entire nation was still
in a pronounced state of public-information isolation in 1790. Even in Philadelphia and Boston, which were then the
first and third cities in the country, newspaper readers were at a considerable
temporal remove from most non-local domestic events. This was equally true with
respect to many occurrences in the nearby hinterland. For example, the mean
time lag between events in Worcester
and publication of their reports in Boston,
only forty-two miles distant, was almost five days.” (Pred, Urban Growth and
the Circulation of Information 38-39). These time lags were not
necessarily a function of distance: Boston and Philadelphia and Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh are roughly
equidistant, but information traveled much more quickly between the former than
the latter, primarily because of speed of transportation, but also because of
demand for information.
Daily newspapers proved to be an important source of data
for Pred. By looking at how long a news item from a Boston newspaper took to be reprinted in a newspaper in New York City, Portsmouth, NH, or Charleston, SC, he could
show how the elapsed time for information to reach certain cities changed over
a period of years. The illustration above from the 1811 Boston
Columbian Centinel is one example of
the time lag between Boston and other
cities. As transportation technology improved, the information gaps became
smaller. New York City eventually
took the leading position as the country’s information broker.
What does this have to do with the Boston
News-Letter and this blog? I'm
struck by how similar many blogs are to 18th and 19th century newspapers in the
era before the telegraph, a similarity I have been thinking about for some time
but which is reinforced by Pred’s methodology of tracking the dissemination of
news items from one newspaper to another. Open almost any issue of a small town
(or big city, for that matter) newspaper of that time and you will find a
collection of local news, state news, national news, and international news
along with advertising, poems, fiction, and other non-news writing. Much of the
news was reprinted from other papers, sometimes verbatim, other times slightly
edited, with or without the local editor’s commentary. Local news would consist
of letters from readers on the subjects of the day or short pieces written by
the editors. The editors of these small town newspapers should be seen as the
first content aggregators. They subscribed to the out of town newspapers,
read them, distilled them, and republished important stories for local
consumption. Many newspapers of the time also had a very specific political
point of view—objectivity was a fast track to insolvency.
Today, some blogs operate in much the same manner,
especially those dealing with current events. The blog writer picks up a piece
of information from another news source and uses the news item as a departure
point for adding more facts to the story or their own analysis. Most bloggers
don’t have the resources to research and write their own national or state
level news which means many news blogs are reactive rather than proactive, a
situation which would be familiar to their counterparts from earlier times. And
while blogs may have a global reach, many of us still write for a “local”
audience in the sense that we often know who are readers are and what types of
information they are looking for through comments, emails, log file analyses,
and yes, even face-to-face meetings. And like our predecessors, borrowing
content is tolerated (within reason) and some blogs even provide a system for
crediting each other through trackbacks.
My analogy isn’t perfect. While some bloggers take news from
the largest sources and republish and comment on it, their posts can then move
from their blog to a larger aggregator such as Universal Hub or back up to the original
news source—even the City Record and
Boston News-Letter has appeared on the front of boston.com’s News section. It would be a
very rare occurrence for a news item from a small town paper in the 18th or 19th
Century to be reprinted in a major metropolitan daily. But when I say that the City Record and Boston News-Letter and
other blogs are the spiritual descendents of the original Boston News-Letter, I think I am on firm
grounds for staking my claim, which backs up, to my mind, Allan Pred’s
conclusion in Urban Growth, “History does not repeat itself, but processes do.”
Bloggers and 18th and 19th Century newspaper editors would have a great deal in common to talk about.
Note 1. For an overview of the “New Urban History”, look at
Leo Schnore’s “Further Reflections on the ‘New’ Urban History: A Prefatory
Note” and Eric Lampard’s “Two Cheers for Quantitative History: An Agnostic
Forward”, both in The New Urban History:
Quantitative Expolorations by American Historians. Leo Schnore, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press) 1975. If you wish
to read a shorter version of Allan Pred’s work that encompasses some of the
same subject matter, I direct you to “Large-City Interdependence and the
Pre-Electronic Diffusion of Innovations in the United States” in the same
volume.
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