Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — JOURNALISM. [ARTICLE]

JOURNALISM.

The First Printed Newspaper—The Oldest Newspaper in the United •States. The first printed newspaper, according to Thorne, authority for the following statistics, was The Gazette, published iu Nuremberg, in 1457, and the oldest paper extant is The Neue Zeitung aus Hispanien und Italien, printed in the same oity in 1534. Other countries followed Germany in issuing printed newspapers in the following order: England, in 1622; France, in 1631; Sweden, in 1644; Holland, in 1656; Russia, in 1703; Turkey, in 1827. The first American paper consisted of three pages of two columns each and a blank page, and was published in Boston Sept. 25,1690, tinder the name of Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic, but it was immediately suppressed. In 1704 the Boston News Letter appeared, printed on one sheet of foolscap paper. It flourished for 72 years. The oldest newspaper in the United States is the Weekly Massachusetts Spy, published at Worcester, Mass. This paper was established at Boston March 3, 1771, by Isaiah Thomas, the historiau of American printing. It was removed to Worcester in 1775, where it has been issued continuously ever since. The total number of newspapers pub lisbed in the world at present is estimated at about 43,000 distributed as follows: United States, 17,000; Germany, 5,500; Great Britain, 6,000; France, 4,092; Japan, 2,000; Italy, 1,400; Austria-Hun gary, 1,200; Asia, exclusive of Japan, 1,000; Spain, 850; Russia, 800; Australia, 700; Greece, 600; Switzerland, 450; Holland, 300; Belgium, 300; all others, 1,000. Of these about half are printed in English. The whole number of periodicals published in the United States in 1887 was 16,310. The whole number of copies printed during the year was 2,497,354,000. The first printing office in the United States was established in 1039, the first political newspaper was in 1733, the first daily paper in 1781, the first penny paper in 1833 and the firs‘ illustrated paper in 1853.