First Newspapers

Compared to today's newspapers the only thing historical newspapers have in common is their format and that they both contain news. Very early newspapers didn’t report deaths, marriages or births like today’s newspapers do. Early newspapers also contained mostly ads for local businesses and not a whole lot of news.


The government should not have the power to shut down or restrict what a newspaper talks about, if they did have that kind of power any bad things they did would go unnoticed by the general public. They could do just about anything without having to worry about being criticized or called out by the news media. Any talk about subjects the government had decided to censor would all be word of mouth and could be a totally different story then what had actually happened after it went through a couple of people.


Newspapers can be critical of the government today because people fought for the right of freedom of speech in America so since their ideals were built upon freedom of speech it wouldn’t be very fitting of them to restrict newspapers. In Canada we don’t exactly have freedom of speech so if you are saying something too demeaning or unfavourable about the government it can probably be censored.



I wasn’t surprised at all that the first newspaper in Canada was in Halifax since Halifax was one of the most happening spots in Canada back then as there was trading and stuff with Britain all the time so Halifax was populated with all kinds of British people. British people were used to having newspapers so it only makes sense that they would want one for when they were in Canada.