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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
NEW JERSEY editors put "first things first" and hoe their own row.
Their determination to emphasize local news and features against
the national and international content of New York and Philadelphia
dailies has produced in an essentially urban State a prevailingly suburban
type of journalism. Almost without exception, the New Jersey press daily
declares its independence from its metropolitan rivals.
The majority follow the lead of the Newark Evening News in reporting not only the minutiae of their own cities but also social, political, and
cultural activities of hamlets within a 50-mile radius. An example of the
strong New Jersey sense of local importance was a News headline on
November 2,1937: "NEW YORK ALSO VOTES TODAY." The necessity for this provincialism, however, becomes apparent when circulation
figures of New Jersey and out-of-State papers are compared.
Neighboring newspapers have made greatest inroads in the heavily
populated suburban areas. One New York paper alone, a tabloid, has a
weekday circulation of 199,000 and a Sunday circulation of more than
400,000 in New Jersey. Likewise, one Philadelphia daily sends to New
Jersey 65,000 copies, an eighth of its total circulation.
In comparison, the 36 English-language dailies in the State, of which
only a very few print Sunday editions, have a circulation of approximately
800,000 on weekdays and 218,700 on Sundays (including that of the
Sunday weeklies). Improved delivery facilities are increasing the circulation of metropolitan papers in the State without causing a corresponding
decline in that of New Jersey's own papers. Readers of out-of-State journals usually buy a local paper also.
This same influence of neighboring cities caused early New Jersey journalism to limp decades behind that of other Colonies. At the outbreak of
the Revolution, the population of the Colony still looked to the nine
Pennsylvania papers -- three of which were printed in German -- and to
their four contemporaries in New York for information on the Old
World and the New. James Parker's effort to establish a local publication,
The American Magazine, at Woodbridge in 1758, brought him at the
end of two years only fines and imprisonment.
The first cry of a newsboy hawking his wares in New Jersey was heard
in the fall of 1776, when Hugh Gaine temporarily moved his New York
Gazette and Weekly Mercury across the river to Newark. His innovation
in salesmanship had been preceded, a year earlier, by the appearance of
a wall newspaper at Matthew Potter's inn at Bridgeton. Three or four
hand-written sheets, every Thursday morning, attracted a swarming chattering crowd of farmers, teamsters, and townspeople to the walls of the
old tavern. This lively sheet, called the Plain Dealer, came to an abrupt
end after it had dealt a bit too plainly with the practice of bundling.
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