Watched Days

On this day in 1690, Boston got the first newspaper printed in British America. Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick. (Single-page broadsides came earlier, in Cambridge in 1689; this was the first multi-page.) Four pages, two columns. The last page was left blank so a reader could write their own news on it and send the sheet to a friend.

It ran once. Four days later the governor and council suppressed it, called it a pamphlet, and forbade printing anything in the colonies without a license first. The next newspaper came fourteen years later.

The wrinkle: it was not killed for attacking the government. The order names “Reflections of a very high nature” and “sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports.” One of its stories said Louis XIV was sleeping with his son's wife. The first American newspaper may have been shut down partly over what we would now call fake news.

And in its opening it promised that anything collected that turns out to be a mistake “shall be corrected in the next.” There was no next.

The blank page is the part I keep. A paper built with a hole in it, sized for the reader's hand.