Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/91



WINTER WEATHER AND NEWS

Winter always brought its difficulties to the colonial printer. His shop often being poorly heated in severely cold weather the paper froze while it was being prepared for the press and caused endless delays. The colonial printer was forced to wet his paper before he could put it on the press. Winter also interfered seri- ously in the delivery of newspapers: post-riders who acted as mail-carriers frequently had to abandon their routes because the roads were closed by snowdrifts. Such irregularity in delivery frequently caused subscribers to discontinue their papers until the roads were open for travel again in the spring. This custom occasionally caused the colonial publisher so much annoyance that he threatened to move his paper to another town unless readers would subscribe for the paper for the entire year.

Possibly some of these discontinuances during the winter sea- son were the fault of the colonial editor. Rural subscribers cared more for local news than they did for reprints from English papers. During the winter months when ships neither arrived nor departed from the ports, early American editors had a hard time to fill their columns. Few of them, however, were as frank as William Bradford, of The New York Gazette, who, on one occasion, explained the presence of an abstruse discussion in his columns as follows: " There being a scarcity of Foreign News, we hope the following Essay may not be unacceptable to our READERS." Severely cold weather was often accepted by the colonial printer as the excuse for omitting an issue entirely. Benjamin Franklin was always equal to any emergency. He frankly admitted that when news was dull during the winter season, he amused the customers of The Pennsylvania Gazette by filling the vacant columns with anecdotes, fables, and fancies of his own. To these "fillers" he gave such an air of truth that he not infrequently deceived his own readers. Many of his anec- dotes, written only to amuse and entertain, were quoted as Gospel truth by European writers on American affairs.