So, how exactly did news spread through the colonies and early United States? First, it is important to consider both geography and class status. “The people with the best news were the people in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia,” places where, Adelman explains, a massive infrastructure of printing combined with transatlantic shipping for quick access to news. “The further south you go, the further inland, things got a little slower.” But beyond geographical limitations, there were limitations of class. “When we’re talking about political news in the 1770s,” Adelman says, “we’re talking about the group of people who were politically active, so we’re talking about mostly land-owning white men.”
Adelman presents three different but interconnected ways that news can circulate: through conversation, through correspondence, and through newspapers. News can spread orally through a conversation as simple as someone walking up to someone else and saying, “Did you hear...?” As Adelman explains, “the printing office was a place where that tended to happen, because people tended to go to the printing office when they heard things they thought were newsworthy.” This method shows up in the pages of newspapers, in paragraphs beginning with “We hear that...” News was also shared in coffeehouses and taverns, where, for example, a ship captain might make an appearance upon arriving from England.
Handwritten transmissions also shared news from other cities or across the Atlantic. Adelman describes letters from London coming in to merchants in the colonies where, if you read past the first few paragraphs of business items, there might be a paragraph with news worth sharing. A merchant, say, John Hancock would be able to take a letter directly to a printer, who would know which paragraphs to pull.
The third method of news circulation – through newspapers – relies upon oral and handwritten communications, and relates back to Goddard and the quest for a reliable postal system. “The post office,” Adelman notes, “was important first and foremost because it’s how a lot of those newspapers that printers were using circulated.” There was a custom and occasional policy for the British to allow the exchange of a single copy of a newspaper with another printer for free, alleviating the need to subscribe to papers from other places. Printers also relied on the post office to get their papers to subscribers in less populated areas. A main post road ran from Boston to Baltimore (the image at right is a marker near Harvard Yard for the Boston Post Road) and on to Charleston, and there were some interior routes running west from cities like Boston or New York. But in areas where there was not a post road, printers or groups of subscribers would privately hire riders to deliver papers.