Good day, all!
I’m researching an item from the January 3, 1896 Custer County [Nebraska] Chief. It looks like something that came off the wire services. Was the Associated Press the only news agency that this would have come from at that time? Further, are there any good books that would address this question authoritatively?
Thanks!
Out of curiosity(and possibly helping you), what was the article about? Specifically, names, etc. I subscribe to many paid databases of newspapers from the period. I’d be glad to check out the info and see if it was from another newspaper, AP, etc.
Newspapers quite often ran stories from other newspapers, with and without attribution to the source.
I gave up and I’m going with “it depends.” You can pretty much assume that any out of town news in any but a handful of papers in the 19th century was from another paper. That could have come from a formalized news agency or it could be an arrangement with a particular paper or an informal sharing arrangement. Some were flat-out stolen. There certainly were rivals to AP by then. It had been around for 50 years. It wasn’t until the 20th century that papers consistently labeled the origin of stories, though.
Here’s a good-looking source, judging from the table of contents. The International Distribution of News, by Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb. You’d have to find it offline, though.
Thanks, samclem!
The following is a transcript from the notice cited in the OP. I’m not sure about punctuation owing to the poor quality of the copy I have. Bolding original.
I first encountered this in a blog entry by a curator at the Nebraska State Historical Society who had inexplicably moved the events to Dawes County, Nebraska. My first impression was that this was the work of well-known prankster John G. Maher, but finding the original set in Pierre, SD (which is over 200 miles from Dawes County, NE) put that to rest. It’s probably a hoax story, possibly predicated on real sightings of “cattle mutilations”; I imagine these befuddled 1890s ranchers as much as they mystified their descendants in the 1970s. That’s speculation, though.
The story is flanked by a notice about a countess suing one of the Vanderbilts for $5.00, along with an account of a young widow in Texas sneaking stuff past customs agents in “her balloon sleeves”. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism.
Thanks again!
I found the same story on the same day in the Washington KS Republican, the Lead SD Daily Call, and the Lincoln NE Herald and flanked by the same stories in the same order.
Thanks, Expanso! What database was that?
FWIW, newspapers.com has it in the Alexandria Gazette from Alexandria, Virginia about six weeks earlier (November 14, 1895).
ETA: Ditto the Blackfoot, Idaho paper of February 01, 1896. I wonder what news service this was?
Hey, I’ve been keeping my weight down! Haven’t gained a pound in years.
I also looked at newspapers.com. A spread of time for the print date is common for feature stories. I’ve found them across more than a year.
Since the stories include both foreign and national news my guess is that it was from AP, as the AP contacted with Reuters for foreign news in the 1890s and it seems unlikely that a similar pairing could be easily gotten elsewhere.
That was my first impression also. I didn’t think AP did this kind of “low” journalism, but I haven’t researched the matter. I have a couple of books coming in - perhaps they’ll clear it up. Thanks, Exapno! Got it right this time, eh?
I’m not sure why you consider feature stories “low” journalism. They were popular and omnipresent and comprised more than half of any day’s newspaper, the vast majority of which were syndicated rather than house-written.
Take the Pittsburg Daily Tribune I cited. Every single story on the front page is from a wire service. That includes “A Pastry Cook’s Luck” and “Comfortable People” The paper has eight pages and I doubt that 8 columns in total are local, and not all of that was “high” news by your definition.
Papers expanded (see what I did there? :)) to fill space around advertisements. Most of that space went to stuff people actually wanted to read, i.e. features.
I’m not sure I’d categorize the three stories above (Baroness sues Vanderbilt for $5.00, vampire runs loose in South Dakota, upper-class widow and her child smuggle opium in poofy sleeves) as “features”. All three sound like they were likely made up; collectively they don’t pass the sniff test. The Custer County Chief that I originally found the story in had half a page dedicated to serial fiction, a neat little travellogue about a trip from Nebraska through the Southeast, and an in-depth story about local goings-on in Wisconsin. Those I would call features on the AP level. The two columns we’re talking about seem more like tabloid material.
But now we’re veering into IMHO territory. If the AP distributed them, that’s darned interesting regardless.
Features are any articles that aren’t hard news. It’s of course possible that some of them weren’t absolutely true. Then, as today, many articles were simply reprinted from press releases. But stories, i.e. fiction, were clearly marked and separate.
If you search for Baroness Blanche de Berzsenyl you’ll find other stories about her suit entirely unrelated to this one.
You sound like you’ve never read any 19th century newspapers and are judging them on some standard that I can’t understand. These stories are exactly what you would expect to find in papers of the day. I’ve read thousands from the earliest days on.
Tabloids didn’t come out of nowhere. When they did come around, which wouldn’t be for another decade, they merely concentrated certain types of stories and used larger headlines.
What is your issue here?
I guess I don’t have one, mate. You’re right - most of my newspaper reading has been post-1900, and usually focused on specific stories rather than the paper as a whole. Reading side notes and ads has always been interesting - I’ve laughed out loud at how many ads there are for beer-making ingredients in 1920s papers - but I’m not experienced in stories like this. Please forgive my ignorance, and thank you for the benefit of your experience.
ETA: And I see now that the amount the Baroness was seeking was $500, not $5.
The Associated Press was (and still is AFAIK) a member cooperative. Relatively few reporters actually are employed by the AP - it relies on local members to contribute local stories.
So, if the newspaper in Pierre, SD ran a story that was inaccurate, exaggerated or completely made up, and an AP regional editor didn’t question it too closely and put it in “the feed,” and other newspapers took the first X number of stories from the feed to fill their space, that’s how it got spread.
Given that Expano found the same stories running in the same order on the same date in three papers in different states, I’d put strong money on that being exactly what happened.
Could be. Local news writers pulled stuff like that from time to time. The Jacko hoax is one of my favorites.
Another likely scenario: Louise Pound’s biograhical essay on prankster John G. Maher explains that the New York Herald would often cable Maher asking for any stories out of the area, in this case Northwest Nebraska right around Fort Robinson. To keep things lively, Maher would often embellish events (his reports on the Ghost Dance are hard to read in the wake of Wounded Knee, though Pound absolves him of any real blame) or just make things up (such as the British government’s plans to attack mostly-Irish O’Neill, NE as a reprisal against the Fenian League). I can see a Maher counterpart in Pierre filing this story with the *Herald *or another paper in the East where news of the wild west was still novel. The story would be picked up as a block of short features distributed by AP (the *Herald *was a founding member of its predecessor organization, the General News Association of New York), et voila. I haven’t found the “original” story (if there is one) in the Herald or any other paper yet, but it’s worth another look.
The disparity of dates is certainly interesting as well. As mentioned above, the earliest printing of this block of stories that I’ve found comes from Alexandria, Virginia (November 14, 1895) and the last from Blackfoot, Idaho (February 01, 1896).This is probably old hat to folks more versed in newspaper history than I am, but I’m finding it fascinating.
I hope there is a way to find out what news service this originated from. Still looking.
I don’t remember reading any news article in the late 1800s that had an attribution to a wire service such as AP. The closest you can usually find is the paper giving credit to the newspaper that they got the story from.
To help answer the OP, I was reading “The Daily Newspaper in America” by Alfred Lee (1937). He states that the main competitor of the AP in the 1890s was an organization called the United Press, which closed up shop in 1897. (The second United Press, which evolved into United Press International, has no relation to it).