The Wire Agency: News and the telegraph

I went to search for our "recent comments" here, as I was looking for a comment that LeAnn had made, which inspired this post.  I ended up having to find it another way, but I did find it.  Here it is:

Loving these posts on the Punitive Expedition. I'm so curious if you find any articles from the local paper that list the 28th Infantry, the unit my great-grandfather was in. In one of my first grad classes, I wrote a paper about how the events of the Punitive Expedition were reported in the newspapers, both national ones such as New York Times or the like and more local papers such as the Baltimore Sun. I found that the articles were essentially the same as the Associated Press was already in existence. So, there didn't seem to be any huge focuses on the local units in the local papers. Anyway, I'm finding these posts quite interesting. Thanks

The post appeared in the post on technology and the Punitive Expedition.

What LeAnn had noted about locals papers had also surprised me.  I hadn't expected such up to date news, quite frankly, .and I also expected it to have a highly local character.  It doesn't.  And that's for the reason she noted.

Now, having said that, what I will say, and which emphasizes this, is that if I take a step out further in news coverage this isn't true. That is, I was putting mostly up the Casper paper, with the Cheyenne paper on occasion.  But if you start looking at the newspapers of the smaller towns, the Punitive Expedition hardly appeared at all.  In any of them.  Now, why was that true.

Just what LeAnn noted. The wires services.  Those small papers weren't subscribing to the wire services.

Here's the first one we recently ran:

The Raid on Columbus New Mexico: The news hit.

Most towns and cities in 1916 were served by a morning and an evening newspaper, or a paper that published a morning and evening edition.  Therefore, most Americans would have started learning of the Villista raid around 5:00 p.m. or so as the evening newspapers were delivered or started being offered for sale.

Here's the evening edition of the Casper Daily Press, a paper that was in circulation in Casper Wyoming in 1916 and which is the predecessor of one of the current papers.

Here's the Encampment Record, from southern Wyoming, on the same day:

Quite a bit different.

From the Encampment Record, for the same day, we learn that improvements were being made to the city hall.  Registered livestock were being brought into the valley, something that urban sophisticates might make fun of today but real news.  A local road needed improvement.  And, some distance away, the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, named for the 1902 novel by Owen Wister, and which is still there in Medicine Bow, had closed.  It only closed temporarily, of course, as it remains open today.

 

The Virginian Hotel, which has been featured on this blog before, with this photo being from Railhead.  It's interesting to note that Wister's novel was such a hit that it was inspiring the naming of a hotel in Wyoming so close to the date of its publication.

News Agencies got started in Europe as early as the 1830s. When telegraph came about, however, that really opened the door for the wire agency, a type of news agency that depended on the transmission of news by telegraph.  In the United States, the Associated Press was founded in 1846 as a nonprofit organization.  It originally only included five New York newspapers that had founded it, and it conveyed the news of the Mexican War by boat, horse and telegraph.  In 1900 the Illinois Supreme Court held that wire agencies were a public utility and that meant that the Associated Press had to let in any newspaper that would pay for the service.  The United States Supreme Court upheld the Illinois Supreme Court in Inter Ocean Publishing v. Associated Press, a decision that really opened up reporting in the United States (but which I doubt the Supreme Court would have ruled the same way in today.  Soon, any paper that wanted AP wire reports could have them, and soon thereafter competition spring up, including United Press and International News Service.

That brought in the golden age of the news reporter, as we so often imagine it today. Reporters working for the agencies going to the field and wiring in their reports to the agencies, who in turn spread them rapidly throughout the nation.  

News reporters and photographers interviewing Alma Gluck, 1917.  Gluck was a celebrated opera singer and would have been 33 years old at the time of this photograph.  There are a lot of interesting details in it, including a depiction of a fedora by a couple of gentlemen in the photo, sowing their early spread,  as well as a reporter taking his notes by hand.  That reporter, if he was a wire reporter, would then wire his story in. Note also the early large cameras, including at least one motion picture camera.

This was an amazing change in the way that things had been done.  Local newspapers before this, and there were many, simply reported on local news for the most part, until a story became so big it had to be reported in the local paper.  But now, the major news, including in our examples war news from Europe, was appearing the next day in small cities.  The world had become very connected.

Before we close in this amazing change in the transmission of news, let's observe a couple of things.  One is that the news was being wired, but photographs weren't really yet.  Some early news photos were appearing, but wire photography wouldn't come in until the 1920s with the invention of additional technology.  Secondly, lets consider the reporters.

One of the really amazing things about reporters of this era, and well after, is that these were not, as a rule, college educated men.  That says something about the nature of education at the time.  By and large, these were men with high school educations.  People didn't go to college and major in journalism.  If they wanted to be reporters, they took what they'd learned in high school and went out as a cub reporter for a paper.  Some really astounding writers are included in this group.  Francis McCullagh, an Irish born writer who traveled all over the globe writing for English, Japanese and American newspapers is one example. With a Catholic school education, he reported on wars everywhere from the Russo Japanese War all the way to the Spanish Civil War, writing several books along the way.  Robert Leckie is another.  He started writing for a local newspaper while still in high school and then went on to be a wire reporter after World War Two, later writing his famous memoir A Helmet For My Pillow as a reaction to seeing South Pacific.  It'd be hard to get in the door of a newspaper as a writer today without a university education.  Perhaps that says something about education standards of the era, or should, and expectations then and now.