Broadsheet Newspapers

Origins

While newspapers developed during the print revolution that was made possible by the spread of the printing press, they slowly expanded in size to accommodate the medley of content crammed into publications by printers, including shipping news, foreign dispatches, commodity prices, and advertisements. Similar to modern newspapers, these early-seventeenth-century broadsheets organized their text into vertical columns.

The broadsheet form developed largely out of technical necessity. In the 1600s and 1700s, newspapers continued to be printed on wooden presses requiring pages to be pressed against the type one sheet at a time. Printing was a slow, labor-intensive process. This constrained circulation to small numbers and made the single-sheet newspaper a necessity. As editorial and advertising content increased and the need for more space forced newspapers to expand, it made technical and economic sense to increase the size of the page rather than expand the total number of pages. A single page only needed to be folded; not assembled. One large sheet of newsprint could be printed on both sides and folded to create four separate pages.

In the early 1800s, the rise of mechanical presses increased printing speeds and allowed for greater print runs and thus circulations. Implementation of steam-powered presses further quickened the pace with which newspapers could be produced. But this did not lead to a diminishment of page size. Rather, it remained sensible, from the printer's standpoint, to churn out larger pages rather than assemble many smaller sheets. On the extreme end, broadsheet pages grew to enormous sizes due to advertising policies that encouraged yearly contracts, but did not restrict the size of the display ads. As a result, in the 1830s, a page of the New York Journal of Commerce measured a width of 35 inches and a height of 58 inches. When opened, the two pages spanned 70 inches, occupying a little over 28 square feet of space. Each page carried news and advertisements across 11 columns. This format came to be known as the “blanket” sheet because of its cumbersome size.

Large sheets remained standard for urban newspapers. In 1867, the Chicago Tribune carried ten columns, two more than the eight or nine column pages common in that era. Within columns, spaces between rows of text—known as leading—decreased. With a minimum of graphics, the pages came across as seas of gray type. Because of the large page dimensions, the total number of pages in nineteenth-century papers remained either four or eight, depending on the size of the circulation and the size of the city. This meant only one or two actual pages were needed (before folding). In the twentiethcentury, the increase in use of graphics and movement away from text-heavy pages led to smaller page sizes and fewer columns—usually five or six. The total number of pages increased and newspapers began to be divided into sections.

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