The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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issues. 63 The institution of the coffeehouse was growing in popularity both in
England and in the colonies. This type of gathering place also served as a forum for
civic discourse. Proprietors often charged a penny for customers to come in to read
the newspapers and use the coffeehouse’s tobacco and pipes. 64 Newspapers worked
in tandem with such public gatherings to stimulate civic discourse. 65
The influence of newspapers was magnified by such multiple transmissions
from reader to listener to other listeners. This “multi-step flow” of information
extended and may have helped to channel the influence of print. “Opinion leaders”
or “influentials” often orally retransmitted the messages they had received via print.
This interpersonal communication is seen as much more influential than mass
media messages, and the retransmitted messages were doubtlessly reshaped by the
secondary senders. A message read in a newspaper inconsistent with preconceived
opinion was unlikely to have substantial influence, but when relayed personally, by a
respected person in a coffeehouse or tavern, the influence was likely to be greater.
The oral retransmission of what had been printed in the newspapers may have
actually increased the influence of that printed material. As Robert Weir noted, this
multi-step process thus had the paradoxical effect of making the influence of the
gazettes even greater than if they had a larger circulation. The civic discourse that
went on in the taverns and coffeehouses had the effect of undercutting the
63 Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture, 1995), 233. Thomas Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3-8. Thompson, in Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing
and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999), 1-13, notes that in that urban environment, by the end of the century, they increasingly
gathered in groups of men that were similar to each other, rather than such egalitarian assemblies.
64 Mary Goodwin, “The Coffee-House of the 17 th and 18 th Centuries.” (Williamsburg:
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, Research Report 1956).
65 Habermas found the physical space of the salons and coffee houses crucial to the rise of the
“public sphere.” Clark, Public Prints, 3-4, suggested discourse also took place within the
newspapers and Warner viewed the prints themselves as the location of the discourse.