NewsBeat

May 2023 NewsBeat 7 coasts feared that the morally dubious sin-city newspapers would infiltrate their towns. "The poisoned sentiments of the cities," warned Rep. Abraham Venable of Virginia, "concentrated in their papers, with all the aggravations of such a moral and political cesspool, will invade the simple, pure, con- servative atmosphere of the country, and meeting with no antidote in a rural press, will contaminate and ultimately destroy that purity of sentiment and of purpose, which is the only true conservatism." An- other lawmaker said that this system would "annihilate at least one half of our village newspapers." But, notably, these skeptics did not urge curtailing the subsidy. Instead, the Jack- sonian Democrats that represented more agrarian areas pushed for a second subsi- dy — giving an extra break to help sustain local publishers. In 1845, Congress agreed that newspapers would be free if they were delivered within 30 miles of the office of publication. Congress was not done subsidizing the newspaper industry. Congress allowed newspapers to exchange papers with each other for free. That was a big deal since most newspapers devoted many column inches to stories clipped from others. It was their version of a wire service. Here, according to Kielbowciz, is how the people in Jefferson City, Missouri learned about the death of President William Henry Harri- son in 1841: "A letter reporting Harrison's death on April 4 was mailed to an editor in Cincinnati who informed a paper in Lou- isville, Kentucky. A copy of the Louisville paper was mailed to St. Louis. In return, the St. Louis press copied the stories. Extra were issued, some of which were sent to Jefferson City by steamer. The Jefferson Inquirer finally published the story on April 15 — eleven days after the event." The government was, in effect, lower- ing the cost of filling the newspapers with news. In 1812, frontier papers included seven times as much news borrowed from other papers as produced locally. Of 17,279 papers mailed from Philadelphia, 57 per- cent were going to other newspaper editors. Finally, when the postal service in the 1830s established a system of express mail routes — including some support for the Pony Express — they made a point of saying "newspaper slips" — summaries of newspapers' key stories — would ride for free. Yes, those Pony Express riders were laboring under an unfunded government mandate, requiring that some news get carried for free. The subsidy did not fade away with the founders. In 1967, the Postal Service was still spending about $400 million a year, or about $3.5 billion of today's dollars, to sub- sidize magazines and periodicals, estimat- ed Professor Geoffrey Cowan of the Univer- sity of Southern California. After that, the size declined in part because fewer news- papers relied on the mails but also because Congress decided that the Postal Service should break even, prompting a series of rate increases for periodical press. This is not to say there should be a $40 billion postal subsidy. We mostly do not have our news mailed to us anymore (though it is insane to be raising postal rates on newspapers right now). It might be tempting to think that since the founders were subsidizing the distribu- tion of newspapers, we, too, should focus on the same issue, now that local media is suffering. To some extent we are: While Congress decided not to support local jour- nalism at all in 2022, it did approve more than $100 billion in subsidies for broad- band from 2020-2022. But the problems facing the news media today are different than those faced in the early 1800s. Then, the issue was the cost of carrying a newspaper in dusty saddle bags from hither to yon. Now, the Internet has made the cost of distribution almost zero — while local news creation has collapsed. Some 1,800 communities have no local news source and thousands more have A baggage clerk loads newspapers onto a bus at Knoxville, Tennessee. The newspapers were le at small towns along the way. Esther Bubley 1943 photo from the Library of Congress.

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