What are the similarities and differences between wire services and feature syndicates?

What are Acta Diurna, corantos, diurnals, and broadsheets?

 The Acta Diurna (actions of the day),is one of the earliest newspapers.It was existing in Caesar’s time. Written on a tablet, was posted on a wall after each meeting of the Senate. Its circulation was one, and there is no reliable measure of its total readership. However, it does show that people have always wanted to know what was happening and that others have helped them do so.

Corantos, one-page news sheets about specific events, were printed in English in Holland in 1620 and imported to England by British booksellers who were eager to satisfy public demand for information about Continental happenings that eventually led to what we now call the Thirty Years’ War.

Diurnals -occasional news sheets, but by the 1660s the word newspaper hadentered the English language.

broadsides (sometimes referred to as broadsheets)- single-sheet announcements or accounts of events imported from England.

What is the signifi cance of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, the Boston News-Letter, the New-England Courant, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and the New York Weekly Journal?

In 1690 Boston bookseller/printer (and coffeehouse owner) Benjamin Harris printed his own broadside, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. Intended for continuous publication, the country’s first paper lasted only one day. Harris had been critical of local and European dignitaries, and he had also failed to obtain a license.

More successful was Boston postmaster John Campbell, whose 1704 Boston NewsLetter survived until the Revolution. The paper featured foreign news, reprints of articles from England, government announcements, and shipping news. It was dull, and it was also expensive. Nonetheless, it established the newspaper in the Colonies.

 The Boston News-Letter was able to survive in part because of government subsidies. With government support came government control, but the buildup to the Revolution helped establish the medium’s independence.

James Franklin’s New-England Courant was the only one publishing without authority. Th e Courant was popular and controversial, but when it criticized the Massachusetts governor, Franklin was jailed for printing “scandalous libels.” When released, he returned to his old ways, earning himself and the Courant a publishing ban, which he circumvented by installing his younger brother Benjamin as nominal publisher. Ben Franklin soon moved to Philadelphia, and without his leadership the Courant was out of business in three years. Its lasting legacy, however, was in proving that a newspaper with popular support could indeed challenge authority.

 In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin established a print shop and later, in 1729,took over a failing newspaper, which he revived and renamed the Pennsylvania Gazette. By combining the income from his bookshop and printing businesses with that from his popular daily, Franklin could run the Gazette with significant independence. Even though he held the contract for Philadelphia’s official printing, he was unafraid to criticize those in authority. In addition, he began to develop advertising support, which also helped shield his newspaper from government control by decreasing its dependence on official printing contracts for survival. Ben Franklin demonstrated that financial independence could lead to editorial independence. It was not, however, a guarantee.

 In 1734 New York Weekly Journal publisher John Peter Zenger was jailed for criticizing that colony’s royal governor. The charge was seditious libel, and the verdict was based not on the truth or falsehood of the printed words but on whether they had been printed. The criticisms had been published, so Zenger was clearly guilty.

But his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, argued to the jury, “For the words themselves must be libelous, that is, false, scandalous and seditious,or else we are not guilty.” Zenger’s peers agreed, and he was freed. The case of Peter Zenger became a symbol of colonial newspaper independence from the Crown, and its power was evident in the refusal by publishers to accept the Stamp Act in 1765.

What factors led to the development of the penny press? To yellow journalism?

At the turn of the 19th century, New York City provided all the ingredients necessary for a new kind of audience for a new kind of newspaper and a new kind of journalism. The island city was densely populated, a center of culture, commerce, and politics, and especially because of the wave of immigrants that had come to its shores, demographically diverse. Add to this growing literacy among working people, and conditions were ripe for the penny press, one-cent newspapers for everyone.

William Randolph Hearst applied Pulitzer’s successful formula to his San Francisco Examiner, and then in 1895 he took on Pulitzer himself in New York. The competition between Hearst’s Morning Journal and Pulitzer’s

World was so intense that it debased newspapers and journalism as a whole, which is somewhat ironic in that Pulitzer later founded the prize for excellence in journalism that still bears his name.

 Drawing its name from the Yellow Kid, a popular cartoon character of the time, yellow journalism was a study in excess—sensational sex, crime, and disaster news; giant headlines; heavy use of illustrations; and reliance on cartoons and color.

What are the similarities and differences between wire services and feature syndicates?

This innovation, with its assignment of correspondents to both foreign and domestic bureaus, had a number of important implications. First, it greatly expanded the breadth and scope of coverage a newspaper could offer its readers. This was a boon to dailies wanting to attract as many readers as possible. Greater coverage of distant domestic news helped unite an expanding country while encouraging even more expansion.

News services, as we’ve already seen, collect news and distribute it to their members. (They are no longer called “wire” services because they no longer use telephone wires. Today material is more likely to come by computer network or satellite.) Unlike the early days of the wire services, today’s member is three times more likely to be a broadcast outlet than a newspaper. These radio and television stations receive voice and video, as well as written copy. In all cases, members receive a choice of material, most commonly national and international news, state and regional news, sports, business news, farm and weather reports, and human interest and consumer material.

 The feature services, called feature syndicates, do not gather and distribute news.

Instead, they operate as clearinghouses for the work of columnists, essayists, cartoonists, and other creative individuals. Among the material provided (by wire, by computer, or physically in packages) are opinion pieces such as commentaries by Ellen

Goodman or Garrison Keillor; horoscope, chess, and bridge columns; editorial cartoons, such as the work of Scott Willis and Ben Sergeant; and comics, the most common and popular form of syndicated material. Among the major syndicates, the best known are the New York Times News Service, King Features, Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), the Washington Post News Service, and United Feature Syndicate.

  5. When did newspaper chains begin? Can you characterize them as they exist today?

The years between the era of yellow journalism and the coming of television were a time of remarkable growth in the development of newspapers. From 1910 to the beginning of World War II, daily newspaper subscriptions doubled and ad revenues tripled. In 1910 there were 2,600 daily papers in the United States, more than at any time before or since. In 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued the “Canons of Journalism and Statement of Principles” in an eff rt to restore order and respectability after the yellow era. Th e opening sentence of the Canons was, “The right of a newspaper to attract and hold readers is restricted by nothing but considerations of public welfare.” The wire services internationalized. United Press International started gathering news from Japan in 1909 and was covering South America and Europe by 1921. In response to the competition from radio and magazines for advertising dollars, newspapers began consolidating into newspaper chains —papers in different cities across the country owned by a single company.