Electrifying news! Journalists,audiences,and the culture of timeliness in the United States,1840--1920

The telegraph literally and figuratively electrified news. Telegraphy, the first commercially viable use of electricity, made possible the production and reception of nonlocal news daily, even minute-by-minute, by transforming reporting into a process that delivered impulses of information. The now-familiar daily news cycle—scheduled reports of recent news punctuated by even more timely breaking news—originated with telegraphic journalism. This genre of reporting developed with an ethos of timeliness shaped by both producers and consumers. While newspapers structured their operations to produce ever-more timely news, audiences incorporated timeliness into the rhythm of their lives. Timeliness, in short, became a key nexus in the production and reception of news.

The application of electricity to communication exerted “crucial technological influence on news practices and forms” (Bell, 1995: 306; see also Giddens, 1991: 25). To produce timeliness, newspapers restructured all facets of their operations, from workplace architecture to circulation efforts. In the process, timeliness steadily assumed a central if not primary position in the constellation of news values—certainly more universally honored than objectivity. Roshco (1975: 11) points out that journalistic timeliness comprises three elements: “(a) recency (recent disclosure); (b) immediacy (publication with minimal delay); (c) currency (relevance to present concerns).” With the advent of telegraphic reporting, immediacy routinely eclipsed timeliness’ other two constituents in judging newsworthiness. Beating the competition in delivering a story to readers provided a simple metric for reporters and news organizations to distinguish themselves, a “democratic measure of journalistic ‘quality’” (Schudson, 1986: 82). Timeliness also entered into editorial assessments of other news values. Breaking news, for instance, implied novelty, a “rupture [in] the skein of existing expectations” (Schlesinger, 1977: 342). Perhaps most important, timeliness altered assessments of a story’s significance: Editors elevated low-value but immediately available stories over more consequential ones in ordering the day’s news. Within reports, too, timeliness mattered. Putting the outcome—the most recent development—first “overturns temporal sequence” but “allows for constant updating” and timely processing (Bell, 1995: 312–313).

Just as telegraphy altered the temporal basis for producing a news report, the report in turn altered the temporal basis for the public in apprehending the world. Daily papers, especially those with wire-service franchises, presented themselves as the public’s portal to an electrified national and international newsgathering network. With the wires furnishing simultaneous streams of information from all quarters, newspapers began offering synthetic, omniscient reports. Dispatches about a major domestic or international event from one location conveyed that news concurrently with political responses from Washington and the market reaction on Wall Street—all, and often more, obtained by telegraph. Telegraphic news thus compressed time and transcended space, simulating an experience of immediacy and simultaneity—even participation—in a networked industrial society. Newspapers encouraged readers to believe that they could truly know, by following telegraphic reports, what was happening beyond the horizon, and that this timely knowledge empowered them.

The burgeoning scholarly interest in media technologies and communication networks has directed historians’ attention to the pioneering roles of telegraphy and the wire services in relaying news and other time-sensitive information. Most major studies of the telegraph highlight Western Union’s position as an industry-dominant firm and central player in American finance whose operations influenced the nation’s political economy (Hochfelder, 2012; Wolff, 2013). Taking a wider view, John (2010) sketches the continuities and discontinuities in telegraphy’s relations to the postal and telephone networks as well as the place of all three in American political economy. Insider accounts of wire services have been superseded by more analytical studies of their effects on the news industry and politics (Blondheim, 1994; Schwarzlose, 1989, 1990), plus the business strategies behind their participation in the global wire-service cartel (Silberstein-Loeb, 2014). These and other studies, which variously emphasize technology, business, and political economy, provide essential details and context for understanding the production of timely news.

Acknowledging the role of telegraphy and wire services in the production of timeliness, however, does not fully account for the particular nature, widespread acceptance, and consequences of this journalistic attribute. Wire-service dispatches, supplemented by reports from newspapers’ own correspondents, flowed over telegraph lines to publications whose staff processed them for delivery to readers, pointing to organizational, occupational, and public settings as sites that contributed to the culture of timeliness. Discussions within and among these domains—found in trade journals and other occupational literature as well as in newspapers’ engagement with their audiences—reveal some of the presumed consequences of timeliness and the value parties associated with it.

This essay begins by locating journalistic timeliness in the broader context of the 19th-century’s changing temporal rhythms. It then explores how rendering journalistic accounts as impulses transformed the production of news as well as the audience’s engagement with it. In the process, the press reified timeliness internally through organizational rewards and occupational discourses, and externally by projecting its institutional values through marketing and the metatexts that accompanied stories. Ultimately, timeliness enhanced some readers’ prospects of participating in some distant affairs. But whatever its instrumental value, timeliness accentuated the ritualistic quality of news by simultaneously presenting scattered audiences with “dramatic action in which the reader joins a world of contending forces as an observer at a play” (Carey, 1975: 21).

Telegraphy, time, and the news

The naturalization of timeliness in the production and reception of news occurred as part of a broader reorganization of time in the 19th century. Contemporaries celebrating the advent of telegraphy frequently proclaimed that the new technology annihilated time and space (Czitrom, 1982: 3–29). But social scientists emphasize that telegraphy reconfigured rather than annihilated these coordinates of social life (Castells, 1997; Kern, 1983: 3). For instance, Giddens (1981: 189) observed that Samuel F. B. Morse’s demonstration of a simple telegraph system in 1844 “initiated a new set of relations between presence and absence,” elements in his concept of “time-space distanciation.” Scholars widely concur that telegraphy compressed and commodified time, while increasing the coordination and control of activities over space (Adam, 2004). Most such research, however, directly examines institutional responses to telegraph-produced timeliness and only obliquely suggests how timeliness figured in the lives of individuals. More than just about any other institution, journalism bore the earmarks of the new temporal rhythms and figured in producing them—and did so while directly conveying timeliness every day to countless people.

Producing timeliness

Telegraph operations mushroomed from Morse’s original 30-mile line that opened in 1844 to a network that spanned about 80,000 miles by the end of the Civil War and reached 1.7 million miles by 1920 (Field, 2006: 4:1001–1002). In 1880, Western Union transmitted 611-million words for wire services and individual newspapers; a single paper that year paid more than $70,000 for its dispatches (North, 1884: 105–112). After the 1870s, increasing quantities of news moved over the leased wires made possible by multiplexing. Telegraph companies leased circuits for all or part of the day to wire services and the larger newspapers that could afford this service (EW, 1885; Operator, 1880; T&TA, 1912b, 1918). With the expansion of the network and bandwidth, the time-lag between the occurrence of nonlocal news and its appearance in print dropped precipitously. Domestic news appearing in western Ohio dailies averaged nine days old on the eve of the telegraph, dropped to about four days by the Civil War, and then to a half day by the end of the century (Brooker-Gross, 1981).

Improvements in speeding transmission initiated by telegraph companies and wire services reverberated through every stage of the news-production process (Merrill, 1893). Even before a story’s transmission, reporter-source interactions partly determined its timeliness. Reporters rendered the information they gathered in a form that maximized speedy relay. Newspapers receiving a dispatch geared their workflow to rapidly process a story, resorting to clever shortcuts for exceptionally pressing news. Once published, telegraphic news moved rapidly to readers through circulation channels that pushed transports to their limits.

As reporters regularized their use of the telegraph just before the Civil War, news sources discovered that they could modulate the timeliness of reports. Between the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, high-status sources developed techniques for exploiting the temporal rhythms of the telegraph-based daily news cycle. From the outset of his administration, Lincoln dictated precisely when his important messages could be communicated, via telegraphic reports, to a national audience (Blondheim, 2002; Wheeler, 2006: 31–35, 98–99). A few years later, Congress granted telegraph reporters a privileged place on the floor of its chambers so that lawmakers’ deliberations could be flashed to the nation (Marbut, 1971: 135). Presidential techniques for managing timeliness kept pace with developments in telegraphic reporting. During the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley had 20 telegraph lines installed in a “war room” to follow fast-breaking developments, and upgraded press facilities to keep reporters close at hand (TA, 1898). This positioned the White House to track news as it moved over the wires and then immediately share its perspective with reporters to shape the next news cycle. McKinley’s press-savvy successor, President Roosevelt, sometimes scheduled the release of major announcements for transmission to newspapers just in time to drive reports of political opponents’ competing events off the front pages (Juergens, 1981: 42–43). Thus, well before the advent of broadcasting, institutional sources knowledgeable about telegraphic-based news cycles managed timeliness to achieve targeted effects.

With material for a dispatch in hand, reporters headed to a telegraph office, in most towns located near political and economic institutions that generated news. For major stories that could be anticipated, such as sporting events, trials, executions, and political conventions, newspapers arranged to have telegraph lines strung to the site of the story. Reporters worked elbow-to-elbow with operators to feed a steady stream of dispatches to the newsroom and public, simulating the immediacy of as-it-happened observations. A reporter who covered many early 20th-century breaking news stories, especially executions, mused about constantly updating a story: “All day long, new leads, inserts, adds at end. All day long a race with life, writing life as other people live it, changing the story as life changes, keeping pace with life but never quite catching up to it” (Doherty, 1941: 116).

To save money and speed transmission, reporters wired skeletonized versions of their stories using abbreviations that presaged text-messages’ streamlined language. Truncating words and phrases had been a common practice from the early days of telegraphy, but the text-heavy demands of transmitting news reports prompted a wire-service manager, Phillips (1897: 228–248), to devise an extensive code expressly for use in telegraphic journalism. Widely adopted, Phillips code speeded transmission by representing common phrases as single words, and words as abbreviations (TA, 1907). In sports reporting, for example, “base on balls” became “bob” for transmission (Harnett, 1997: 112). Some shorthand terms widely used today—for example, SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) and POTUS (President of the United States)—originated with Phillips. Thus prepared, dispatches were handed to operators who transmitted them in an even more elemental code, Morse’s dots and dashes, at about 30 words a minute.

Following the Civil War, metropolitan dailies increasingly resembled complex information-processing factories that rapidly prepared huge quantities of information for their audiences. “Few considerations are so strong in the newspaper world as those of time,” the editorial secretary of the Detroit News observed in 1917. “[I]t is no unusual thing to split the minutes and count the seconds in which a task must be completed. Under such circumstances, the application of efficiency principles was not only logical but necessary” (White, 1917: 2). To process the glut of occurrences flowing from the wires and from reporters on the street, dailies adopted innovations and routines that complemented the transmission speed realized by telegraphy.

The newsrooms of large dailies with leased circuits received dispatches directly, decoded by their own telegraphers; smaller newspapers still picked up dispatches from nearby telegraph offices. In the 1890s, news organizations began instructing their “telegraph operators to learn the manipulation of the typewriter, as it is found that this instrument materially increases the speed of receiving messages” (Electricity, 1891; EW, 1890). Dispatches then went to a telegraph editor, later known as a wire-service editor (Harrington and Frankenberg, 1912: 107–109). Telegraph editors fleshed out skeletonized dispatches by converting Phillips code into complete sentences and filling in the articles, prepositions, and common words typically omitted from transmission. Skilled telegraph editors became remarkably adept at producing a well-rounded story from a bare-bones dispatch, but they always risked muddling facts in the process of reconstituting a story (Shanks, 1867: 517). The telegraph editor in effect wrote much of the story even though he or she had no localized knowledge of the situation conveyed in the report.

Circulation practices and publication schedules also responded to the out-of-town reports flowing ever faster into newsrooms. Many small-city papers publishing two or three times a week began issuing daily editions once telegraph lines reached their town (Scharlott, 1989). Big-city papers already publishing daily began offering issues every few hours or more frequently, with “the later editions being identical with the earlier, except in the addition of the later telegraphic and other news” (North, 1884: 114). Near-continuous publication allowed newspapers to realize economies of scale that helped offset the costs of telegraphic newsgathering and the capital-intensive physical plant (Lee, 1937: 269–281).

The circulation of timely news outside cities changed dramatically through a combination of electrical newsgathering and fast transports. Newspapers synchronized the production of telegraphic reports with the train schedules that carried their papers to outlying markets (FE, 1910a). Cooperation between the Post Office and railways led to the inauguration of special trains that minimized delays between connections and extended the daily news cycle far into cities’ hinterlands. Dubbed “fast-mail trains,” they started service in September 1875, with the inaugural run from New York City carrying 663 sacks of newspapers and another 50,000 individual copies (NYT, 1875; Printers’ Circular, 1875). Postal clerks sorted the mail in transit on specially designed rail cars and deposited it at stations along the route (Nixon, 1894: 91).

Telegraphic news in big-city dailies penetrated even farther into the countryside with the advent of the Post Office’s Rural Free Delivery in the 1890s. Dailies carried by rail reached rural routes that radiated from small towns. Thus, a farmer 200 miles from Kansas City and 12 miles from the rail station could get international news less than half a day old by 1907:

Out in the Middle West the other morning, a dozen miles from town, a farmer rode on a sulky plough turning over brown furrows for the new crop.

“I see by today’s Kansas City papers,” he began as a visitor came alongside, “that there is trouble in Russia again.”

“What do you know about what is in today’s Kansas City papers?”

“Oh, we got them from the carrier an hour ago.” (Harger, 1907: 93)

The routine transmission, production, and dissemination of timely news could be accelerated with shortcuts to expedite the publication of exceptional stories. To speed transmission, telegraph circuits were opened over longer distances so that reports flowed from the site of a story to newsrooms with less processing and retransmission along the way. Urgent wire copy, often sent a paragraph or two at a time in “takes,” moved immediately to typesetters and simultaneously for posting on bulletin boards outside the newspaper office (Journalist, 1892). Presses could be stopped and re-plated with the updated stories. Press operators expecting a steady stream of updates installed a fudge box on the press that enabled them to insert sections of type without casting and installing new plates (Kent, 1970).

Newspapers striving for ever-faster production timed the flow of news to the second. In 1900, the Indianapolis News issued special baseball editions in fierce competition with its rival, the Press. Forty-five seconds after “the last man struck out” in a May 7 Detroit game, the production process had begun about 250 miles away in Indianapolis. The paper hit the streets a little more than 11 minutes later, according to a memo that recorded the time of each step in production. Apparently that was not fast enough. “About 5 or ten seconds after the [news]boy went out of the alley I turned around and a boy offered me the [rival] press baseball edition, showing that they must have beaten us somewhat to enable him to get over to our office by that time,” an editor wrote. ¹ The remainder of the memo outlined ways to further accelerate production and distribution.

Engaging timeliness

Electrified news entered people’s homes, and their lives, decades before electricity itself. From the start, electrified journalism manifested its immediacy through stories’ placement (on pages and public bulletin boards), headings, and structure. Instantaneous transmission from multiple points exposed audiences to a new form of omniscient, synthetic reporting. And presenting news in ever-shorter intervals converted the reports into a stream of sensations that altered recipients’ psychic involvement with information, sometimes exciting audiences.

Newspapers in the 1840s and 1850s typically displayed their dispatches in columns headed by some variation of “By Telegraph.” Before the telegraph, many newspapers carried ads on the front page along with reading material. “But when telegraphic news came to be common but costly, newspapers began to see the importance of attracting the casual reader by means of display on the front page” (O’Brien, 1928: 119). Once post-Civil War dailies routinely filled columns with wired reports, they replaced such headings as “By Telegraph” or “Latest Intelligence” with more subtle markers of timeliness. Datelines, for instance, indicated the origin of news from distant locales along with the day, and often the hour, of transmission, a combination that signified the compression of time and space. Simply using today in a story that came by wire implied simultaneity.

Story structure also highlighted immediacy. In the earliest days of telegraphy, newspapers displayed an unfolding story communicated in dispatches with paragraphs arrayed chronologically that featured the time of receipt down to the minute (Davis, 1921: 44; McPherson, 2004: 5–9). Readers thus followed the story developing much as the newspaper staff did, and witnessed how a single story consolidated discrete impulses of intelligence. As telegraphic reporting matured, many stories reversed chronology, putting the most recent information first in a structure later characterized as an inverted pyramid. Initially, this assured that the outcome of a development reached readers even if the wires failed or the authorities preempted transmission. In the long run, though, the inverted pyramid made sense for efficient editing (simply cut the bottom of a story) and to serve hurried readers who skimmed just the opening paragraphs of the many stories sent by wire (Harrington and Frankenberg, 1912: 27–28). Paradoxically, the chronological and reverse chronological presentations both accentuated timeliness for the audience.

Before the telegraph, people eager to learn the latest news gathered at the post office to await the arrival of out-of-town newspapers. With the advent of electrical communication, the audience looked to the walls outside newspaper offices, and often congregated there for hours to follow constantly updated telegraphic reports. These public displays of telegraphic news started as simple messages posted on bulletin boards (Henkin, 1998: 87–88, 169–170; Wallace, 2012: 55–61). By the end of the century, larger newspapers featured “a blackboard, covering, in some instances, two or three stories of the building, and illuminated at night by many incandescent and arc lamps. A man handy with chalk is employed to write the dispatches on the blackboard as fast as they are received” (ER, 1898; for photo, see Baehr, 1936: 226–227, 258). These public displays evolved into more sophisticated presentations using lights, an early version of today’s illuminated text scrolling around buildings in urban squares.

News posted outside publication offices represented a nexus of production and reception. Delivered to the newsroom as discrete, staccato impulses of intelligence, stories went out to the audience—a crowd—as such. News became a sensation. From the mid-1800s to the advent of broadcasting, election bulletins continually arriving by wire electrified, and often agitated, partisan crowds gathered outside newspaper offices (Matheson, 1967; NYT, 1872). Newspapers posted returns on walls or even projected them onto screens. Resourceful publications such as the New York Herald entertained crowds by projecting drawings of candidates and political cartoons interspersed with election updates (Ralph, 1903: 158–160). The Minneapolis Journal rented a hall and hired vaudeville artists and a band so six thousand people could follow the bulletins “posted as rapidly as received,” with intervals filled “by a capital stage entertainment” (FE, 1900a).

Unlike election coverage, whose storyline usually resolved fairly quickly, stories that spanned several news cycles, such as the lingering death of President James A. Garfield, allowed audiences to contribute their own meaning to the impulses of information circulating nationwide. When an assassin shot Garfield in July 1881, the press responded with telegraphic reporting typical of disaster or battle coverage. But with Garfield on his deathbed for two and half months, “a sort of information feedback loop . . . turned its events into something more” (Menke, 2005: 639). Large and small newspapers with access to the telegraph issued extras with medical bulletins, noting the minute of release, while crowds eyed the news posted outside. “As the president lingered, the multiple daily reports on his condition—his pulse and temperature, ingestions and excretions, responses to his wife’s comments and his doctors’ nutritive enemas—became part of everyday life” (Menke, 2005: 644). Besides carrying dispatches about the reactions of luminaries and the public, the wires also circulated and recirculated stories about the varied meanings people attached to the event—its implications for politics, national unity, modern culture, and even the nature of modern communications.

The rush of telegraphic news, combined with its staccato nature, occasionally created emotionally charged public spectacles that produced a simultaneous behavioral response throughout the nation. In 1910, former heavyweight boxing champion Jim Jeffries, later dubbed “the Great White Hope,” emerged from retirement in a bid to reclaim the title from African-American boxer Jack Johnson. Telegraph companies upgraded the circuits from Reno, Nevada, to accommodate the voluminous dispatches filed by 150 correspondents (T&TA, 1910b). For days before the Fourth of July fight, newspapers around the nation featured reports, many unabashedly racist, from the boxers’ training camps. Special correspondents included such literary luminaries as Jack London. While 20,000 boxing fans witnessed the match live, countless others gathered outside newspaper offices around the country to share the round-by-round bulletins, many wired from ringside (Gilmore, 1975: 39–42; Ward, 2004: 200–214). A San Francisco paper even used dispatches to instantaneously recreate the match with two boxers on a platform outside its building (Burns, 2004). African-American newspapers lacked access to the major wire services, but in some cities their readers found venues where the bulletins were read aloud. News of Johnson’s decisive victory over the “Great White Hope” unleashed violence in at least 50 cities; individuals and mobs burned buildings, assaulted scores of people, and killed at least eight African Americans (Gilmore, 1975: 4, 59–72).

The telegraphic coverage of this event suggests how a rapid succession of emotionally charged impulses primed the emotions of many in the audience, ultimately discharged as violent behavior. During the two weeks before the match, a crescendo of dispatches from the fighters’ camps in Reno filled newspaper columns and bulletin boards; correspondents filed 800,000 words on Western Union lines before the fight, and 200,000 the day of the match, while the Postal Telegraph Company provided additional service (T&TA, 1910a, 1910b). This accumulation of informational impulses excited sensations, creating a feeling of virtual presence if not participation in a faraway event, especially when surrounded by others similarly engaged. Flashed to the nation, news of the outcome precipitated violence—identical collective behavior occurring simultaneously in widely separated communities, a phenomenon now associated with broadcasting and newer communication technologies.

For major stories about war, politics, and international affairs, dispatches arriving simultaneously from many quarters gave readers a seemingly omniscient view of complex developments. A well-situated turn-of-the-century metropolitan daily stood at the apex of a global telegraphic network, a recurrent motif in journalists’ professional discourse and an image that newspapers projected to the public. If served by the AP, a paper selected from the local news gathered by each of the wire service’s several hundred members as well as reports generated by AP bureaus in leading cities. For international news, the AP obtained reports from Britain’s Reuters, France’s Haavas, and Germany’s Wolff, agencies that covered their own countries, their empires, and adjacent regions. Leading dailies also boasted their own special telegraphic correspondents, a few of whom roamed the world.

Newspapers developed this genre of omniscient journalism during the Civil War when platoons of correspondents reporting from the various fronts filed stories for publication in northern papers. Rapid news transmission enabled editors to pair battlefield dispatches from multiple locations with accounts filed from Washington, D.C., that provided the administration’s reaction or that of its political opponents, or both. The Spanish-American War extended this reportorial innovation into the realm of international reporting by capitalizing on undersea cables that ran to Europe, Cuba, and the Philippines. A single day’s budget of news could simultaneously include reports from American and Spanish troops in Cuba, the White House, Spain, European capitals, and the Philippines, along with public reaction from around the United States—all bearing on a single subject (Baker, 1898). Even a modest-sized daily far from East Coast news centers capitalized on the telegraph in this fashion. The front page of the September 13, 1898, Idaho Daily Statesman, published mornings in Boise, carried stories datelined the day before and originating in the principal areas of conflict and decision-making—Madrid, Washington, New York, Manila, Havana, and Puerto Rico. Readers also found secondary developments related to the war on the same page and wired from Detroit, Boston, Charleston, SC; Newport News, VA; and Montauk Point, NY.

Although war reporting inspired this genre of omniscient journalism, it became common in presenting other types of complex stories, notably politics. Major policy statements from Washington warranted a general wire-service story sent to an array of papers, along with a telegraphed version of the official text. To complement the generic wire-service coverage, special correspondents for leading dailies filed dispatches offering insider intelligence about national stories tailored for readers in a particular circulation area (Howard, 1976: 124–135). Elections also inspired omniscient coverage. Beginning around the Civil War, and involving increasingly elaborate telegraphic arrangements thereafter, newspapers obtained continually updated local, state, and national returns and combined them with telegrams from politicos analyzing and commenting on the results, all for posting outside their offices and as the basis for multiple published editions (Littlewood, 1999; Nixon, 1943: 218; Ralph, 1903: 147–152).

Unexpected rapidly developing stories such as natural disasters inspired similar efforts to provide omniscient coverage. When news of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the ensuing fires reached the New York Sun, for instance, the paper supplemented fragmentary reports from the city with news from telegraph offices surrounding the city, from individuals who contacted the Sun, and from government reports issued in Washington, D.C. Sitting in the Sun’s office on the other side of the continent, a reporter familiar with San Francisco synthesized a comprehensive report from bits of news obtained over the wires (O’Brien, 1928: 248–263).

Valuing timeliness by news organizations and workers

Newsworkers’ occupational discourse mirrored and reinforced the continual elevation of timeliness among the values that guided their work. Trade journals—both in telegraphy and journalism—reporters’ memoirs, histories of newspapers, and the how-we-got-the-story genre of works all recounted incidents with timeliness as the central message. Producing timeliness—even faking it—yielded tangible and intangible rewards for journalists, benefits conferred by both their employing organizations and their occupational peers. Protecting the value of timeliness prompted large newspapers to seek legal protection for their ownership of telegraphic news.

News organizations’ instructions about wiring news prescribed the types of stories that warranted rapid transmission by wire and those for which the mails sufficed. “The character of the news must of course determine its mode of transmission,” the New York Tribune reminded its correspondents. ² Such instructions typically specified that news of events—fires, deaths of prominent individuals, major horse and boat races, accidents, political developments, and anything that might move the markets—should come by wire, while the mails served for details and stories about processes. ³ Even as transmission costs dropped and constraints eased in the late 1800s, especially as a result of multiplexing and leased circuits, news organizations still devoted resources partly in proportion to perceptions of a story’s timeliness value in matters of politics, business and, increasingly, the outcome of sporting events. Instructions for correspondents and the values they reflected contributed to “the odd notion that news is made important by the mere fact of its rapid transmission over the wire,” Warner (1881: 57) observed. Warner, a former newspaper editor, offered a remarkably prescient illustration in an 1881 address to the American Social Science Association, for which he later served as president: “A horrible assassination in India is instantly telegraphed; but the progress of such a vast movement as that of the Wahabee revival in Islam, which may change the destiny of great provinces, never gets itself put upon the wires” (60).

In the age of electrical communication, reporters exploited telegraph companies’ first-come, first-sent rule to outpace their rivals. Most simply, reporters who wired their story first scored a beat. Going a step further, a reporter could file a story and then tie up the lines by having the operator continue sending any text to delay rivals’ transmissions. More deviously, a reporter could go to the telegraph office first, commandeer the lines by having the operator start sending text (customarily chapters from the Bible), then gather the news and return to the office to file it; other reporters, who may have obtained the information first, found their dispatches had to wait. The occupational lore of journalism featured approving accounts of such reportorial enterprise in preempting the wires (Journalist, 1888a; Operator, 1882; T&TA, 1916).

Elite reporters valued telegraphic timeliness partly because it institutionalized occupational distinctions and conferred competitive advantages, notably preferred access to information. With a burgeoning Washington, D.C., press corps a decade after the Civil War, correspondents for the self-styled “legitimate press,” mainly metropolitan dailies, sought to distinguish themselves from writers for weeklies and special-interest periodicals, the “illegitimate press,” who mailed reports to their publications. Congress empowered correspondents to develop accreditation standards that determined which reporters gained admission to the Capitol’s press galleries and enjoyed use of its telegraph facilities. From 1879 to 1939, the principal criterion was whether a reporter filed stories by wire to a daily newspaper. This timeliness test barred reporters writing for weekly and monthly publications, including female and African-American correspondents. In fact, the new rules squeezed out 20 women who had previously reported from the galleries (Ritchie, 1991: 109--110, 120--121, 145).

Major news events inspired the trade press to detail the elaborate telegraphic arrangements required to report in a timely fashion. One example: Four months before the 1888 Republican convention in Chicago, the party’s press committee began working with Western Union and newspapers to install circuits for correspondents to send dispatches directly to publications in 30 cities (ER, 1888a). Convention planners even allowed a press operator to transmit from the foot of the speaker’s stand. News of the nomination reached London, via the Atlantic cable, two minutes after the votes were tallied—even before delegates in the convention hall heard the official announcement. By one estimate, telegraph companies transmitted 14.5-million words in connection with the convention (EW, 1888). In a similar fashion, trade journals frequently previewed and reviewed the arrangements for telegraphic reporting of presidential messages, military battles, elections, sporting contests, and disasters (e.g. FE, 1910b; T&TA, 1912c). These accounts invariably highlighted the metrics of timeliness, reducing telegraphic reporting to quantifiable features—miles of circuits, words sent, number of operators, and cost—implying that technical prowess equaled professional accomplishment in journalism (e.g. EW, 1884; T&TA, 1912a).

The status of both telegraph operators and reporters reflected the technical skills needed to produce timely news. Among the ranks of telegraphers, press operators commanded respect from peers, and the highest salaries from employers, for skillfully handling large volumes of text (Gabler, 1988: 51). Press telegraphers fared well in tournaments testing the speed of transmission (Journalist, 1890). News organizations also prized telegraph operators-turned-reporters whose technical skills, mainly knowledge of Morse code, gave them an edge in sending reports (Journalist, 1887). Even better, combining the skills of a stenographer, telegrapher, and reporter enabled a correspondent to quickly record and transmit details (Telegrapher, 1874).

Accounts in trade journals about extraordinary reportorial enterprise reveal how newspapers elevated timeliness above all other journalistic or civic considerations. In a sad but telling example, Denver Times reporters learned in 1900 that a mob planned to forcibly remove an African-American criminal suspect from a train as he was being transported to trial (Perkin, 1959: 396–397). The Fourth Estate (1900b) headlined its story “SWIFT REPORTING . . . . While the Negro was Being Burned at the Stake the Story of the Affair was Being Sent to the Times.” The trade journal applauded the newspaper’s foresight in sending a reporter and “a Western Union Telegraph operator who made connection with the wires and in a few minutes was able to send the first message concerning the story of the lynching to Denver.” Many trade stories lauded reporters for delivering timely stories despite such obstacles as downed wires, prickly telegraph censors in war zones, and cutthroat competition (e.g. ER, 1888b).

Early reporting textbooks ranked timeliness as first among equals in news values. The Reporter’s Manual, published in 1904, opens with a preface by a prominent editor emphasizing the importance of honoring sources’ confidences and reporting truthfully. Much of the book, though, provided concrete advice on gathering news quickly and beating the competition. One tip for reporters awaiting trial verdicts (guilty, not guilty, or hung jury):

With one, two or three motions of a handkerchief in the window of the court-room to a confederate across the street you could release the proper [pre-written] bulletin, catch the last edition, and then beam upon your competitors as they struggled through the crowd to file their tardy stories. (Gavit, 1904: 20)

On the most elemental level, the building blocks of professional discourse—words expressing the qualities of work—reveal the pervasive influence of timeliness in the production of news. ⁴ Wire service, of course, described a newsgathering institution that transmitted stories telegraphically; small newspapers that could not afford full wire service but still wanted timely news settled on a pony service, “a brief summary of news obtained from a press association.” Add, take, and lead denoted stories transmitted by wire in discrete chunks to update details already in hand; pick up indicated where fresh information should be inserted in a story. Scoop and beat, used both as nouns and verbs, underscored the occupational and organizational competition involved in producing timeliness. When newspapers went to press expecting more timely copy later, they printed a space-holding filler in an early edition, a bogus, replacing it with the updated news when it arrived. Newsrooms referred to a feature story as a mailer, equating the slower mode of transmission with low timeliness value. Professional argot for stories transmitted well before publication, advance or release copy—obituaries, presidential addresses, and other articles that remained in newsroom files until the telegraph signaled release—reflected the often-manufactured nature of timeliness. Bulletin and flash represented the telegraphic precursors of today’s breaking news and this just in.

Advertisements in trade publications also reinforced the valuation of timeliness. Rarely seen by newspaper readers, trade ads placed by newspapers designed to solicit advertising also served as benchmarks for publications across the nation to compare one another on measures of timeliness as a marker of industrial achievement. The Philadelphia Call “Publishes editions EVERY HOUR from 12 o’clock noon, until 4.30 o’clock p.m., thus enabling it to gather ALL THE LATEST NEWS of the day,” the paper’s full-page ad boasted in a national directory of periodicals (N. W. Ayer & Sons, 1898: 1383). Even equipment manufacturers tapped into this value. The full-page ad for “One-Set Automatic Suction Rollers,” used on printing presses, highlighted speed in its text and visual elements: “A Scoop! And on the Street First by Thirty Minutes” (Editor & Publisher, 1919).

The verisimilitude or even outright fabrication of timeliness indicated that journalists valued this quality to engage audiences. Cooperating with powerful sources, the press sometimes published seemingly breaking news whose time of publication had been fixed by terms of an embargo, a practice that originated before the Civil War (Marbut, 1971: 83; TA, 1901a). Stories represented as timely telegraphic news sometimes were not timely, not sent by telegraph, or not even news. “Many newspapers habitually ‘raise dates’ on . . . mail correspondence, thinking to give the impression that the story was written yesterday and came by telegraph when it did not,” according to one of the first journalism ethicists (Allen, 1920: 4). During the Civil War, correspondents complained that stories they mailed or sent by train appeared in their papers’ telegraphic news columns. A variation on that practice involved fleshing out a bare-bones dispatch with background information that the telegraph editor had gleaned from mail exchanges. Telegraph editors who “read exchanges carefully . . . can make a five-word bulletin look like a 500-word ‘special,’” an editor advised (FE, 1903). Small-town newspapers engaged in the most widespread practice of simulating timeliness when they published as telegraphic news stories that had been typeset at distant printing plants and then, as boilerplate, shipped by railway express to the publication (Blythe, 1912: 77; Johnson, 1894).

The cachet associated with telegraphic news did not escape the notice of advertisers. In the late 1800s, advertisers paid a premium to have their reading notices—product placements masquerading as articles—inserted as telegraphic news to capitalize on the presumably engaged readership of those columns (Lawson, 1993: 32–35, 40, 42, 165n33). Cleveland dailies in 1911 charged 50 to 100% more for inserting a reading notice in the telegraphic columns than among general news items (Nelson Chesman & Co., 1911: 202–203).

The news industry’s ultimate valuation of timeliness came in the successful campaign to win legal recognition for this intangible attribute as property. Since 1792, if not before, editors had regarded news obtained through postal exchanges as a public resource available to other papers for reuse without permission. Sending news by telegraph, in contrast, converted it into quasi-property (Banner, 2011: 73–93). At first, clever ruses to intercept and pilfer a rival’s telegraphic transmission were regarded more as reportorial enterprise than as a basis for recrimination or litigation (e.g. Telegrapher, 1867). By the late 1800s, however, large news organizations looked to legislatures and the courts for protection of dispatches as property (Epstein, 1992). A 25-year campaign by the AP culminated in International News Service v. Associated Press (258 U.S. 215 [1918]) in which the Supreme Court acknowledged that the value of telegraphic news derived not from the originality of expression, the basis of copyright claims, but from the timeliness of transmission. The misappropriation doctrine launched by this ruling reified the norms of the large papers that constituted the AP’s membership, and has been rediscovered as a precedent for today’s legal disputes over the widespread copying of breaking news posted on websites.

Valuing timeliness in public

The marketing of telegraphic reports and the metatexts that accompanied stories conveyed the importance of timeliness and the reconfiguration of time and space wrought by electrical communication. With timely reports in hand, newspaper readers could feel empowered by their knowledge of distant affairs and even their ability to react to or participate in some of them. Improvements in absolute timeliness, however, masked critical differences in relative timeliness. Disparities in timeliness for economic decision-making prompted the passage of laws and calls for structural changes in telegraphy that would equalize access to intelligence.

Newspaper marketing tutored readers and potential subscribers about the variety, volume, and value of timely news. When telegraph lines first reached a city, newspapers invariably directed readers’ attention to the timeliness of their dispatches. “Our readers were no doubt astonished yesterday to find Cleveland news up to 12½ and i a.m. in the Commercial of the same morning,” the Cincinnati Commercial (1847) boasted. “Under our telegraphic head we gave yesterday news from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, etc., up to i o’clock a.m.” Once timely news became commonplace in competitive markets, newspapers touted the extent of their telegraphic services in promotional materials. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s 1880s’ four-page handbill soliciting subscriptions, How to Get Eight Pages or Fifty-Six Columns of the Latest News from All over the World, extolled the paper’s rich telegraphic coverage more than any other feature. ⁵ In addition to wire-service coverage and cable news (international reports that came by undersea telegraphs), the Post-Dispatch had a “Special Leased Wire from New York, over which it receives between 5,000 and 10,000 words of Special Telegraphic News” a day. Leased wires distinguished newspapers from competitors that relied on standardized wire-service reports.

Almost any journalistic endeavor, from the spectacular to the mundane, provided opportunities to remind readers about the immediacy of news. In a spectacular albeit manufactured accomplishment, the New York Times in 1911 telegraphed “This message sent around the world” from its office to its office in 16 minutes and 30 seconds over 28,613 miles of undersea cables and landlines (NYT, 1911). In a less dramatic but more typical fashion, the Denver Times detailed for its readers all the steps involved—each timed to the minute for a total of 15 minutes—in transmitting and publishing a story from Washington, D.C. (Journalist, 1893). Similarly, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat boasted in 1889 that just 20 minutes after former Confederate President Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, it had the news ready for fast-mail trains that carried papers to the countryside (Clayton, 1969: 172). Even a mundane letter from a North Dakota paper dunning subscribers in arrears emphasized that they would soon lose access to timely wire-service dispatches that “Nearly every day brings some big news which you will want to know about and which is vital to your future prosperity.” ⁶

Journalistic reports about weather forecasts and disasters illustrate telegraphy’s effects on the absolute timeliness of news and its tangible value to readers. The utility of weather forecasts improved dramatically when telegraph companies began transmitting meteorological observations from multiple locations to Washington, D.C., in 1870. Meteorological bureaus then synthesized the data and prepared forecasts for distribution to the nation by wire in time for publication in newspapers before weather systems reached most communities (Fleming, 1990: 141–162; Monmonier, 1989: 112–115). Farmers, shippers, and others directly affected by the weather adjusted their activities based on this timely intelligence. A common motif in stories about severe weather featured details about the enterprise required to route around breaks in the communication network. When an 1888 snowstorm knocked out lines between Boston and New York, for instance, the press rerouted dispatches through London. “What queer days these be . . . when we drive 6,000 miles or more for the news that is almost at our doors, and project it by the lightning . . . to the Land’s End and London, and thence back again . . . to imprisoned New York!,” the New York Evening Sun mused (quoted in ER, 1888b; see also Journalist, 1891). For observant readers, such metatexts provided glimpses into the often-circuitous flow of information in a network society.

Similarly, telegraphic reports about local disasters became national stories fast enough for readers to influence outcomes. Stories about the great Chicago fire of 1871 filled telegraphic news columns throughout the nation and prompted outpourings of aid that reached victims in time to ameliorate their plight (Pauly, 1984). “While the devastation is in progress the tidings are spread far and wide, [and] the sympathy of the world is aroused,” the Telegrapher (1872) observed about responses to disasters in an age of electrical communication. The 1889 Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania, which killed 2,029 people, brought one hundred correspondents to the small city. Their dramatic dispatches aroused the public’s emotions and justified the American Red Cross’s first major peacetime relief effort (Jones, 2012: 37, 47–48).

Organized interests—mainly businesses and political activists—recognized the value of monitoring the daily or hourly news reports of policy-making in the nation’s capital. Groups far outside Washington, D.C., tracked critical congressional deliberations and then pressured lawmakers by telegram, and later the telephone, to influence the terms of legislation before they had time to gel. “It is the advantage of the telegraph that it gives you the news before circumstances have had time to alter,” a prominent editor observed a few years after the Civil War (Journal of the Telegraph, 1869: 30). Telegraphic newsgathering, high-speed printing, and rapid newspaper distribution combined to influence public opinion about developments in Washington; it now materialized nationwide fast enough to complicate political and diplomatic decision-making back in the nation’s capital (Britton, 2007; Hildebrand, 1981). To temper the volatility of public opinion in the age of electrical communication, the federal government engaged in its first censorship of specific news reports domestically during the Civil War (Blondheim, 2002: 876–878) and internationally during the Spanish-American War (Sumpter, 1999), in both instances by regulating the flow of telegraphic news. Tellingly, these censorship efforts aimed to delay news, reducing its timeliness, rather than suppressing it outright.

The timeliness of news had long figured in the daily economic decision-making of those directly involved in commerce and finance. With the expansion of the market economy in the mid-1800s, and the concomitant rise of a mass press, newspapers’ tracking of daily activities reflected the cycles of trade and business, a trend powerfully abetted by the telegraph at midcentury (Carey, 1986: 164). Newspapers touted their business coverage, implying if not stating that their columns carried timely economic intelligence that anyone could use. By 1860, “the late afternoon dailies of major centers carried same-day market reports from other major centers” (Pred, 1980: 147). A decade later, half the reports the New York Associated Press (NYAP) wired its Midwestern clients consisted of “eastern market news and quotations” (Blondheim, 1994: 173). Newspapers’ evening editions outstripped morning papers in part because the telegraph brought same-day business intelligence (Lee, 1937: 278–279). “Reports of the transactions on the Produce, Cotton, Metal, Real Estate, and other exchanges during the closing minutes are . . . laid before the readers within a very short time after each statement is made,” the Journalist (1888b: 5) boasted. Some afternoon dailies styled their late-day paper the “Wall Street edition” (Lefèvre, 1904).

Although few newspaper readers needed constantly updated economic intelligence in their daily decision-making, the press nonetheless provided glimpses into the economic relations that animated a national market. Newspapers increasingly reported data distributed by wire in tabular form, replacing the old text-heavy shipping news of the pretelegraphic era. “Tabulation reformulated the listing of commercial information and gave it predictability and authority: the newspaper offered an organized and simplified account of an abundant and complex world,” according to Barnhurst and Nerone (2001: 73). Casual investors could follow fluctuations in prices, reported by telegraph from geographically dispersed markets, and read the contextual news that moved markets, which also arrived by wire. At the extreme, these nonprofessional investors placed their bets in “bucket shops,” rooms equipped with a telegraph ticker where they bought and sold against other nonprofessionals in the course of a day (Hochfelder, 2012: 121–137). Sports gambling also thrived in such environments, propelled by data available in newspapers’ telegraphic dispatches and from publicly situated tickers.

The widespread recognition of timely news’ value in economic decision-making prompted the adoption of rules establishing the order of telegraphic transmission. Because the first telegraph lines could carry only one message at a time, order of transmission presented opportunities to profit from the earliest knowledge about economic developments in distant markets. Terms of service and laws furnished a short-term solution by giving the press priority in transmitting reports. Many early telegraph companies’ bylaws, and some of the first state laws governing electric communication, moved reporters to the front of the queue: Operators transmitted press dispatches before private messages (Nonnenmacher, 1996: 70–79). As one of the first treatises on telegraph law explained, the public prized dispatches about business because “they exert a vast and controlling influence over the commercial and monetary affairs of the world,” while even “those of a political character . . . affect the social and industrial interests of society” (Scott and Jarnagin, 1868: 161). Priority transmission, plus newspapers’ rapid production schedules, narrowed the timeliness gap between public and private access to market data until leased wires opened high-speed circuits for well-placed clients. With leased wires, private information vendors transmitted intelligence over private circuits, often in advance of the same data sent by the press for the public (TA, 1901b).

Public debates about the structure of the telegraph industry also highlighted concerns about the value of timeliness in an industrial society. After the Civil War, the attentive public became aware of the overlapping operations of three New York-based networks—telecommunication, news, and business, usually personified as Western Union, the Associated Press (the NYAP and its successors), and Wall Street—that could manipulate the timeliness of nationally distributed information to serve their backers’ interests (Nalbach, 2003). This criticism propelled a movement, often associated with Populists and Progressives from the 1880s to 1920, to nationalize private firms or operate a public wired network under the auspices of the Post Office Department (Hochfelder, 2012: 32–72). Although the movement never achieved its goal, it inspired congressional debates and muckraking articles that reminded the public of disparities in timeliness and its consequences for decision-making, especially in economic matters.

Press claims about the value of its timely economic news in empowering newspaper readers thus glossed over the structural and contractual arrangements that perpetuated a public–private timeliness gap. Journalistic institutions themselves played both sides of the public–private divide. In the 1870s, the NYAP gathered European business news for distribution by Western Union to newspapers around the country. Although the NYAP ostensibly served the public, its contract with Western Union gave the telegraph company’s Commercial News Department exclusive use of the market-moving data for 30 minutes; it, in turn, subcontracted with another financial telegraphic service for exclusive use of NYAP’s European economic data for 15 minutes, a court decision revealed (Kiernan, 1876). These contracts left the newspaper-reading public third in line as recipients of the wire-service’s market-moving dispatches.

Conclusion

Telegraphy provided the technological basis for the development of journalism’s culture of timeliness that extended into broadcasting and today’s 24/7 news media. In the era of postal newsgathering, important out-of-town news took days to reach a paper; by telegraph, it arrived within hours or minutes—sometimes even while major stories were unfolding. After 1920, radio could immediately deliver news directly to countless households if newscasters arranged for audio pickups from the site of a story and stations were tied into networks. More often, though, radio and even television stations obtained the bulk of their national reports by wire for decades after the advent of broadcasting (the phrase “rip and read” denoted broadcast copy delivered by teletype). Well into the 1960s, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite honored both the legacy and continuing importance of telegraphic news transmission by opening the broadcast with the soundscape of a clattering teletype.

Timeliness achieved its central place in the culture of American journalism because it straddled two conceptions of communication—communication as the transmission of data and communication as storytelling. Telegraphy’s speed catalyzed both.

The first generation of telegraphic journalism treated news that came by wire as data inputs, akin to the market intelligence prized by arbitrageurs. As such, timeliness enhanced decision-making, initially about economic matters but gradually extending into other realms as well. Like other businesses, news organizations and workers maneuvered to gain timeliness advantages by outpacing their competitors. Once the telegraph network matured in the late 1800s, rapid transmission fostered a new genre of journalism, omniscient reporting, not unlike today’s cable news programs featuring an anchor who debriefs reporters shown onscreen stationed at various sites. Newsrooms simultaneously obtained intelligence from multiple locations and synthesized a picture of the world beyond their readers’ horizons. The press encouraged readers to believe—sometimes justifiably, but often not—that the immediacy of this news enhanced decision-making and participation in public affairs. In many cases, though, the much-vaunted timeliness of publicly available news masked the persistent advantages of those with access to private communication channels.

The press has always engaged in storytelling, but the timeliness of telegraphic news altered the audience’s involvement with accounts found in newspaper columns. Electrified news made events common to many people at nearly the same moment in a manner that encouraged the construction of meaning by the individuals and crowds that followed it. Telegraphic reports formed the basis for the first nationwide media spectacles, with countless eyes simultaneously fixed on the textual representation of a single event. News circulated fast enough for reactions around the nation to become part of the story itself. Rendering news as impulses through production and delivery also accentuated its sensationistic qualities apart from any sensational content, especially unfolding developments reported in a staccato stream that culminated in an election, battle, or sporting event. If consumed in public, such news often further electrified an already-charged atmosphere.