The Business of Newspapering
in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Life at Mobile newspapers, 1813-2013: Agonies of adventure, hairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random compromises and barely averted catastrophes.
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Cranky early telegraph network delivers few changes to Port City’s even crankier news market
The telegraph took its first faltering steps into Mobile in 1848. This map shows the status of the network in May 1860. Source: Edmund Russell and Lauren Winkler, “Uniting the States with Telegraphs, 1844-1862,” Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, https://telegraph.library.cmu.edu/.
U.S. mail exchange system tied Mobile newspapers into a national information network
Mobile’s newspapers depended heavily on the postal newspaper exchange system to gather and deliver the news. Scenes like this detail from Richard Caton Woodville’s painting of War News from Mexico, 1848 were repeated across the country.
Civil War-era editor largely remembered for poem
Bivouac of the Dead Tablet. Looking east, Mobile National Cemetery, 1202 Virginia Street, Mobile. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Register organized some of the South’s best reporting on the Civil War
The National War Correspondents Memorial arch contains the names of nine Southern Civil War correspondents. Four of them reported the war for the Mobile Register.
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Source: Historic Mobile Preservation Society
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