Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette!

    
 
  Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, was quite an interesting read. I read the six hundred and eighty second issue, printed on January 6, 1941. The headlining story was about the war going on between Bulvaria and Hungary, but it did not feel like a regular article. Instead the article felt like I was reading from a history textbook, where it was giving me a play by play of past events. It did not seem like breaking news that we have today, which gives us every little detail they can squeeze out daily of important events. I do understand that news from across the ocean was difficult to receive in a timely manner back then, but I felt like it could have come across a little less text-booky. Sometimes it did not even seem like he was writing in complete sentences, so it was extremely tough to get through it all.
    On the topic of complete sentences, nothing else in this paper had complete sentences. There was a headline titled “Books Sold” and it was literally just a list of all the books sold in Philadelphia. Maybe that is how the New York Best Sellers List began or rooted from. Although this was just a general list and not even showing data of how many copies were sold, but then again those kinds of numbers probably did not matter much back in Franklin’s day.
    The most confusing article in this paper was one entitled “John Barkley, At the sign of the Bible, in Second-Street, Philadelphia, intends in two Months time, to take his Paffage for Old England, and has juft imported from London, and lately from Glafgow, fuch Goods as follows,”. I did not understand until the end that this was whole huge behemoth of an article was just advertising a sort of garage sale. It seemed like every other piece in here resembled it in some way, in that items, characteristics, and other random things were just listed. The gazette felt like a place for people to put out want advertisements or lists of things, instead of bringing news to the masses.