ABSTRACT
“Nineteenth-Century Publishing Innovations in Content and Technology” focuses on changes to content brought by technological advances, as well as the famous “stunt journalism” practiced by Nellie Bly in her historic travels around the world. It shows how the immediate transmission of news changed the very nature, content, and construction of information, eventually leading to global news, and how it affected socially constructed ideas of time, space, and place. It also describes the changes brought to the penny press industry by the Associated Press and the New York Times, which both relied on “facts only” approaches to news. Using materials from this chapter, students should be able to see how technological developments in communication affected news delivery speed and content itself. They should also be able to compare and contrast the kinds of news content that was popular both before and after the introduction of the telegraph, seeing a correlation between technology and timeliness. They should also explain how traveling the world at record speed contributed directly to the development of the international scope of the news delivery, describing Nellie Bly’s stunt journalism as both sensational news content and pioneering journalism. Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 4 include: the telegraph and transatlantic cable; the inverted pyramid and the Associated Press; the New York Times (Henry Raymond); and Nellie Bly and stunt journalism.
