Wartime News over Southern Wires: The Confederate Press Association
By Ford Risley
Penn State University
When the Associated Press severed its telegraph lines to the South six days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, the newspapers of the Confederacy were left without any cooperative arrangement for news gathering and distribution. Southern editors immediately recognized that a new system had to be devised if journals were going to provide readers with timely news of the Civil War. After several failed attempts, editors established the Confederate Press Association in March 1863. The PA, as it often was known, was beset with problems, including an uncooperative Richmond press and the loss of key newspapers over the course of the war. Still, thanks to an aggressive superintendent and a core group of dedicated members, the Association managed to serve the basic needs of the South's readers for news of the Civil War.
The persistence of Southern editors in finding a mutual arrangement for sending and receiving telegraphic news from the war was a clear signal that the journalism practiced in the region was changing from the old partisan practices that had dominated newspapers for so long. News was beginning to replace opinion as the main emphasis of the South's newspapers, just as it had decades earlier in the North. Moreover, the organization and practices that guided the work of the Confederate Press Association for two years foretold the shape of cooperative news reporting after the Civil War.
Ford Risley, Ph.D.
Dr. Kittrell Rushing or Dr. David Sachsman 311 Frist Hall Communication Department The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403-2598 http://www.utc.edu/commdept/conference/
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