The News and Technology From 1840 To 1970

Richard B. Kielbowicz, University of Washington, has published Regulating Timeliness: Technologies, Laws, and the News, 1840-1970, at 17 Journalism & Communication Monographs 5 (March 2015). Here is the abstract.

The advent of telegraphy shifted news gathering from the public postal system to a private network dominated by telegraph companies and wire services, a nearly simultaneous revolution in journalism’s technology and political economy. Postal news gathering had been open to all newspapers with few costs and constraints, while its telegraphic successor developed amid a web of regulations. A changing configuration of occupational rules, private business arrangements, and public laws regulated each stage in the production of telegraphic news, from source-reporter interactions to post-publication liability. This study analyzes the origins of rules that governed timely news — determining who got it, how fast, and on what terms — from the advent of telecommunication to the eclipse of telegraphic news relays. 

To explore these issues, this Monograph combines an historical approach with the organizational scheme of a law review article. It begins with background and context — a short section on pre-telegraphic newsgathering and the rules that governed it, followed by an overview of telegraph technology and the political economy in which it developed. The core of the analysis consists of six parts, each examining a discrete facet of timeliness and its regulation: (1) Technological constraints initially led to company rules and state statutes establishing priority in transmitting news, though industrial contracts and reporters’ norms later proved more influential in this respect. Capitalizing on the limitations of the new technology, telegraph companies and their journalistic clients regulated timely news to advance business objectives in their own realms while forging cross-industry alliances to bolster one another’s interests. These industrial maneuvers (2) fueled a long-running dispute over the ownership of telegraphic news and (3) fostered anticompetitive practices belatedly addressed by public lawmaking bodies. Firms that vended timely news used regulations to (4) shore up their incumbency advantages by fending off threatening changes in political economy and coping with new communication technologies. Once telegraphic reporting became a mainstay of modern life, (5) reporters’ sources found ways to manage the timing of their news, while (6) the legal system limited tort liability for the parties that produced and delivered it.

The full text is not available from SSRN.