Gobright's Reporting

Gobright’s redemption would come April 15, 1865. In his own memoirs of his time as the AP correspondent in Washington, Gobright described the events of the night as such:

New York Herald- April 15 1865

“On the night of the 14^th of April, I was sitting in my office alone, everything quiet: and having filed, as I thought, my last dispatch, I picked up an afternoon paper, to see what especial news it contained. While looking over its columns, a hasty step was heard at the entrance of the door, and a gentleman addressed me, in a hurried and excited manner, informing me that the President had been assassinated, and telling me to come with him!” (2)

Gobright began to leave for the theatre, but before he did he sent the first telegraph of the event to be sent that night at 12:30 a.m:

“WASHINGTON, APRIL 14, 1865

TO THE ASSOSIATED PRESS: THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT IN A THEATRE TONIGHT AND PERHAPS MORTALLY WOUNDED” (5)

This telegraph was the first of many Gobright would send that night and into the early morning, becoming the basis of many newspapers front-page headlines. When Gobright arrived at the theatre he gathered as many sources as possible and after hearing that Secretary Steward had also been attacked, travelled to his residence to gather information on that story. On returning to his office Gobright began to write a full dispatch on the events that occurred that night. His telegraph began as follows:

“President Lincoln and wife, with other friends, this evening visited Ford’s Theatre, for the purpose of witnessing the performance of the ‘American Cousin.’” (2)

When viewed against Stanton’s recount of the events, Gobright’s lead is much weaker. It attempts a chronological recreation of events, rather than getting right to the point. (5) But Gobright’s telegraph meant something else for the way journalism would come to be: the evolution of the 24-hour news cycle.

With the advent of the telegraph, reporting in the Civil War was a much more timely affair than it had been before. (1) What Gobright’s all night coverage did was set a precedent to be followed, even if not at first. Technology would still need to catch up but it was now known that people needed news as it happened, and valued this timeliness.

The Assassination of President Lincoln, sourced from Wikipedia

The government had been collaborating with the AP during the Civil War as a means of spreading official messages that could be read in papers almost instantly. It had been the AP’s routine to consolidate news dispatches from their New York offices to be sent out late at night. This not only provided clearer telegraph lines, but also allowed the newspapers that subscribed to the AP a competitive edge against others in printing news first. (1) This competition is obvious in today’s 24-hour news sphere, the faster you are to get news out the better your paper as a whole does.