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“We Send Our News By Lightning . . .”: The Information Explosion Of The Nineteenth Century And Adaptation In The Press, 1840-1892, Timothy L. Moran

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the change that came to American newspapers and reporting between 1840 and 1892 as the result of increasing communication bandwidth and the emergence of fast communication networks. Improvements in news distribution by post roads, steam navigation, and steam railways, followed by application of telegraphic communications, significantly speeded the news and changed the news cycle itself by linking metropolitan news centers with peripheral newspapers. The American Civil War brought this new information technology together with an event that created massive audience demand for timely and factual news, as opposed to purely political or commercial information. In postwar years …