WASHINGTON – On Tuesday, May 30th. The first daily newspaper in the United States, the short-lived Pennsylvania Evening Post, began publication in 1783. The Pennsylvania Evening Post was printed by Benjamin Towne in Philadelphia.
The hunger for news in the United States was such that by 1850, there were some 250 daily newspapers.
The number of newspapers peaked around a hundred years ago, when there were 2,600 dailies published across the United States, with a circulation of over 24 million.
Today, the number of daily newspapers in the U.S. has dropped to around 1,330. In the year 2000, there were almost 56 million daily subscribers. Within a decade, that number dropped by 10 million.
In the United States today there are still nearly 7,400 publishers of daily or other newspaper editions and they employ over 200,000 people.
