Boston

Newspapers

Publick Occurrences, a 6- by 10-inch three-pager, was immediately accused of printing “sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports” and was shut down by the colonial authorities five days after its appearance. It was never resurrected. The Boston News-Letter (1704) and the Boston Gazette (1719) lasted much longer. Early news items dealt first with financial and commercial issues and later with politics and urban life. James Franklin's New England Courant (1721) is credited by some historians as being the first American newspaper to carry on a crusade—it was against the smallpox inoculation.

The 1800s were dominated by continuous appearances and disappearances of newspaper titles. At one time in the 1830s the city had 15 daily and weekly newspapers, some of which [Page 177]offered short-lived evening editions. Most were concentrated in downtown Boston's famous “newspaper row” on Washington Street where one of the popular traditions was the daily display of handwritten news signs or blackboards in a newspaper's street-level windows.

Most notable newspapers of that era included the Boston Daily Advertiser (1813), the first successful New England paper catering to the interests of the elite, purchased by William Randolph Hearst in 1917; The Boston Traveler (1825), originally dedicated to stagecoach listings and the first Boston paper to use newsboys to sell copies in the streets; The Boston Transcript (1830), a stodgy, literary paper, which served the city's gentry, and was the subject of T. S. Eliot's poem “The Boston Evening Transcript”; The Daily Post (1831), a very successful paper (at its peak it sold more than 600,000 copies daily) that was Democrat and prolabor; The Liberator (1831), published by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; The Boston Herald (1846), a penny-paper founded by a group of area printers; and William Randolph Hearst's The American (1904). In 1912 the Herald bought the Traveler and in 1967 they combined to form the Boston Herald-Traveler. In 1972 the Herald-Traveler was forced by a government decision to sell its broadcast stations and was soon sold to Hearst's Record-American to survive. These properties eventually formed the Boston Herald.

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