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My grandfather worked as a typesetter for a Dallas newspaper for many years. Because of my interest in writing and taking journalism in high school and college, we shared time talking about newspapers and how they were published. One of his first jobs as a young boy was delivering newspapers in Victoria, Texas where his father was a doctor. In writing a novel loosely based on his life, I did research about newspapers which I found to be interesting.

 Even though daily newspapers are dwindling today, they were once the main source of news for those who were literate and could afford the price. Printing in colonial America was expensive with small circulations. No editor could afford to put more than one or two issues a week. Because of the expense of printing and distributing the paper, many of the common folks in town were excluded. Even though Americans tended to be literate, they simply didn’t have the money to buy newspapers. Thus, the circulation remained small.

One of the early "newspaper" sheets circa 1690.

In spite of the expense, early newspapers had a profound influence on the early years of our federal government. Articles, essays, and editorials were in abundance and the organs for political faction. Many politicians became connected to specific newspapers.

Noah Webster, before publishing the first American dictionary, started the first daily newspaper in 1783 in New York City named the American Minerva. Essentially, it was an organ of the Federalist Party. Although in operation for only a few years, it influenced and inspired the establishment of later newspapers.

Eight years later, Alexander Hamilton founded the Post, and it also had some political affiliation. At the time, the newspaper became the means for politicians to communicate with their constituents. The papers carried accounts of newsworthy events as well as letters from the people who voiced their opinions concerning political matters.

John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson all had political campaigns which played out on the pages of newspapers. This type of political action continued well into the 1820’s.

As newspapers began a transformation in the 1830’s, they turned to publishing news of current events, local happenings, and non-partisan editorials and essays. The price also went down which allowed for the working class and even new immigrants to buy them. Now everyone could afford the paper and reading the news every morning became a routine in many households across the country.

Some of the great names in the industry as it grew included Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett, pictured above, of the New York Herald. They both possessed strong personalities and controversial opinions as expressed in their respective newspapers.

Another editor, William Cullen Bryant, edited the New York Evening Post even though people knew him better as a poet. The New York Times began publishing in 1851 with Henry J. Raymond at the helm. Raymond worked under Greeley, and the newspaper was considered an upstart without any strong political connection.

Newspaper Press Circa 1865

As the nation grew, underwent wars, and invented new technologies, the newspapers grew as well. With the invention of the linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler, the papers could publish larger editions with more pages and more news of interest to more people such as news about sporting events.

In the late 1880s Joseph Pulitzer, a successful publisher from St. Louis, bought a paper in New York City. Pulitzer transformed the business of print news by focusing on events that would appeal to common people. He focused on crime stories and other sensational subjects in New York World. The vivid headlines, produced by a staff of specialized editors, pulled in readers.

Pulitzer met with great success in New York, but in the mid 1890’s, a competitor came into the picture. William Randolph Hearst, already the publisher of a San Francisco newspaper, moved to New York City and purchased the New York Journal.

From the competition between the two men came a circulation war, the likes of which had not been seen before. There had been competitive publishers before, of course, but nothing like this. The sensationalism of the competition became known as Yellow Journalism.

In the 19^th and early to late 20^th Century, our nation witnessed a rise in newspaper circulation. Newspapers were delivered to the home, sold at newsstands or hawked by newsboys on city streets. 

Now, in the 21^st century, we see its decline. People now depend on electronic media to give them up-to-date news about events around the world. With the news flashes available on cell phones and computers, even the news on TV may seem old.

Most Americans today are in a rush for everything, and getting the news as soon as it happens is more appealing than reading through various sections in a daily newspaper. With rising costs and smaller editions, the newspapers of today are becoming less and less a necessity of our daily lives.

How much of a part does a newspaper play in your daily life? Do you prefer a printed version or electronic?

It's getting to be rodeo time here in Houston, and my newest release features a barrel-racing heroine. 

Kylee is the youngest of the Danner clan and drops out of college to barrel race full-time and spend more time with her rodeo sweetheart, Jesse Martin. Connor Morris, known as Jesse Martin on the rodeo circuit, is in love with Kylee, but he is keeping his true identity from her for now. When her brothers discover Jesse Martin is an ex-con on parole, they jump in and decide Kylee must break off the relationship. Kylee can’t believe Jesse is what they say, but when he doesn’t show up at the rodeo where they’re both competing, she grows suspicious. When the truth of his identity as Connor Morris is revealed in a news item on television, it is even more shocking to Kylee. His retired movie queen mother has had a heart attack and is at a hospital in Denver. He is shown there with a woman claiming to be his fiancée, and she calls him Connor Morris, son of Hal Morris, who was running for U.S. Senator from Colorado. Jesse must now not only gain back Kylee’s love and trust, he must also convince her father and brothers that he loves Kylee and the TV story was a big mix-up. 

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at:  www.marthawrogers.com, Twitter:  @martharogers2                Facebook: Martha Rogers Author

Nellie Bly

Adventurous and Daring!

by Martha Rogers
In high school, I was on the newspaper staff and loved my journalism class. In college, I took more journalism courses to improve my writing skills and journalistic ability.

One of the women we studied was Nellie Bly, a pioneer in journalism and what we might call today an “investigative” reporter.

She was born as Elizabeth Cochran on May 4, 1864, in Cochran’s Mills Pennsylvania. She began her career in 1880 at the age of sixteen, writing columns for women on things pertaining to the home, gardening, society and child rearing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. As was customary, she used a pen name for her writing. She chose Nelly Bly from the Stephen Foster Song, but it was misspelled in the paper as Nellie and stayed that way. Her editor was so impressed by her writing that she was able to convince him to begin investigating new topics such as divorce and its effect on women. She even went to Mexico for six months as a special correspondent.

From Pittsburgh, she moved on to New York around 1887 as Nellie Bly and worked on assignments at the New York World, John Pulitzer’s flagship newspaper.

Several events as a reporter there cause her to stand out as a journalist. The first was her assignment to go undercover as a mental patient. She so impressed the editors that they gave her a top assignment. According to Nellie, “I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein.”

Nellie found getting committed to the asylum to be rather easy. She used the name Bly Brown to take a room at a cheap boarding house where she questioned and imitated the women who seemed the most insane to her. Sure enough, she was deemed insane, and the matron of the house had Nellie escorted by the police to the Essex Market Police where a rather impatient judge name Duffy declared her to be insane. He ordered her to the insane ward at Bellevue Hospital, and a few days later, she boarded a ferry for the island in the company of unwashed and uncomprehending women. One of the attendants told her that once she got to that place, she’d never get out of it.

She spent a number of days Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum and took careful notes of both her own experiences and those of other inmates. She painted such a dire picture of the mistreatment of inmates and how they experienced a host of abusive treatment from cold baths to confinement in small, locked rooms infested by vermin.

She dropped her act of acting crazy and tried to present herself as mentally competent. That went nowhere until the newspaper sent an attorney to arrange for her release. On Sunday, October 9, 1887, the World ran the first installment of her story, and Bly became an overnight sensation. The psychiatrists who had diagnosed her to begin with, apologized profusely, but it didn’t stop the reporting.

One of her quotes from her notes:

A grand jury was impaneled to investigate the abuses and poor treatment reported by Nellie. What she discovered became an embarrassment to the city aldermen, and they quickly appropriated a million dollars a year to correct the abuses Bly exposed. About one month after the expose hit, many of the problems she reported were improved. Better living and sanitary conditions were among them as well as more nourishing meals. Even the most abusive nurses and physicians were fired and replaced.

She later published a book based on her experiences. Ten Days in a Mad-House was a slim book but

remains a classic in the annals of psychiatry and warns against inhumane treatment of the mentally ill.

Another major event in her career occurred when she broke the record set by Jules Verne’s fictional Phineas Fogg in the novel, Around the World in 80 Days. In 1889, it was the fastest journey in her era and she made it around the world in seventy-two days. She became famous for it, and it was widely reported around the world.

Nellie went from one journalistic success to the next with a series of dispatches from the Eastern Front during WWI and her reports on the Women’s suffrage movement.

Reporting wasn’t her only world. In 1895 she married an elderly Robert Seaman, a wealthy man who ran the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. Due to his failing health, she retired from journalism to take over the reins of his company. He died in 1904, but carried on with the company.

Nellie Bly died at the age of 57 in 1922. Many have wondered what triumphs and good deeds this woman could have accomplished if she’d lived longer. She will long be remembered as the woman who helped change the plight of the mentally ill. Sadly, the treatment of the mentally ill still needs a great deal of attention. 


Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at: www.marthawrogers.com,

Twitter: @martharogers2 Facebook: Martha Rogers Author