The art of religious design guided the look of the very first newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick.
The paper declared that “It is designed” to be a once a month account of “considerable things as have arrived unto our notice.”
Undoubtedly, the newspaper displayed some nuances to the word “design” that went beyond our common understanding of newspaper aesthetics.
Puritan newspaper design language
The editor Benjamin Harris believed that behind all actions, including the launch of his newspaper, loomed a Divine Providence. There was a belief that the seemingly random “occurrences” were related somehow to a greater design.
Similarly, “design” also meant that the editor embodied his values and purposes in the newspaper.
The result was that Publick Occurrences was a rather straightforward, plain aesthetic, much like the Puritan churches of the time.
Similarly, Harris’ good friend Cotton Mather, a leading Puritan reformer, wrote his own history of early America with a style that he described as “simple” and “humble,” devoted to factuality rather than to flourish and clever elaboration.
The editor of Public Occurrences explained that his four-page newspaper Publick Occurrences, dated September 25th, 1690, would be published monthly, or more often “if any Glut of Occurrences appear.” Harris implied that an expanded publication schedule of the paper would be unlikely. The newspaper design could be very simple because the important “occurrences” were few and precisely or well-defined. There was an assumption that news didn’t have to be extensively interpreted because the facts were straightforward and the Puritan community in America had an essential unity of worldview.
The news covered calamities like war, the smallpox plague, and tragic accidents. The copy would work reasonably well with “headline news” approaches today.
It quickly became obvious that a neutral coverage of these “occurrences” often didn’t do justice to their actual significance for the readers.
Lack of coverage of controversies and, oddly, of religion
From its inception, the simplicity of news design was contradicted by reality. Underneath Publick Occurrences’ placid layout raged anger against the injustices and lies originating out of tumultuous religious and political controversies. “Simplicity” and “Objectivity” from the beginning was an aspiration that often covered a multitude of barely acknowledged subjectivities. Also, the notion of Providence provided a bland gloss to the welter of events, religions, and controversies.
Because the editor Harris saw all news as a product of Divine Providence, the paper actually gave very little coverage to specific religious organizations, events, or beliefs. Providence was a vast generalizing concept that didn’t cover the actual interplay of specific religious events and personalities. The only remarkable religious event noted was the beginning of a Day of Thanksgiving by “Christianized Indians.”
Antecedents in chronicles, information letters, signboards
Publick Occurrences and its immediate successors resembled the chronicle genre that went back at least to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. However, the selection of news was more focused than the somewhat random selection found in chronicles. Yet, there was little sense of an in-depth exploration of themes or key stories.
Since the paper was so slight, there was not much attention to design elements in conveying the news like headlines, maps, graphics, and illustrations. Both Puritan historians and newspaper editors shared the idea that objectivity meant keeping to the bare statement of the facts.
Public Occurrences and other newspapers also had roots in the chatty letters put out to subscribers by “information companies” in earlier times. These organizations gathered news from informal personal reports and rumors to provide handwritten briefings to subscribing rulers and trading companies.
The newsletter readers were also used to the practice of putting up signboards in commercial areas that announced the comings and goings of ships and trade goods. These announcements had to be accurate and succinct. So, this influence on the design of news reporting came through Puritans who were associated with the rise of a new type of economy which came to be called “capitalism.” In his classic The Protestant Reformation and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber associated the Puritan’s simple, methodical style with that of the new capitalists.
However, the association of religion and commerce was a tenuous thing. Successful entrepreneurs easily shifted their eyes from God to Mammon. So, the Puritans were aghast at some of the results of their own successes.
Avoidance of the intricacies of gossip, rumor, and the flourishes of propaganda
When newspapers started to become tattletale sheets to attract more readers, driving up profits, the religious leaders read them and exhaled gasps. A fishmonger in London was praiseworthy, but a scandalmonger was practically a thing of the devil. Puritans denounced the volumes of writing (“pens unmolested” by “thinking,” one said) put out by hack writers and journalists paid by the word who lived in the London area called “Grub Street.” Undoubtedly, the characterization of reporters as “grubby, ink-stained wretches” came from this historical era.
The Puritan stylists associated aesthetic flourishes as possible evidence of exaggerations, lies, and cavalier sympathies with kingly authoritarians. So, they tried to hold the line at the simple recitation of facts. However, even their own practices couldn’t live up to such a bare minimal definition of life.
The editor of Publik Occurrences published a damning report on the killing of prisoners of war by New England’s Indian allies, implying the at least tacit collaboration of leading members of Puritan society.
The newspaper’s threat to expose rumor-mongers as liars was undermined by the publication in Publik Occurrences of a rumor about the bizarre incestuous sex life of the French royal court. This sort of story was common among the promoters of Puritanism and democracy: look at how the royalists live lives degraded by unchecked power and privilege! However, this little story proved too much for the authorities.
The politics of New England at that time pitted Harris as a member of the Mather-faction of Puritans against the establishment, which was loyal to the royals These sharp-eyed authorities supported the royal prerogatives with a quick spotting of the political motives behind the “objective” reports. Having the powerful upper hand as the political establishment, they suppressed the paper after only one issue.
Of course, over the next two hundred years, democracy and capitalism won, and the news media proliferated while the number of pages and design elements grew. Papers grew into partisan dailies, and rumors grew into tabloids. “Grub Street” in London became the center of the newspaper business, and its name reinforced the public’s opinion that news publications were a little grubby with tattle-tales about vices, rumors, and shocking exaggerations.
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*Note that certain parts of this series is adapted and extended from my contribution to the book by Michael R. Smith, 7 Days to a Byline That Pays. [20151005_0600]
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Also read:
No. 2 Sensationalism versus sobriety in the art of religion news in the 19th & 20th Centuries
I didn’t know. Thanks for updating us!
There was a short-lived publication of a newspaper called Publick Occurrences from 1973 through 1975, based in Newmarket, New Hampshire, for which my brother Richard W. Suffern served as an advertising manager. One of its notable advocacies was opposition to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in only one of the two planned plants being built. It consciously modeled itself on the Puritan news paper in terms of its title.