1st Newspaper Founded

New York Gazette, the 1st newspaper printed in New York, founded by printer William Bradford in 1725. At first, it was not distinguished. Historian Frank Luther Mott has described the paper as a "small two-page paper, poorly printed, and containing chiefly foreign news from three to six months old, state papers, lists of ships entered and cleared, and a few advertisements."

Bradford had been a printer in Philadelphia, and he was induced to move to New York in 1693 to become the public printer. He was in his 60s when he first issued the weekly Gazette in early November 1725, and he supported the provincial governor William Cosby upon which his livelihood depended. Public discontent with some of Cosby's actions (which the Gazette would not touch) led to the founding of a second newspaper in the province in 1733, The New York Weekly Journal. The printer of that paper was Bradford's former apprentice John Peter Zenger, who the governor sued for libel, but was acquitted at trial. This was a critical incident in the development of the American conception of the freedom of the press.