A nod to a local sesquicentennial

I let last year pass by without noting an important anniversary. At least it’s important to me.

The Jefferson Era, the first true newspaper in Greene County, published its first edition in 1866. Last year marked the sesquicentennial of that event.

The Era changed owners over the next few years, and the name of the publication was changed to the Jefferson Bee in 1872, but the enterprise has been in continuous operation now for over 150 years. It’s the oldest continuous business in Greene County.

And it wasn’t even the county’s first publication.

That dubious honor goes to the Jefferson Star, which V.B. Crooks cranked out on the press he brought to Jefferson in 1860, just six years after the county’s official founding.

But it would be a stretch to call the Star a newspaper.

Back then, Iowa had a law requiring the publication of annual property tax lists in three consecutive issues of a newspaper.

Crooks would publish the lists every year in three issues of the Star, submit a bill to the county for the service, then halt the Star’s publication until next year’s lists were ready.

When Crooks died in 1863, new owners took over the thrice-a-year “newspaper” and changed the name to the Jefferson Record.

Then in 1866, a husband-wife team, M.H. and M.L. Money, bought the operation and became the editors. Changing the name to the Jefferson Era, they began regular weekly publication.

The April 6 first edition of the Era, in an editors’ note, promised “great care will be employed in the selection of miscellaneous reading matter, pertaining to Morals, Education, Domestic Economy, Wit, Humor etc., etc; in a word, we shall endeavor to present something, in each issue, that will be interesting and useful to all.”  

The publication’s name was changed to the Bee in 1872.

My brother Tom Morain, in his historical analysis of early 20th century Jefferson, called the Bee “the offspring of Crooks and Money.”

In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was unusual for a town of even a couple thousand people to have only one newspaper. Generally there were at least two, one Republican and one Democratic.

Jefferson was no exception.

Other publications started, flourished for a few years, then sold out or combined — the Greene County Gazette, the Jefferson Citizen, the Jefferson Democrat, the Iowa Advocate, the Iowa Argus, and the Souvenir.

The Souvenir published its first issue in 1885. It merged with the Bee in 1903.

The Jefferson Herald began publication in 1917, 100 years ago. The Bee and the Herald, although competing as newspapers, merged their production plants in 1931 to cut costs. They consolidated into a single business under common ownership in 1946, and the assets of the company were sold in 2012 to Herald Publishing Company of Carroll.

Longevity has marked the ownership and operation of the Bee and Herald.

E.B. and Paul Stillman owned and published the Bee for many years starting in 1884. Victor Lovejoy served as editor-publisher for over 30 years in the early 20th century. My dad, Fred Morain, bought a minority interest in 1937 and I joined him in 1967. Our family owned and operated the publications for 75 years.

Newspapers publish obituaries. And a number of business analysts have been predicting the demise of the newspaper industry itself for the past several decades. But while a number of individual newspapers around the nation have met that fate, and others have merged with their competitors, the death watch of newspapers as an American institution is taking an awfully long time.

There’s one good reason for that.

No other medium is geared to provide the amount of detail found in newspaper stories.

This is true whether the publication is transmitted on paper or online. So long as people want more than just a couple of sentences or a couple of minutes on some subject, newspapers will have a place in their lives.

People want to know what’s going on around them, in their community, their state, their country and the world. The newspapers that earn their trust for reliability, in news and ads, will continue to thrive, as they have for many decades.

Politicians who find published facts to be irritating have taken to calling such media reports “fake news.” Newspapers that are found to be unreliable deserve that criticism.

But American history is littered with political figures whose bluster against newspapers turned out to be just that — bluster.

The free press guaranteed by the First Amendment is protected by American libel laws. To prove libel, a plaintiff must prove that the story was inaccurate and that it was published with malice or wanton irresponsibility.

Bluster, even by the nation’s top dog, doesn’t cut it.