Empire of Ink: The Printer, the Scoundrel and the Fanatic Who Invented the American Newspaperby alex wright
One day Tony Soprano was walking down the street wearing his bedroom slippers retrieve his daily newspaper; Was the next Silicon Valley hotshot Description of newspapers (and magazines) As for me “Yeh” things Outside he gets wet… like roadkill.’ Ouch.
In his scholarly, undisputed third book, “Empire of Ink,” Alex Wright reports that the number of papers in the U.S. has declined from 9,000 in 2005 to 6,000 in 2025 (more than I had predicted), with an average of two more papers closing every week. Starbucks stopped selling them months before the pandemic.
Still, many of my fellow journalists – even young ones – anxiously keep track of whether their articles will be published and celebrate when they hit the front page. However this Internet version will be the one that will hold the new metrics of popularity, if not always quality, with clicks and screen “stickiness”.
The “Empire of Ink” helps explain the long-standing attachment to paper on an increasingly obsolete and overlooked technology. This is an unsentimental history of the American newspaper from the Revolutionary War to the early 20th century, taking in the surreal cut-and-paste culture of then and much of the online media today.
Wright is a digital designer and researcher who has worked for Google News and The New York Times (we have not met), and is the author of two previous books on how human knowledge is indexed and distributed. She is also descended from newspaper people, including her great-grandmother who was a friend of Atlanta Journal reporter Margaret Mitchell before she retired from writing “Gone with the Wind” due to an ankle injury.
Of course, many novelists besides Mitchell contributed to newspapers, but Wright was more interested in those who feuded with him. Charles Dickens, himself a former reporter whose books were serially hugely successful, found the American Penny Papers “so dirty and so brutish that no honest man would admit anyone into his house for a water-closet door-mat.” The hero of his “Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” faces self-important scandal sheets such as The New York Sewer and The New York Rowdy Journal.
James Fenimore Cooper filed 14 libel suits against various newspapers, winning all of them, and declared that “the American press is the pest of society, the scourge of decency, a distorter of truth, and a promoter of crime.” (He would fit perfectly on Threads.) Edgar Allan Poe once challenged to a duel the editor of the slavery-defending The Richmond Examiner, who wrote about Poe’s rumored affair with a local widow. The poet appeared so drunk that he was not ready to fight; They renovated a tavern and became lifelong friends.
However, the literary figure most associated with this era of newspapers was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, who started out as a poor printer’s apprentice at Missouri’s Hannibal Courier and ended up as one of the few ink-stained riches.
In between, he was an itinerant “tramp printer” who traveled around the country with his brother Orion, pulling pranks and gathering material for his semi-fictional memoir “Roughing It”. She wrote a popular piece defending redheads that was picked up without attribution – as was common then – giving what Wright calls “her first taste of viral fame”. In his white suit, he suggests, Twain was to be “the original influencer.”
The book works hard to build a bridge from the multitasking print experts of old to today’s TikTokerati, and mostly well, stopping by legends (like Horace Greeley) and little-knowns along the way.
“The old small-town country editor – trading subscriptions for whiskey or eggnog; soliciting gifts of poems, essays and bits of gossip from neighbors; and exchanging newspapers with fellow editors across the country,” Wright argues, “might be a better embodiment of the newsmaker of the future than the comfortably middle-class newsroom typewriter jockeys of the mid-20th century.”
But it may not be possible to bring back the days when “typesetting tournaments” were more mysterious than the NBA Finals; Jalen Brunson, a “compositor” at The Times, was so fast that he became known as the Velocipede.
Twain was a technology enthusiast who predicted versions of microfilm and Siri, but one of his major failures was investing in a mechanical enterprise called Paige Compositor, named after its inventor.
Its 218-page patent application was nicknamed the Whale, but the 18,000-part machine proved to be a white whale: lapped by the nimbler Linotype, the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler, and declared “the eighth wonder of the world” by Thomas Edison. Linotype’s own long retirement party began in the 1970s with the advent of phototypesetting and then computers.
Essentially, “Empire of Ink” argues that technology changes, but the fundamental human desire to share and compare notes remains the same.
After Watergate, there are many old memories in the world regarding the seriousness of the mission. Wright harks back to a much earlier time, when newspapers were like zines or crazy quilts, passed around, hotly politicized and — thanks to an exclusion from the Copyright Act of 1790 — wildly plagiarized by adventurous editors, the “knights of scissors” who predicted aggregation and perhaps even AI.
He doesn’t have a road map for the future of journalism, but when the news is so dire, what a relief it is to be invited onto the optimism train.
ink empire: : The printer, scoundrel and radical who invented the American newspaper | by alex wright | basic books | 384 pp. | $34
