Poughkeepsie Journal's mission timeless

State's oldest paper steeped in history

By Margaretta Downey
Poughkeepsie Journal

This country’s early newspapers were rags. Literally.

They were made of discarded cotton and linen, which is why they are still around today. A paper you left in your attic a decade ago will probably have disintegrated — its brittle wood pulp has no lasting power.

But longer lasting is the legacy of coverage, the first draft of history as it’s been called. Twenty-six newspapers were publishing in New York state when the story broke on the death of Washington in December 1799. The Poughkeepsie Journal is the only surviving New York newspaper that carried that story and every other major story since then.

In 1785, most of the United States was in a post-war depression. Jobs were scarce and debtors were filling prisons.

But fertile Dutchess County with its lifeline of Hudson River trade was beginning to prosper. Poughkeepsie became a haven for new commerce. It was here in this busy river port, at ‘‘the Second Door West from the Store of Messrs. Tappen and Smith,’’ where Nicholas Power began publishing ‘‘The Country Journal and The Poughkeepsie Advertiser’’ on Thursday, Aug. 11, 1785.

His four-page weekly newspaper was the first of tens of thousands of issues leading up to today’s Poughkeepsie Journal. (Power changed his paper’s name to the Poughkeepsie Journal in 1789.)

The Journal, the third oldest newspaper in the United States, is one of only about a dozen papers that have been in continual publication since the 18th century.

The oldest are the Hartford Courant and the ‘‘Journal-Courier,’’ now owned by the New Haven Register in Connecticut.

‘Every Kind of Printing’

The Journal today averages 330 pages per week — about half advertising and half news — news gathered by reporters in Wappingers and in Washington, in Kingston and in Kosovo and beamed back and forth over high-tech satellites.

Editor Nicholas Power gave his early readers a mixture of state laws reprinted with boring exactitude, dispatches brought by ship or post rider from other cities in America and abroad; articles credited to other newspapers; and advertisements and legal notices which contained practically the only local news. He also offered ‘‘every Kind of Printing performed with Neatness and Dispatch’’ at his offices on Main Street.

Sometimes staying solvent was tough. Power would frequently implore subscribers to pay up. He would accept wheat, rye, Indian corn, oats, buckwheat, butter and flax, but preferred C-A-S-H, which he would always write in capital letters in his entreaties.

When these newspapers began, production was tedious and primitive. Everything was handmade, the presses, paper, type, ink. Because of that, you wouldn’t find the late-breaking news on the front page. That was reserved for long-winded speeches or reprinted laws, which could be set in type early. The real news would be inside the paper on the last pages set.

Objectivity wasn’t a factor

Power, like most early editors, thought of himself not as a journalist, a position we’ve tried to elevate to professional status today, but as a printer. You gave him information and he printed it. He didn’t worry about accuracy or objectivity.

Letters to the editor were an important forum in early papers, as they are today. In 1802 Power, who often came close to calling Jefferson a traitor, printed a letter from a reader who was furious about the ‘‘$100 spent on illuminating the Capitol as a consequence of Thomas Jefferson’s election.’’

And the Journal, like Ann Landers today, told people how to cope. In a popular series, called Knick-Knacks, the editors offered this pearl in 1856: ‘‘If you would borrow money and have no security, go to a youth; for men are like green peas — the younger they are, the easier they will shell out.’’

Though it began as a weekly newspaper, the Journal started daily publication as the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle on Dec. 4, 1860, inspired by demand for news as the country verged on civil war. (The editors promised that first day of publication not to carry accounts of such vulgar items as prize fights, immoral trials or divorce cases.) Four generations of the Platt family — from Isaac Platt in 1821 to his great-grandson and namesake in 1931 — would be involved with the publication of the Journal and its successors.

The 19th-century Journal would report ominous signs of events to come.

The Journal has long been an advocate for equality. It had called slavery ‘‘a curse to the human Race. May the time soon come when these states will wipe the stigmas from her shores.’’ That was not written in 1861, but in 1821.

Under foreign news, the Journal reported that some Jews in Europe were obliged to live in Jews’ quarters or ghettos. They were ordered to wear a mark of distinction on their clothing. That was Jan. 18, 1826.

Unprecedented front-page coverage was given to the assassination of President Garfield on July 2, 1881. After the assailant had been identified erroneously twice, the Poughkeepsie Eagle revealed that the actual assassin, Charles Guiteau, was in Poughkeepsie during July 1880 and advertised a lecture at the YMCA titled, ‘‘Which Will It Be, Garfield or Hancock?’’ The talk was canceled because of low attendance. When Guiteau was found guilty of killing the president, the Eagle attacked the insanity plea: ‘‘the defence of insanity had been so abused as to be brought into great discredit.’’ Shades of John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Reagan 100 years later in 1981.

‘‘Civil rights’’ was the title of the major story about four black passengers forbidden to sit with whites. They ‘‘...were denied the rights granted to all American citizens...’’ This didn’t happen on a bus in the early 1960s but on a river steamer in May 1882.

Names, ownership change

Over two centuries, the Journal would change its name 13 times and become an amalgamation of 10 different newspapers. In 1960, the Journal, which had become the Poughkeepsie New Yorker in 1941, switched back to its 18th-century name, which it had held until the 1840s. The paper is owned by Gannett Co., Inc., based in Arlington, Va. It purchased the Journal from Speidel Newspapers, Inc., in 1977.

The Journal has always been based in Poughkeepsie, but it now covers the mid-Hudson Valley with an average of 44,000 copies a day in three different editions, with a 57,000-circulation paper on Sundays.

‘‘The Journal seeks to be the definitive source of local news in our coverage area,’’ said Derek Osenenko, the Journal’s executive editor. ‘‘We do that by providing a strong local news base each day, as well as world, national, state, sports, business and lifestyle coverage. And we produce a number of special reports and sections throughout the year that tackle tough issues with depth and analysis.’’

Something that 18th-century editor Nicholas Power couldn’t have fathomed is the Journal’s Web site, which offers news and information about the Hudson Valley at www.pojonews.com.

But this element has stayed true. The slogan over the gate leading to the Journal’s front door reads ‘‘Here Shall the Press the People’s Right Maintain.’’

Newspaper people — reporters and editors, sales people and clerks, paper carriers and press operators — are all just caretakers, stewards of a public trust.

The Poughkeepsie Journal covered the passage of the Bill of Rights.

‘‘And we intend to be around at least another two centuries,’’ said Journal Publisher Richard K. Wager, ‘‘to help see those rights — the readers’ rights — preserved.’’