Los Angeles herald., 1909-11-22
Los ANGELES HERALD: MONDAY NOVEMBER 1909

lEY RE4l to ind themselves lue pOS~
IM 49, SCISSORS of what no people
IA ~ ever before had possessed
lksAlMs4 IA daily newspaper. Tho
Daily Courant" was a tiny single
sheet publication appearing six times
a week. Like all its successors, living
and dead, 1t was intended to supply
a "long-felt want" The particular de-
mand existing at that time was the
desire of the people of London to OBJ
tain news of the campaign being
waged on the continent by the Duke
of Marlborough, for In the good year
1909 Europe was bleeding in the war
of the Spanish succession. The history
of daily newspapers from that day un-
til this is the history of the world,
but there is a particular trade history
which is of interest even to those not
engaged in journalism.
The United States and Canada now
boast 2500 daily journals and the rest
of the world has about as many. There
are 60, 900 newspapers and other period
icals in the world, $4,000 of which are
published in the United States and
Canada. More than half of all the
periodicals in the world appear in the
English language. The development
of modern Journalism has been the pc
culiar mission of the English and
fore, that London should have the
honor of being the birthplace of the
daily newspaper and that it should
now be the home of the most powerful
Of all daily journals; while the United
states surpasses all other countries In
the versatility, scope and prosperity Of
its press.
The newspaper, however, is an ltal-
ian invention. Leaving aside the Chi-
nese antiquities and reckoning only
the western world, the first newspaper
editor was julius Caesar. The great
Roman did not possess the facilities OF
the twentieth century, but he had the
soul of a press agent. lie used the
dead walls of Rome to display bulle-
tins of the news-news carefully col
ored to suit the political desires or }.
Caesar II this early effort at publicity
be barred, still the Italians have the
claim to the first newspaper. In the
latter part of the sixteenth century the
first regular publication OF bulletin
containing information for the public
was undertaken in Venice. These bull
| letins were not printed, but were writ
| ten on large sheets and displayed in
| public ROOM They were called ga
2etta," from which comes the English
| newspaper title Gazette" The pop
ular clamor for news of the war be-
tween the Venetians and the Turks
was the "long-felt want supplied by
| the appearance of these "gazetta.
! The files of sixty years of It's issues
| are preserved in museum in Flor
| ence.
The first printed paper was the
English Mereurie," a religious pub
lication which appeared in London in
1858. The earliest real newspaper was
| the London Weekly News, born in
| 1919. For ninety years the London
press led a varied existence, more
than three hundred newspapers being
started only to perish in early fall
| ure. But in the fullness of time sew
eral weeklies were firmly established,
and there were seven thrice-a-week
journals in England when 1.-THE Daily
| Courant" made its bow TO the public
in the autumn of 1903.
The first newspaper venture In
America was tragic failure. Mr..
| Richard Pierce of Boston, in 1880. be-
| gan the publication of "Publick Occur
rences." He declared in his salutatory
| that there were too many unfounded
and baseless rumors floating about
Boston and that the mission of his
paper was to record them and then
trace them to their source. Mr.. Pierce
appears to be entitled to the honor oi
being the first journalistic muck-raker
! But those were cruel times, and the
| legislature suppressed the sheet after
| its first issue, solemnly declaring 1t 10
be "a pamphlet which came out con-
trary to law and contained reflections
of a very high nature"
| A generation later Benjamin Frank
| lin conhded TO his mother his intention
! to start a newspaper The worthy
| woman exclaimed: What can you be
| thinking Off There are two newspa-
| pers in America nowl" AS a matter oil
fact there were Ave, but three of them
were SO far away that Mrs. Franklin
had not heard OF them. The successor
of the paper which Franklin did estab-
! llsh now has the largest circulation oil
any weekly publication in the world
more than a million and a quarter q
| week.
The first daily newspaper in the Unit
ed States, the American Daily Adver-
tiser, appeared in Philadelphia in 1854
one year after England had acknowl-
edged the independence of the states
| and five years before the beginning oi
the government under the constitution
The New York Daily Advertiser fol
lowed in 1856, and in 1856 the Pittsbure
Gazette began its present prosperous
| career.
The United States now has eighty
! FIVE newspapers more than hundred
years old, and in this respect at least
| America is quite as old and quite as
! mature as her European sisters. Many
| of the eighty-fiVe members Of the nows-
paper century club are still weekles
but most of them, weeklies in 1909, are