“Plain and Certain Facts”

Abstract

Was there serious, systematic news reporting in eighteenth-century America? Not in newspapers. Journalism historians have often noted that colonial papers carried a lot of local news, but reporting was haphazard. News found its own way into the print shop and into the paper; even the best newspapermen rarely reached out to gather it. But some writers did. This article is about four episodes of public affairs reporting in Boston in the 1730s and the 1740s that involved painstaking efforts to collect, verify, and publish up-to-date, factual information about occurrences of public importance. While the writers were from different professions, they were all print entrepreneurs and major players in the city's public life. They understood their civic duty to include reporting and publishing information on current public affairs, and they pioneered methods for doing that.

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David Paul Nord

DAVID PAUL NORD is a professor in the School of Journalism and an adjunct professor of history at Indiana University. He is the author of Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (2004) and Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (2001).