The Seattle Star (Seattle, Wash.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
8,077 issues from 1899 to 1925, published in Seattle, Washington, digitised for Chronicling America.
Newspaper magnate E. W. (Edward Willis) Scripps once wrote that “the best community in which to found a newspaper is one that is comparatively young and whose population has in very recent time increased.” With a population of 40,000 and growing, Seattle at the turn of the century fit Scripps’ description well. Scripps hired editor E. Hazard Wells to found his latest venture, the Seattle Star, on February 2, 1899.
Scripps’ papers generally supported the principle of public ownership. The Star was a strong advocate of a 1902 ballot initiative to allow the city of Seattle to generate its own power, for instance. When Editor Wells planned to start a newspaper in Tacoma (the Tacoma Times), Scripps proposed borrowing money for the venture from employees. The notes promised to pay 6 percent interest for two years. This idea grew into the Newspaper Saving Society and the First Investment Company, a form of employee ownership.
Scripps thought that advertising had a corrupting effect on journalism. In 1903 the Bon Marché department store stopped advertising in the Star because the editorial staff refused to suppress unfavorable articles about the store. When the Star‘s business manager Edwin Foster Chase told Scripps that he regretted losing the contract, Scripps congratulated him instead. To reduce his papers’ reliance on advertising, Scripps focused on increasing circulation and limiting advertising space in order to inflate the value of that space.
Though Scripps generally…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Seattle, Washington, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress