Regulating Timeliness

Abstract

The advent of telegraphy in the United States shifted newsgathering from the public postal system to a private network dominated by telegraph companies and wire services, a nearly simultaneous revolution in journalism's technology and political economy. Postal newsgathering had been open to all newspapers with few costs and constraints, while its telegraphic successor developed amid a web of regulations. A changing configuration of occupational rules, private business arrangements, and public laws regulated each stage in the production of telegraphic news, from source-reporter interactions to post-publication liability. This monograph analyzes the origins of rules that governed timely news-determining who got it, how fast, and on what terms-from the advent of telecommunication to the eclipse of telegraphic news relays.The advent of electrical communication in the 1840s marked the most striking divide in the history of newsgathering. On one side was the postal system, a network that transported fully formed news articles by horseback, stagecoach, railways, and watercraft. On the other side was the telegraph, a network that used electricity-the first application of electricity for any practical purpose-to transmit news as impulses in code over wires. Amplifying this technological revolution was a simultaneous shift in the institutional setting of American communication networks and newsgathering: the postal service operated as a government agency, while the telegraph and its progeny