Bulletin Boards.

Before the American publishing revolution of the late 1820s the nation's newspapers were little more than community "bulletin boards " The typical paper was only four pages long and approximately nine by fourteen inches in size. Advertisements took up two of those four pages, and the other two usually included lists of ship arrivals, departures, and cargoes; a smattering of foreign news; and reprints of political speeches alongside editorials. In fact, because political parties often subsidized the newspapers to serve as mouthpieces for the party line, "journalists," a contemporary acidly commented, are "usually little more than secretaries dependent on cliques of politicians . . . and office seekers for their prosperity and bread." Circulation, even for metropolitan dailies, generally amounted to only one or two thousand copies (even in New York, which had two hundred thousand residents in 1830) while the combined output of all the...