Or this article could be headlined “How the Newspaper Got Bigger.”

I’ll have to report on the Jefferson story later. But his caught my eye.

The first official newspaper in the Colonies, or at least the first one to print more than once, was the “Boston News-letter”. It printed news in the order that it was received from the European news sources. The length of the stories and articles became so large, that this newspaper had to expand its size. The information received soon exceeded the space allotted.

Rather than editing the news down a little, the publisher, John Campbell, just allowed the stories to grow unused in a backlog. As a result, by 1718 the stories were now more than a year behind. So here it is. In order to try to catch up with the news, he had to increase the newspapers size, so he did.

And the size of newspapers continued to grow in size until the internet started making all the new even more accessible. So now newspapers, at least the ones still in business, have begun to shrink or disappear altogether. I think that Thomas Jefferson would be fascinated and absorbed by this.

I was going to tell you of a newspaper that Jefferson shut his eyes to in his day. But this came along, so I’ll think about telling you more tomorrow!