The Florida Newspaper Project
Newspaper publishing in Florida began under British rule. After leaving South Carolina in 1783, William and John Wells published a Tory newspaper from St. Augustine before moving on to the Bahamas when Florida again came under Spanish rule the following year. Three (3) issues of The East-Florida Gazette survive. There is indirect evidence of a Spanish-language newspaper, El Telegrafo de las Floridas, having been published at Fernandina in December 1817 and described in the Charleston Courier.
Spain ceded East and West Florida to the United States in July of 1821. The Florida Gazette began publication in St. Augustine that same month, and The Floridian began publication in Pensacola in August of that year. By 1830, Florida's total population was 34,730, and the two counties established by Andrew Jackson as provisional governor had become fifteen.
Territorial newspapers promoted immigration and statehood. The standard source for information on early Florida newspapers is Territorial Florida Journalism by James Owen Knauss (DeLand: Florida State Historical Society, 1926). Knauss estimated that at least forty-four newspapers were published in Florida before the end of the territorial period and that about half of the 6,800 issues produced survived. The survey database created in the planning phase of the Florida Newspaper Project largely corroborates this estimate; thirty-eight records list holdings for newspapers published in Florida before 1845.
In 1845, the year of statehood, Florida's population totaled 66,000. The young state had its share of partisan newspapers, including Marianna's Florida Whig (1847) and The Whig Banner from Palatka (1846). By the time of the War for Southern Independence, the state's newspapers had become sharply political. Democratic papers likeThe Southern Confederacy from Jacksonville (1861) were countered (at least eventually) by Republican papers like The True Southerner from Tampa (1868). Jacksonville's Republican paper, the Florida Union (1864), continues today as The Florida Times-Union.
During the war, at least one newspaper (the St. Augustine Examiner) was taken over and published by Union forces. One Confederate newspaper became the state's first African-American title. Josiah Walls, who came to Florida in 1864 with the Third Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, purchased The Cotton States from a former Union general after the war and published The New Era from Gainesville in 1873.
Newspapers and their publishers then went on to wield heavy influence on the political and social developments of Reconstruction. Our survey database has twenty-nine records for Civil War-era newspapers, forty-two for Reconstruction-era papers, and fifteen records for newspapers spanning both eras. The Gainesville Sun, this city's current daily, dates its history to The Gainesville Times (1876), a Democratic paper.
Established by an act of the state legislature in 1905, the University of Florida first held classes at its Gainesville campus on September 26, 1906. The University News was the first school newspaper. Today The Independent Florida Alligator serves a population in the range of 40,000.
A line drawn across the Florida peninsula from the mouth of the Suwannee River on the Gulf of Mexico to Daytona Beach creates a northern and southern division more eye-opening than the historical east-west partition. Two-thirds of the total population lived in the northern section at the turn of the century; less than a fifth of total population is there at the close of the century. Newspapers in the northern section tend to have been published continuously in stable communities for long periods; nineteen of the twenty-five agricultural titles on our survey database are located there, and eighteen date from the nineteenth century. Of 305 ethnic titles on the database, only seven are located in the northern section.
The diversity in Florida's newspapers is largely attributable to population movements into the southern section of the peninsula. Retirees and refugees have converged from numerous points, and there are newspapers serving a variety of groups and interests. For example, Almanber "is published monthly [at Boca Raton] in Arabic and English," La Estrella de Nicaragua from Miami is "the Nicaraguan newspaper of America," The Florida Catholic is published in six diocesan editions from its main office in Orlando, the Hi-riser serves "the condominium communities of Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Boca Raton [and] Highland Beach," while the Kreyol Connection is "the first trilingual newspaper (Haitian Creole, French and English) in Palm Beach."
A million and a half Floridians are of Hispanic origin, and 280 Spanish-language newspapers are listed on the survey database, all published in the southern section of the state and three dating from the last century. The Spanish-language La Gaceta, begun in Tampa in 1922, soon included an Italian-language section among its pages, recognizing fellow immigrants proficient in a language other than English.
Fifty-two African-American titles have been identified, seventy-six military titles are listed, and forty titles represent the religious press. Tracing its history back over 100 years, the Florida Sentinel Bulletin publishes both print and online editions of its newspaper.
The state has several metropolitan dailies with national reputations, and nearly 900 weeklies are listed on the survey database. About 375 newspapers are currently published in Florida, where newspapers are an important medium for a multiplicity of messages.
