Thanks to All

Who have said hello in person, by e-mail or in comments. Thanks in particular to Howard Owens for his comments on the timeline. I wrongly indicated that I thought newspapers went from a sort of Ben Franklin state into the modern era on the strength of department stores. Howard rightly notes that the first great era of newspaper expansion came with the penny press in the 1830s, before department stores existed, and that major papers used this headwind to expand technologically into the era when they could accommodate the advertising and circulation needs of department stores as they were born. This is true; it is also true that many papers, in smaller cities particularly, did go from rudimentary sheets to things we would recognize as newspapers on the strength of department store ads. Compare the newspapers in Muncie from 1895 to 1905 and the effect of the W.A. McNaughton Co. and the Fair on the whole enterprise is clear. And department stores remained a main economic prop of newspapers for 100 years. But I appreciate very much the corrective.

Also, to the reader who noted I should use permalinks; I never even knew what the darn things were until your note. I have tried to use one above.