50 | Mass Media and Historical Change
This constellation, however, was ultimately responsible for the creation of
a newspaper profile which still has resonance today. Due to a lack of foreign
news, regional and local reports played a much larger role for North American
newspapers than they did in Europe. Reports on crime and entertainment
news were also more frequent (Burns 2006: 87; cf. Wilke, in Blühm and Geb-
hardt 1987: 292). As in England, advertisements quickly acquired a signifi-
cant status. The papers’ tendency towards opinion-laden and belligerent news
reporting was also reminiscent of their English counterparts. The American
tradition of ‘Crusading Journalism’ began to some extent in 1721 with the
New England Courant by James Franklin, who demanded freedom of press and
accused the British government of corruption. A spectacular case against the
New York Weekly Journal reduced repressions against newspapers through libel
suits (Burns 2006: 55–62, 104f.).
Moral and value-oriented contents intermingled with political positioning.
It was Benjamin Franklin – journalist, inventor and later one of the Found-
ing Fathers of the United States – who established this connection between
moral, political and social commitment in the American press. He turned his
newspaper into a political forum that encouraged its readership to participate
by sending in commentaries, and by means of financial help, advice, new mail
routes and paper mills he established links to over thirty printers from North
to South in order to propagate his approach. By 1755, eight out of the total
number of fifteen North American newspapers were partners of Franklin or
worked in close connection with him (Frasca 2006: 196–204). In this manner
the press became an engine in America’s fight for independence.
A few individual changes in contents can also be made out in Western
Europe. England bore the most striking similarity to the developments in
North America. The proportion of regional reports, partisan commentaries,
and ‘sensationalist’ news increased, as well as the number of advertisements.
Some German newspapers also made innovative changes to their content. The
Hamburgische unparteyische Correspondent for instance was the first to intro-
duce a kind of culture section, which played a part in evolving the gelehrten
Artikel (scholarly article). Other newspapers added light-hearted instructive
text segments. Political criticism was at least attempted by a few papers, such as
Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Deutsche Chronik or Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin’s
Das Felleisen, earning the journalists prison sentences in these specific cases
(Wilke 2008: 89). Overall, however, newspapers were still virtually free of
commentary.
Another media innovation of the eighteenth century was the German
Intelligenzblätter (Intelligence sheet), which presented official information
and advertisements. They cropped up in Britain and France, for instance, in
the form of provincial advertisers. They established their own genre along-
side newspapers and periodicals. In the German-speaking area, roughly