America's first newspaper was shut down immediately after its first issue
In 1690 Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris printed a newspaper in Boston without government permission, and the authorities promptly suppressed it. It took a libel trial in 1735 and the First Amendment in 1791 before American papers could safely criticise those in power, and the fight over press freedom shaped the entire news industry.
News once travelled by hand. In Renaissance Europe merchants passed around handwritten newsletters about wars, markets and customs, each copy unique and scarce. Gutenberg's press, invented around 1440, changed that, and by the late 1400s German pamphlets were printing news, often sensationally. The first English-language paper, The Weekly News, appeared in London in 1621.
Colonial America supplied a landmark case. In 1729 Benjamin Franklin began producing a livelier, more satirical and civic-minded paper. Six years later the printer John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel by New York's governor, William Cosby, and acquitted largely thanks to his lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who argued that truthful criticism of government should be allowed. The Bill of Rights later enshrined press freedom in the First Amendment.
Commerce then reshaped the product. Beginning with the New York Sun in 1833, cheap penny papers chased mass readership with crime and adventure instead of politics. By the century's end banner headlines, illustrations, comic pages and sports coverage were standard, and independent papers were being absorbed into chains. Early twentieth-century muckrakers exposed official corruption and powered Progressive reform, though their influence waned after 1912 as readers tired of exposés they considered sensational.
Broadcasting added new rules. Radio in the early 1920s let millions hear breaking news together, and advertisers pounced. The Communications Act of 1934 declared the airwaves public property, licensing commercial broadcasters on condition that they serve the public interest, convenience and necessity. Television news grew through the 1970s, more than half of US homes had cable by 1990, and the internet brought computer-assisted reporting and journalists who file one story for print, web and camera.
Source: News media
