On the morning of April 24, 1704, in a small wooden building on Newbury Street in Boston, Bartholomew Green made history. Green, from one of the first families of printing in Colonial America, printed the Boston News-Letter, the first successful American newspaper. The Boston News-Letter was first published and edited by John Campbell, Boston postmaster and a bookseller, who had distributed a handwritten letter of news since 1700. While the aptly named Boston News-Letter was admired for its printing quality and typography (also notice the similarities to the popular London Gazette), its foreign-focused editorial has been called poor, dull and unimpressive. Pre-1720 circulations of the News-Letter seldom, if ever, exceeded 300. The issue presented above is dated October 1 to October 8, 1716, and includes an extensive back-page report on the arrival of Samuel Shute, the new Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Campbell continued to publish the Boston News-Letter until 1722 and concentrated his journalism on foreign news, which resulted in a substantial time lag.

News from England took as long as eight weeks to reach Boston by ship “and a few more weeks or months made little difference, to Campbell’s mind, so long as important events were recorded in due order. In short, Campbell thought of news as recent history,” according to American Journalism ( Mott, 1949). Unfortunately, Campbell fell further and further behind in his reporting until he was more than a year behind. In one of his first issues of 1719, Campbell wrote “After near upon Fourteen Years experience, The Undertaker knows that it’s Impossible with half a Sheet in the Week to carry on all the Public News of Europe… He now intends to make up that Deficiency by Printing a Sheet [i.e., four pages] every other Week, for Trial, by which in a little time, all will become New that us’d formerly to seem Old.” A winter with no English ships bringing London newspapers to Boston delayed Campbell’s plan until the following spring when Campbell wrote in the May 18 to May 25 four-page issue (shown above) “By printing every other Week a Sheet and this Month Weekly a Sheet, we have given you not only the Remarkable Occurrences of Great Britain and Ireland to the 4th of March last; but also all those of Europe beyond Great Britain to the first of October.” According to Mott, this was “as well as Campbell ever was able to do with his ‘foreign’ or Continental reports.”

The Boston News-Letter remained the only newspaper in the colonies for 15 years until another Boston newspaper, the Boston Gazette, began publishing in December 1719. Coincidentally, one day after the Boston Gazette first published, Andrew Bradford, song of one of America’s famous first printers William Bradford, began publishing American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia. The American Weekly Mercury was the first newspaper published outside of Boston and holds the title of first newspaper printed in the middle colonies. As the title suggests, the American Weekly Mercury was intended, unlike its Boston counterparts, for a much larger audience. Bradford “worked out a three-tiered subscription rate depending on the distance from Philadelphia: ten shillings a year for subscribers in his own province, fifteen shillings for New Jersey, New York and Maryland, and twenty shillings for Virginia, Rhode Island, and Boston,” according to The Public Prints (Clark, 1994). Similar to the Boston News-Letter, the American Weekly Mercury gave editorial priority to foreign news as demonstrated in the April 11 to 18, 1737, issue shown above. According to Clark, the Mercury’s monopoly ended with the establishment of his father’s New-York Gazette late in 1725. New York was also home to a critical event in American journalism history.

Arguably the most significant and dramatic event of all American journalism history surrounded the owner of the New-York Weekly Journal, John Peter Zenger. After publishing a reader’s letter that was critical of New York Governor William Cosby, Zenger was arrested for seditious libel. “Zenger continued to oversee publication of the New-York Weekly Journal, his editor’s office now a jail cell, until his trial began nine months later,” according to Infamous Scribblers (Burns, 2006). The trial was unique in that it was the first time in American history in which the lawyer, unable to defend his client’s innocence, argued the error of the law and insisted that truth was a valid defense against libel. The jury, finding that all printed statements were based on fact, unanimously returned a verdict of not guilty. “The John Peter Zenger trial was a landmark in the history of American journalism, the first significant court decision in its behalf… The verdict also was the first substantial piece of evidence that the colonies had recourse against those actions of the Crown it found unjust… After the Zenger trial, independence was in the air,” according to Burns.

In the 1740s, about a dozen newspapers were being published in the colonies with Boston, Philadelphia and New York having more than one. Annapolis (Maryland), Charleston (South Carolina) and Williamsburg (Virginia) each had one. The Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Benjamin Franklin, is considered one of the finest specimens of colonial newspapers. Benjamin Franklin began publishing the Gazette in October 1729, which was launched a year earlier by Samuel Keimer. “Like most other newspapers of the time, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was filled not only with short news items and reports on public events, but also with amusing essays and letters from readers. What made his paper a delight was its wealth of this type of correspondence, much of it written under pseudonyms by Franklin himself,” according to the biography Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson, 2003). The December 6, 1745, issue shown above was published during King George’s War, the third of the four French and Indian Wars and an extension of the War of the Austrian Succession. According to Isaacson, in 1746, 16-year-old William Franklin “marched off toward Canada to fight the French and Indians on behalf of the British.

In the 1740s, newspaper circulations still averaged only a few hundred subscribers. The Maryland Gazette was originally established in September 1727 and published by William Parks until 1734. The title was revived on January 17, 1745, by Jonas Green, the great-great-great grandson of Bartholomew Green, who printed the Boston News-Letter. The March 17, 1747, issue of the Maryland Gazette (shown above) contains reports of King George’s War, an extension of the War of the Austrian Succession.

In 1748, at age 42, Benjamin Franklin retired from printing the Pennsylvania Gazette and turned over the business to his foreman, David Hall. “The detailed partnership deal Franklin drew up would leave him rich enough by most people’s standards: it provided him with half of the shop’s profits for the next eighteen years (through 1766), which would amount to about 650 United Kingdom Pounds annually,” according to Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson, 2003). So, in 1748, the imprint on the back page of Franklin’s Gazette added David Hall and now read “PHILADELPHIA: Printed by B. FRANKLIN, Post-Master, and D. HALL, at the New-Printing-Office, near the Market.”

By the 1750s, improvements in the post service helped stimulate newspaper subscriptions and, for the first time, some newspapers realized circulations north of one thousand. Unfortunately, not all subscribers paid. According to Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, James Parker, the printer of the New York Gazette, reported in 1759 that at least a quarter of his subscribers  failed to pay. The April 7, 1755, issue of the New York Gazette (shown above) features a proclamation inviting American colonists to enlist and fight in the French and Indian War — “for the Service and Defence [sic] of his Majesty’s Colonies in North-America.”.