Print is New Media

Or, Back in My Day, We Used to Write the Newspapers By Hand — Both Ways!

Random Google hits are fun:

Between 1844 and 1854 there were at least three handwritten newspapers published in the frontier town of Washington, Iowa. They were the “Domestic Quarterly Review,” the “Washington Shark,” and the “Quarterly Visitor.”

While calling Iowa part of the Old Northwest is a bit of a stretch (it was part of a separate land grab, part of the Black Hawk territory), this sounds pretty interesting. Also, my next band/baseball team/journal is going to be called “The Washington Shark.”

Here’s the paper from whose abstract I pulled the quote:

Roy Alden Atwood,“Handwritten Newspapers on the Iowa Frontier, 1844-54,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism (63rd, Boston, MA, August 9-13, 1980).