The Creation of the News Network

The newspaper, it is one of the many things that we as American's take for granted everyday. In our society we are able to just flip open our copy of the Daily News, New York Times or Newsday that we pick up on our way to work or class and be instanty informed about what is going on around us. Now how many of us have actually opened a newspaper and realized its value, or wonder where exactly it came from? Probably not many of us. In Chapter 3 of Paul Starr's book, he informs us of the Creation of the News Network, a network that proves itself all too valuable in todays society.

Newspapers of today were not the same from the original papers. They did not start out national or even citywide. According to Starr " ..in scores of communities Americans developed little newspapers to relay important political news to their readers, to support their friends and attack their enemies, and to argue for their view of the world". As result, newspapers became even more popular and Starr states that " the printer's single most important business was typically a newspaper." He even goes on to state how communities that were without newspapers would buy themselves a certain number of subscriptions and that between the years of 1790 and 1835 the number of newspapers climbed from 106 to 1,258. It is truly amazing to see just how much impact the newspaper that we all take as an everyday normality, had on people when it was first introduced into society.