Weekly Newspapers

Origins

In the English-speaking world, the first newspapers were produced only when some noteworthy event occurred. As printing became more economical and public literacy increased, a burgeoning interest in world affairs created a market for regular news reports. The first periodically published newspaper was the Weekly Newes in 1622, and it set the precedent for weekly news production (the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant of London, would not appear until 1702). First published in April 1704, the Boston News-Letter was a weekly half-sheet, a single page printed on both sides. By 1750, 14 weekly four-page newspapers were being published in the six largest colonies. After independence, weekly newspapers thrived in the new United States. The Maryland Gazette, now a twice-weekly subsidiary of The Capital, is the oldest continuously published weekly in America, its first issue appearing in 1727. During the westward expansion, a weekly newspaper was one of the signals of the “arrival of respectability” in small towns across the country. Today, local weekly newspapers continue that tradition of fostering a sense of community, civility, and neighborliness.

Most weekly newspapers started as family-owned businesses. Typically, all the business functions, and often the editorial chores, are handled by family members. The majority of weekly newspapers remain locally owned; in 2006, for example, 52 percent of the 141 weekly newspapers in North Carolina were independently owned and managed. However, as newspapers became more expensive to publish and new generations declined to join the “family business,” many weeklies have been purchased by newspaper chains, either regional or national. The McClatchy Company, the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, owned 46 weekly newspapers in 2007, while the Gannett Company, the largest, published nearly 1,000 nondaily newspapers that year. These companies often have a business manager overseeing several weeklies in a state or region, with individual editors at each newspaper. These managers and editors enjoy considerable autonomy, often more so than their daily newspaper counterparts in the newspaper chains.

In such an atmosphere, it may be surprising that most modern technological advances in newspaper production have been pioneered by weekly newspapers—in part because newspaper unions are stronger at large urban papers. Cold type first replaced Linotype at weeklies. Weekly newspaper [Page 1458]staff were doing layout with personal computers—usually Macintosh—perhaps a decade before it became common at the large urban daily newspapers. Weekly newspapers in Illinois were among the first to convert from petroleum-based ink to soybean ink. Use of digital cameras for news was begun by reporters at weekly newspapers that lacked photojournalists on staff. Tom Terry, who formerly owned three award-winning weekly newspapers, credits this nimbleness on the part of weeklies to the absence of layers of management that can curtail innovation due to concerns about cost effectiveness and reliability. Once proven to be useful in the production of weekly newspapers, technological innovations are adopted and adapted by major newspapers.

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