The Press Was Here First

Philadelphia had newspapers by 1771. Washington didn't exist as a capital until 1800. Chicago's first paper predates its city charter by four years. Los Angeles had a press before it had a courthouse.

That's not a coincidence. It's the actual sequence of how American civic life got built — someone had to write down what was happening in a place before that place could organize itself into a functioning polity. The press didn't grow up alongside American self-governance. It preceded it, and made self-governance possible. The First Amendment didn't create the free press. The free press created the conditions that made the First Amendment necessary.

I started Editorial Style to make that argument wearable. Four cities, four founding dates, each one a masthead date worn as a sleeve detail — the same kind of date you'd find in a newspaper's nameplate if the paper were still around to have one. It's grown since — Boulder, Denver, Pittsburgh, Akron, Lancaster — because it turns out most places have a version of this story.

Two local newsrooms are still closing every week in this country. If you want the fuller argument for why that matters more than the legal framing usually given to it, I wrote the full essay on Backstory & Strategy.

The story isn't over. Whether it stays that way is still being decided.