Advertising on Front Page

September 29

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (September 29, 1772).

“Sundry NEW ADVERTISEMENTS omitted this Week, in order to Place to the LONDON NEWS, &c. shall have particular Notice taken of them in our next.”

Advertising could appear anywhere in colonial American newspapers, even on the front page.  In fact, some newspapers often devoted the entire front page to the masthead and advertising.  Others placed both news and advertising on the front page.  The distribution of items selected by the printer and paid notices submitted by advertisers varied from week to week in many newspapers.

Such was the case for the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, printed by Charles Crouch.  Consider the September 29, 1772, edition.  Like other issues, it consisted of four pages crested by printing two pages on each side of a broadsheet and folding it in half.  The first two pages contained news from London that arrived earlier in the week.  The shipping news from the customs house indicated that the Mermaid from London entered port on September 24.  The New Market, also from London, arrived a day later.  That gave Crouch plenty of time to receive newspapers and letters from both ships, read through them, and choose which items to print before publishing a new weekly edition on September 29.  He reserved advertising for the third and fourth pages, marking some notices with a header for “NEW ADVERTISEMENTS.”

Crouch also inserted a note to alert readers (and advertisers searching for their notices) that “Sundry NEW ADVERTISEMENTS omitted this Week, in order to Place to the LONDON NEWS, &c. shall have particular Notice taken of them in our next.”  What constituted “particular notice” beyond making sure to publish them at all?  No news appeared on the front page of the October 6 edition.  Instead, “NEW ADVERTISEMENTS” filled all three columns on both the front page and the final page, two pages printed on the same side of a broadsheet.  Printers often printed those pages first, reserving the second and third pages for news that arrived just before publication.  In addition to the prominent placement of advertising on the front page, almost the entire issue consisted of paid notices.  Only the second page carried anything other than advertising.  News extended throughout the first and second columns.  It overflowed into the third, but more “NEW ADVERTISEMENTS” accounted for half of that column.

The proportion and placement of news and advertising often varied from week to week in colonial newspapers as printers made decisions about providing news for subscribers who (sometimes) paid for their newspapers and disseminating paid notices for advertisers who accounted for an important revenue stream.  As a result, some newspapers sometimes looked like vehicles for delivering advertising without much news content at all.

February 28

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Connecticut Journal (February 28, 1772).

“Advertisements.”

Among the many primary sources that I incorporate into my classes about early American history, eighteenth-century newspapers are among my favorites.  Despite the decline of print editions of newspapers in the internet age, students still have expectations about what a newspaper looks like and how it should be organized.  Working with eighteenth-century newspapers gives us many opportunities to identify change over time.

We consult digitized copies of newspapers via several databases.  Students quickly discover that colonial printers distributed new editions only once a week, not daily.  Printers chose which day of the week to publish their own newspapers, most of them opting for Mondays or Thursdays, but none of them published newspapers on Sundays.  The Sunday edition celebrated today did not exist in early America.

Moving beyond the calendar of publication to the newspapers themselves, students learn that the standard issue for most newspapers consisted of only four pages produced by printing two pages on each side of a broadsheet and then folding it in half.  On occasion, some printers also distributed supplements or extraordinaries, but for the most part subscribers received only four pages of news and other content each week.

Upon examining the contents, students express surprise over the organization and lack of headlines for most news articles.  In modern newspapers, advertisements usually do not appear on the front page, but that was common practice in eighteenth-century newspapers.  Consider the February 28 edition of the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post-Boy.  Immediately below the masthead, a header for “Advertisements” announced what sort of content appeared in that column.

The header itself was relatively unique; running advertisements on the first page was not.  Indeed, some printers filled the entire front page with advertising.  The production process played a role in that decision.  In order to create a four-page issue out of a single broadsheet, printers first printed the front and back pages on one side of the sheet.  After the ink dried, they printed the second and third pages on the other side of the sheet.  They saved the second and third pages for the most current news.  That meant they first printed advertisements, many of them with type already set because they ran in previous issues.

In the eighteenth century, readers knew to open their newspapers to the second and third pages to find the most current news.  Doing so seems quite foreign and counterintuitive to students accustomed to the appearance and organization of print editions of newspapers in the twenty-first century.  Discovering this on their own provides valuable opportunities to critically engage with primary sources, examining not only their format but also the production process and how readers engaged with newspapers as material texts.