Putting life's events and the personalities who have populated the centuries in linear and chronological order can bring some meaning to what we call history and heritage.

"Only a Matter of Opinion?" has called upon the resources of the first museum for news, the Newseum, to help in highlighting significant publications, editors, editorial writers, editorial cartoonists, commentators and columnists.

This timeline is the result of over two dozen visits to the Newseum, always with a discovery of interesting significant events or persons or tantalizing trivia. In addition, the Newseum's News History Gazette was referenced thoroughly to verify dates, spelling and data.

We encourage teachers and students who visit Washington, D.C., to cross the Potomac River to visit the Newseum (http://www.newseum.org) at 1101 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22209. If you cannot visit, order a copy or class set of the News History Gazette edited by Eric Newton, the world's only managing editor of a museum.

TIMELINE of NEWS

OR

GETTING THE MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE

59 B. C.

Rome: acta, handwritten government news notices posted daily in public

1450

Johann Gutenberg makes a printing press from a German wine press

1566

Venice: gazzette, handwritten news sheets are sold weekly

1609

Printers in two German towns print weeklies

1644

English poet John Milton defends press freedom in

1650

Germany: the first printed daily newspaper, Einkommende Zeitungen

1702

London, England: Daily Courant, the first successful daily newspaper in English

1712

Joseph Addison in The Spectator coins "a Journalist" to refer to a correspondent

1721

Benjamin Franklin Bache, who started the Aurora with a press bequeathed by his famous grandfather, is known as a strident "partisan" editor

1754

Snake cartoon published by Ben Franklin rallies colonialists: "Join or Die"

1775

Papers, pamphlets and post urge resistance to the British

1789

George Washington called a "debaucher" in New York press; newspapers live on party support

1833

Weekly Democrat, Chicago's first paper founded

1847

Frederick Douglass starts The North Star. Crusades against slavery and for women's rights.

1855

The Chicago Tribune purchased by Joseph Medill

1861

Wilbur F. Storey buys the Chicago Times for $13,000. Storey instructs his correspondents during the Civil War: "Telegraph fully all news and when there is no news send rumors."

1862

New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley's editorial page is leading voice against slavery. His "Prayer of Twenty Millions" is answered by President Lincoln.

1864

Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside orders the Chicago Times seized and suspended for sedition. President Lincoln rescinds the order after three days.

1886

Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype produces a line of type at a time. Before this type was handset one letter at a time.

1892

In newspapers like the New York World, literary, financial and drama editors emerge.

1897

Russian refuge Abraham Cahan creates the Jewish Daily Forward which becomes America's largest ethnic newspaper.

1898

The battleship Maine explodes in Havana Harbor, Cuba. William Randolph Hearst: "How do you like the [New York] Journal's War?" New York Evening Post columnist Edward L. Gotkin: "It's a crying shame that men should work such mischief … to sell more papers."

1900

William Randolph Hearst adds to his newspaper chain with the American, an evening paper.

1902

President Theodore Roosevelt coins "muckrakers" to identify early investigative reporters who exposed social ills.

1905

The Chicago Defender, an African American weekly newspaper, is founded by Robert S. Abbott who is considered a founding father of modern black journalism.

1910

Newspaper circulation wars are common in the cities with so many dailies struggling in now saturated markets. The Chicago Tribune battles with the Examiner. Circulation lies are just one standard tactic; some resort to stealing competitors' papers, sabotaging delivery wagons or equipment, and intimidation of carriers."

1919

Ring Lardner, sports writer and columnist, began his sports writing career covering the Chicago White Sox and Cubs for Hearst's Chicago Examiner and later writing a baseball column for the Chicago Tribune.

1919

Chicago writer Hugh Fullerton exposes the 1919 Black Sox scandal. His persistence ties some Chicago players to New York gamblers. His is one of the earliest examples of sports investigative journalism.

1928

"The Front Page" by Chicago Journal reporter Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur is produced.

1931

New York Herald Tribune columnist and NBC Radio commentator Dorothy Thompson is expelled from Germany for calling Adolf Hitler "a man in a trance."

1937

Herb Morrison of WLS, Chicago, goes to Lakehurst, NJ, to build the station's library of transcripts with an eyewitness account of the sedate docking of the world's largest airship. When the "Hindenburg" explodes before his eyes, Morrison spends two hours recording 40 minutes of action followed by reports on emergency activities and interviews with survivors.

1940

Paul Harvey starts on network radio in Chicago: "Hello, Americans"… "Paul Harvey (pause) Good DAY."

1942

Langston Hughes, well known among black poets, playwrights and authors, begins a weekly column in the Chicago Defender, featuring conversations with James B. Semple or "Simple."

1945

April 18, war columnist Ernest Taylor Pyle killed by sniper. President Truman: "No man in this war has so well told the story."

1953

Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender becomes the first African American woman to be accredited to the White House press corps.

1955

Ann Landers begins her advice column at the Chicago Sun-Times.

1965

Carl T. Rowan, who broke the racial barrier at the Minneapolis Tribune in 1948, becomes the United States' first African American syndicated columnist for the Chicago Daily News.

1972

Mike Royko wins the Pulitzer Prize for his commentaries in the Chicago Daily News.

1984

Oprah Winfrey becomes host of "AM Chicago" which in 1986 becomes "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

1988

Harpo Productions is established. Winfrey is third woman (after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball), the first African American woman, and the first journalist, to own and run such a company.