Long ago, before newspapers, a town crier rang a bell and called out the news in the street. In 1846, five New York City newspapers paid for a pony express route to get news of the Mexican War north faster than the mail, and the Associated Press was born. A news group such as the Associated Press makes stories, photos and videos for others to use, and its mission, as of November 2026, is to advance the power of facts. The first message sent over Samuel Morse's telegraph line was sent on May 24, 1844, between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, although Morse made use of ideas from other scientists and inventors, including Joseph Henry. The telegraph changed how wars were fought, how money was sent and how newspapers did business, and the first permanent telegraph cable across the Atlantic was laid by 1866.
In 1920 a radio station in Pittsburgh called KDKA read election results on the air, and people listened at home. Radio sent sound across long distances to a country where most people lived outside big cities, and it made the nation feel smaller and more connected. In Britain, the BBC was formed on 18 October 1922 by a group of wireless manufacturers, and daily broadcasting began on November 14, 1922. When the BBC started its first daily radio service, news was supplied by an agency, after much argument. For years a network TV news show was only 15 minutes long each weeknight, and it grew to 30 minutes on September 2, 1963.
Public broadcasting grew from a problem of money. In 1965 the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a nonprofit foundation, created a commission to study the problem that nonprofit local stations had small budgets. The Public Broadcasting Act, signed on November 7, 1967, created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it was meant to provide federal funds to promote programming involving creative risks the networks are unwilling to take. The Public Broadcasting Service was incorporated on November 3, 1969, and NPR on February 26, 1970. As of May 2024, public radio is organized as a membership group of independently operated stations in all 50 states that together reach more than 99 percent of Americans.
Weekly Reader was a classroom newspaper for kids, and its first issue, on September 21, 1928, was aimed mainly at fourth graders. In 1987 its circulation was 9 million and it reached 80 percent of the nation's schools. Today the sources are many. As of November 2026, among U.S. adults, 88 percent say they at least sometimes get news from digital devices, and 63 percent get news from television at least sometimes. Also as of 2026, 12 percent say they often get news from radio and 6 percent from printed newspapers or magazines, and 59 percent say they get news from social media at least sometimes. These figures add up to more than one hundred percent, so many people use more than one source.
According to the Medill State of Local News Project, newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week in the United States, as of 2024. Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. A little fewer than 5,600 U.S. newspapers remained in 2024, and 80 percent of them were weeklies. The 2024 report said that in a year, 130 newspapers shut their doors or merged, and that the country has already lost more than one-third of its print newspapers over two decades. It also counts more than 660 stand-alone digital news sites, and says there are now fewer than 100,000 people employed in newspaper publishing overall.
In 2022, U.S. newspaper advertising revenue was an estimated $9.8 billion and circulation revenue $11.6 billion, so readers paid more than advertisers. Daily U.S. newspaper circulation, print and digital together, was an estimated 20.9 million that year. From 2022 to 2023, newsroom jobs, mostly reporters and editors, fell by almost 2,000 positions. A news desert is an area that lacks consistent local reporting that fills critical information needs. The 2024 Medill report found 206 U.S. counties with no local news source and 1,561 counties with only one.
The changes in how news is consumed and produced have made it harder to verify if a news item is accurate. Researchers who study the news say people often overestimate how common misinformation in news actually is, and that can reduce trust in reliable sources, as of November 2026. A 2018 survey found that three-quarters of Americans could usually tell news from opinion in their go-to source, but fewer than half could on social media. Some publications now put the word opinion in headlines and add notes to editorials to separate news from opinion and build trust.
Some news is hard to take in, whatever screen it arrives on. Hearing scary or sad news again and again, or seeing strong pictures of it, can upset children. A pediatric psychologist advises limiting how much children see about a traumatic event, and not dwelling on it. Grown-ups can limit how much kids watch about upsetting events online and on TV, and doctors say children need adults to help them make sense of news. If a story is upsetting, it is okay to stop watching and talk to a grown-up, who can help. Some news is uplifting, such as children their age taking a stand on an issue.
Words to know
- telegraph: wire message system
- circulation: copies reaching readers
- desert: area lacking something
- misinformation: false information
- broadcasting: sending to audiences
