The Oneida Dispatch and its history..or "Less is More"!

This week marked a piece of history for Central New York as two of its larger newspapers went to only 3 days a week, the Post Standard in Syracuse and the Oneida Dispatch in Madison County.

A number of my friends complained about it and said they always got a daily paper and they couldn’t believe the paper was going to 3 days.  In reality however, many newspapers over the years were only one day a week newspapers... or Sunday only papers.  So being the history junkie that I am I decided to do a little history snooping on the Oneida paper.

The place to go for information such as this I decided was the Library of Congress… and BINGO… I found it.

It seems the Oneida Dispatch can trace its roots back to October of 1851 when a publisher by the name of D. H. Frost put out the first edition of the Oneida Telegraph - a weekly paper that ran until June of 1854. 

From June of 1854 John Crawford became the publisher of what was then called the Oneida Sachem. That too was a weekly paper. The Oneida Sachem was a Republican Journal and eventually E. H. Purdy and D. A. Jackson replaced Crawford as publisher. This paper was published until 1866 when it became the Oneida Dispatch.  (In 1869 the publisher E. Purdy was replaced by M. M. Allen, and eventually only by Mr. Jackson remained as the sole publisher.)

At some point the paper changed names and frequency; it went from the Oneida Dispatch - to the Oneida Weekly Dispatch and then to the Oneida Daily Dispatch.  The Oneida Daily Dispatch ran from 1926 until this week as a daily paper with the exception of Sundays and Holidays...quite a run!

So in essence it is now going to be something it has never been…a three-day print paper... plus a daily paper including… Sundays and holidays in a digital edition on line.

How times have changed…and how the newspaper business changed.

The newspaper business can actually trace its roots back to Roman times when boards were put up on main streets with the news of what was going on posted for the citizenry.

From there it went to printing by hand, then by presses with type set up by hand, then type set by machines, and now by the magic of the digital age!  Voila’!  Not only can we see pictures in color - we can see video and learn the news in real time! 

Wouldn’t those old Roman news people be jealous!  Imagine if they made a typo…today a machine corrects those with a push of a key stroke as we write…hmmm…we still make mistakes….but what the heck! 

So to all you daily complainers…in this case…”Less is really MORE!”

 **Heres a quick video history of newspapers!