Comm455/History of Journalism

Since we took our first test last class, I decided I’d do a wrap-up of all the ethnic press events from our timeline.

(Photo courtesy of www.esquire.com)

• 1732 — “The first foreign-language paper in the British colonies is the German-languagePhiladelphia Zeitung, started by Benjamin Franklin. Lasts only a few issues.”
• 1739 — “First successful foreign-language newspaper in Britain’s colonies, the Germantown Zeitung, begins publication near Philadelphia.”
• 1808 — “The first Spanish-language newspaper in what became the United States, El Misisipi, printed in New Orleans.”
• 1827 — “First African-American newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal, appears on March 16, edited by John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish.”
• 1828 — “Elias Boudinot publishes the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix — partly in English, partly in Cherokee, in New Echota, Ga. First Native American Newspaper. The Phoenix is suspended after the presses are seized by the Georgia Guard in 1835.”
• 1832 — “Agence Havas, the first significant private news agency, opens in Paris. Charles Havas sells translations of foreign news to the city’s newspapers.“
• 1875 — “Yee Lenn publishes what is probably the first Chinese-language newspaper in the United States,  Wah Kee, in San Francisco.”
• 1914 — “The number of daily foreign-language newspapers in the United States peaks at 160.”
• 1923 — “Yiddish-language newspaper known in English as the Jewish Daily Forward is being published in 11 different American cities. It has a total circulation of 250,000.”
• 1961 — “Gordon McLendon starts the first successful all-news radio station, XETRA. It broadcasts to Los Angeles — from Tijuana, Mexico.”
• 1999 — “Al-Jazeera, an Arab-language satellite news channel, begins broadcasting 24 hours a day and is soon attracting large numbers of viewers in the Arab world. It provides them with a perspective on events in the Middle East and elsewhere that is often different from that of Western news organizations like the CNN and the BBC.”
• 2003 — “In the buildup toward the Iraq War, the national borders that had long obstructed the flow of news seem to disappear — on the Internet. Americans interested in looking beyond the American perspective, for example, can easily read what, for example, England’s Guardian has to say on its website. “

As you can tell, most of the ethnic press timeline dates dealt with newspapers being translated into different languages. It seems a lot of events are in the 1800s.

I would also like to include the French Revolution (1789–1799) as an ethnic press event because, as we learned from Dr. Censer, French newspapers were sometimes smuggled and translated into the languages of the various surrounding countries.