Episode #227: How Reading Ye Olden Newspapers Shaped My Writing

Full moons are very cool in my neck of the woods. Reminds me that the simplest things in the universe often bring the greatest amount of pleasure.

I have mentioned periodically over the past seventeen years of blogging, that one of my very first state agency jobs was working at the Connecticut State Library {1996-2003}, first as clerk, then later as an office assistant in a sub department called The Connecticut Newspaper Project, then later in a regular department called History/Archives (this moniker to differentiate from the History/Genealogy department). 

I wrote almost two dozen posts about my time spent there at my very first blog, Cedar's Mountain, which you will find at this link called Library, covering mostly newspaper humor and old newspapers in general.

Having to read 18th thru early 20th century newspapers to get certain types of information for things like programming reels of microfilm or determining a publishing schedule (tri-weeklies were very much a given in the 18th and 19th century), along with reading multiple versions of historical events (like reading three different versions of Rudolf Valentino's 'sudden' death) gave me a deeper appreciation of what actual journalists had to go through.

Back then, newspapers & periodicals were often the only form of entertainment available to the general public. Books were usually too expensive for the general masses to consume, so it often fell to the newspapers to keep people well informed and entertained. This required publishers to churn out massive quantities of very dense articles of all persuasions to keep the masses hooked, so to speak.

This in turn required the writer/journalist to churn out very precise and overly informative articles, which is why if you look at a typical newspaper from the 19th century, most stories often ran two or more full newspaper length columns, with incredibly tiny print (if I remember correctly, the font size was usually between 3 & 5 point; for modern comparison I would say the standard text on a back of any state's lottery ticket should suffice) but packed with loads of information. I would also say that, unlike today's non-tabloid style newspaper, the average size of a newspaper page was doubled the size of a page from say, the New York Times.

I spent a lot of time reading those very informative stories, digesting the often standard style of how the story was written and the kind of information contained (back then, the only words that were actually censored were curse words. seriously). I would like to think that these old newspapers had influenced the way I went about performing my descriptive writing style. To this day, I sincerely believe that my descriptive writing is still my strongest suit, and reading those early newspapers still has a continuing influence on how I write (see last week's blog post on how I choose character names as an example of this influence).

I've had a lot of fun tripping down my memory lane in order to write this blog post. Truth be told, it still remains my absolute favorite state agency job to have during my almost 25 years of state employment {1996-2020}. In fact, to borrow a former football owner's catch phrase about his commercial product, I enjoyed my trip so much that I have decided to revisit my time spent working with old newspapers at the Library with a newish series of blog posts about them. So prepare yourself for this ye olden gentleman to gently pontificate about the curious history of old newspapers, from a purely observational viewpoint.

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