[Page 528]Editorials

The most notable difference in the modern-day newspaper editorial as of 2021 is its decline, mirroring the disappearance of many daily and weekly newspapers and the overall regression of the industry. However, opinionated commentary thrives in nontraditional formats and platforms that include blogs, partisan cable television hosts and pundits, and a host of web news sites. This entry examines editorial influence and readership, as well as dueling editorialists. The entry closes with a discussion of editorial competition.

Since the first widely published newspaper editorial penned in the United States actually appeared—in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette—before the United States existed, during the colonial era, on May 9, 1754, the newspaper editorial and the editorial page have undergone drastic evolutionary change—in content and in style. Those first editorials—defined ...