How did the invention of the telegraph help the development of newspapers?

Question

How did the invention of the telegraph help the development of newspapers?

Answer 1

Immediacy and a broader area of coverage with immediacy.

Imagine that they ended the war and no one knew it. That happened at the Battle of New Orleans.

In Europe, they used carrier pigeons to fly messages to home offices.

In our civil war, correspondents were able to file telegraph copies of their stories very soon after the battle ended (or sooner).

But it was not just wars, but also business developments. Many newspapers were once focused on news of interest to a commercial clientele.

The use of underseas cables allowed overseas traffic in news.

Many of the abbreviations we use now, i.e. POTUS, comes from the old Phillips telegraph code, named after an influential telegraph executive and expert.

Another jargon arose with cable service, which sold by the word. So Cablese was developed, including some Phillips code, but also some  unique to a user.

The cost of telegraphy was high enough that the News Agencies were born. Reuters, Associated Press, United Press, a German agency, Italian, etc.  The original AP came about from a pooling of telegraph costs by a group of newspapers.