“Covers Dixie Like the Dew:” A History of Newspaper Journalism in Georgia

Since their inception in 1763, newspapers in Georgia have printed a first draft of the history of the state and its people. These publications not only recorded events, but also reported the beliefs and attitudes of Georgians, documenting their successes and shortcomings. More than just a mirror of society, newspaper journalism has also been an influential voice in the affairs of the state and helped shape Georgia’s view of itself and the world. Such disparate journalists as Henry W. Grady and John H. Deveaux used their papers to paint an aspirational picture of what Georgia and the rest of the South might become. Through turmoil, division, and change, Georgia’s newspaper industry survived and thrived in its mission to deliver the news to readers across the state. Over time, Georgia’s newspapers diversified and increasingly came to reflect the different identities, viewpoints, and beliefs of its people.

Newer publications took on a more partisan tone than their predecessors, reflecting the rise of political parties in the United States in the late eighteenth century. But even as they reflected an increasing variety of public opinion, the state’s early newspapers shared one thing in common: they were largely produced and published by white men.

Women were discouraged and often outlawed from operating businesses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, an exception was sometimes made for women who were widowed without a male heir to run their deceased husband’s affairs. It was under this set of circumstances that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Sarah Porter Hillhouse broke Georgia’s print journalism gender barrier.

In 1801, Sarah’s husband David purchased Washington’s first newspaper, the Washington Gazette, retitling it the Monitor. After David’s death in 1803, Sarah continued publishing the paper, becoming the first woman to serve as a publisher and editor of a newspaper in the state’s history. Her four-page, four-column weekly was characteristic of the time, with reprinted national and international news, state laws, and local ads. During her tenure, she built a professional reputation that earned her government contracts to print legislative documents. By 1813, after nearly a decade of publishing the Monitor, Hillhouse had passed publishing responsibilities of the paper to her son, David.

Hillhouse’s extended editorship of the Monitor made her one of a small number of early American women to oversee a paper’s publication for a period of multiple years. But despite the rarity of her role, there’s little evidence that she advocated for an expansion of women’s rights more generally. But newspapers could—and did—support community development and social justice, as evidenced by the Georgia’s most distinctive paper of the era, the Cherokee Phoenix.

Since the sixteenth century, Native Americans in Georgia had been contending with European colonization. Among those native groups were the Cherokees, who by the early 1800s had developed a written language and established a capital in New Echota, in what is today Gordon County. In February 1828, the Cherokees began publishing the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper published in the United States.

The paper circulated nationally from their capital and included columns in both English and Cherokee languages. Editor Elias Boudinot employed a strong editorial style that advocated for the rights of Cherokee people over the impositions of the American government. The publication’s title changed to the Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate in 1829 to reflect its coverage of news and issues related to native groups outside of the Cherokee Nation. After the American government ceased making promised payments to the Cherokee Nation for the use of their land, the Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate lost its funding and stopped printing in May 1834. The American government expelled the Cherokee people from their homes in 1838, relocating them to the Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma, along what is commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears.

The onset of the Civil War (1861-65) in 1861 brought disruption to both Georgia and its newspaper industry, but despite the turmoil of war, print journalism continued throughout the state and provided citizens with coverage of the conflict, often in unorthodox ways.

Southern papers depended on supplies from Northern states for printing, and without those supplies, many papers ceased printing during the first year of the war. Publications that were able to survive reduced their number of pages and columns to remain in circulation. Obtaining news to print was also a challenge for publishers in Georgia and across the South, as telegraph news reports from the North were curtailed. Publishers and editors in Georgia remained committed, however, and often relied on correspondence from participants, and some reporters even visited the war front themselves.

Their coverage quickly abandoned the unity that had existed behind secession, as many editors began to question the wisdom of continuing the war. In the later years of the conflict, newspaper publishing became increasingly difficult as supplies continued to dwindle, employees enlisted to fight, and mail services became expensive and unreliable. As the war front moved further south, refugee newspapers from other Southern states, including the Daily Chattanooga Rebel and the Memphis Daily Appeal, temporarily set up shop in Atlanta, which had become a commercial center during the war. In 1864, publishers in the path of Sherman’s march were forced to flee and often hid their printing equipment to avoid its destruction. The newspapers that managed to survive the end of the war and resume publication would have to adapt to a “New South” in the postwar years.

The Black-owned papers that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century were but one segment of a growing and diversifying industry. The state also saw a dramatic increase of weekly newspapers in the decades following the Civil War. In 1869, there were 59 weekly papers circulating in Georgia. By 1890 that number had ballooned to 225. Much of that growth occurred in south Georgia, where small-town papers began circulating in Valdosta, Waycross, Blackshear, Douglas, and elsewhere.

Due to the absence of intra-city rival publications, many of these smaller weekly papers were less politically aligned than their larger city counterparts and devoted more space to local news. Content in these newspapers usually reported local personal items, including illnesses, vacations, club meetings, church events, and humorous incidents, similar to social media posts in the twenty-first century. Their subscribers were often farmers by trade, and the average reader could also find an abundance of agricultural stories in the pages of their rural weekly papers. Many of the weeklies established during this period became the legal organs for their counties and are still in print today, including the Henry Herald, Calhoun Times, and the Jackson Progress-Argus.

Growth only continued in the twentieth century and by 1917, Georgia could boast 35 daily newspapers and 275 weekly newspapers—more than any other southern state. This expansion also included specialized newspapers intended to serve more targeted audiences, including student papers that covered events on campuses statewide. Publishers also established newspapers like the Southern Israelite, which served the Jewish population in Atlanta, to report on the affairs of religious minorities in the state. African American newspapers also expanded their presence in Georgia, among them the Atlanta World (later Atlanta Daily World), established in 1928.

Expanding technologies further contributed to a diversified readership, as publishers were increasingly able to afford a variety of new features, including illustrations, photography, and cartoons. But the biggest change during this period may have been the increasing prominence and sophistication of advertisements.

After the Civil War, the effects of the Second Industrial Revolution resulted in the increasing presence of advertisements for manufactured goods in the state’s newspapers. At the same time, the development of national newspaper advertising agencies increased the availability and importance of advertising dollars to newspaper publishers. By the 1920s, the country was experiencing unprecedented prosperity. Increasing levels of disposable income coupled with cheaper manufactured products resulted in a consumer culture that fueled changes in the content of newspaper ads. A newspaper subscriber in Georgia could find ads for cars, soft drinks, phonographs, and vacations nestled alongside their local news. With expanding page counts, there was space for increasingly larger ads to catch the reader’s attention. As the United States progressed through the Great Depression and World War II (1941-45), the purchasing behaviors of Americans changed, but advertisements in Georgia’s newspapers maintained the conspicuous style that rose to prominence in the early twentieth century.

With its blatant fearmongering and reckless reporting, the Georgian highlights the dangers posed by an unscrupulous press. But newspapers could be a force for social justice, too, as the state’s civil rights era publications showed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Georgia was home to some of the most prominent movement leaders at the time, including Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Hosea Williams, and Julian Bond. Organized protests in Atlanta, Albany, Americus, and countless other cities brought attention to the cause and were covered by newspapers throughout the state.

While not all papers were supportive of the movement, Georgia’s press corps included prominent reform-minded columnists such as the Atlanta Constitution’s Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson, who won Pulitzer Prizes for their editorials in 1959 and 1967, respectively. The African American press and school newspapers also reported on civil rights activities, providing readers with more personal and distinctive coverage of the events in Georgia’s cities and college campuses. Black activists and entrepreneurs meanwhile established newspapers in many of Georgia’s larger cities. One of the earliest and most prominent of these publications was the Atlanta Inquirer. Participants in the Atlanta Student Movement founded the Inquirer in 1960 in response to the conservatism of the city’s other Black-owned newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World. The pages of the Inquirer covered the events of the movement and supported the fight for racial equality in Atlanta and throughout the South. Early reporters for the paper included future state Senator Leroy Johnson and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who integrated the University of Georgia with fellow student Hamilton Holmes.

The fight for rights and freedoms was also taken up by other historically oppressed groups in the second half of the century, resulting in the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the American Indian Movement. Their voices were often heard in the pages of Georgia’s alternative press, which allowed activists to communicate and connect through the time-honored tradition of print journalism.