1. Some newspapers in colonial America supported British rule. But historians say the criticisms of other newspapers helped lead tothe American Revolution. After the war, newspapers supported different political parties and felt free to express opposition to the government.
2. Yet the government of the new nation did not always accept freedom of the press. The Sedition Act of Seventeen Ninety-eight made it a crime to criticize the government with the aim to damage it in the eyes of the public.
3. Three years later Thomas Jefferson became president. He permitted the act to end. Jefferson spoke about the importance of a free press. He said "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
4. Newspapers in the early eighteen hundreds cost about six cents -- too much for many immigrants and working people. Then in the eighteen thirties came the "penny press." These newspapers cost just one cent, a penny.
5. Also, they published a lot of crime and court stories to get more attention than other papers. The penny press cost so little because businesses paid to advertise in the newspapers. The idea spread.
6. The Newspaper Association of America says advertising sales today provide about eighty percent of the money for newspapers. Advertising sales dropped sixteen percent last year, and the group expects another ten percent drop this year.
7. In eighteen forty-six a group of New York newspapers agreed to share news. That alliance became known as The Associated Press. By that time, the use of the telegraph meantthat newspapers could report on recent events.
8. Publishers often used their papers for political causes. Anti-slavery activist William Lloyd Garrison started a paper in eighteen thirty-one with the purpose of ending slavery. Historians say the first paper published by blacks in the United States was Freedom's Journal. It appeared in eighteen twenty-seven. And immigrant groups created newspapers in their native languages.
9. The hunger for news of the Civil War in the eighteen sixties increased the need for reporters. After the war, the purpose of newspapers slowly changed. They began to consider that their job was mainly to provide information. Still, they helped to influence events.
10. Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World in eighteen eighty-three and used it to improve the lives of workers and the poor. He helped start the practice known as investigative journalism. For example, the reporter Nellie Bly was working for him when she investigated the cruel treatment of patients at a mental hospital.
11. In eighteen eighty-nine, Pulitzer sent Nellie Bly on a trip around the world. He wanted to see if she could do it in under eighty days. She did it in seventy-two days.
12. Joseph Pulitzer competed with another powerful newspaper publisher -- William Randolph Hearst. Hearst published the New York Journal. At times, both of them seemed more interested in selling newspapers than in respectable reporting.
13. No history of journalism is complete without discussing the work of two young reporters from the Washington Post. They wrote a series of stories after a break-in at DemocraticParty offices in the Watergate Office Building in nineteen seventy-two. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein discovered wrongdoing that led President Richard Nixon to resign.
14. Robert Redford played Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman was Carl Bernstein in the movie based on their book "All the President's Men." In this scene, their editors are trying to decide if the paper has enough to support a story that the reporters want to print.
EDITOR: "We're about to accuse Haldeman -- who only happens to be the second most important man in this country -- of conducting a criminal conspiracy from inside the White House. It would be nice if we were right."
OTHER EDITOR: "You double-checked your sources?"
EDITOR: "Bernstein, are you sure on this story?"
BERNSTEIN: "Absolutely."
EDITOR: "Woodward?"
WOODWARD: "I'm sure."
EDITOR: "I'm not. It still seems thin."
OTHER EDITOR: "Get another source."
15. The look of American newspapers changed after USA Today arrived in nineteen eighty-two. Most of the stories were short. There was heavy use of color and images and things like opinion polls. People who compared it to television did not necessarily mean that as praise. But the new design succeeded and influenced many other papers.
16. Now newspapers are looking to redesign themselves for an increasingly online world. Millions more people read papers like USA Today and the New York Times for free on the Web than pay for a printed version. Publishers who chose that business plan might regret it now, but they might not have had much choice.
17. Survival means changing as conditions change. Like any other business, newspapers have to balance their needs with the needs of their customers -- the readers they need to keep.
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