'An Ounce of Truth' Published Every Fortnight

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business. Hi, I'm Jaci Clement, and this episode is part of a new series, one that looks at the state of local news across America. Now, to do this, we're going straight to the source and talking with people who are working at some of the oldest media outlets in the country. So today we stop in New Hampshire and we are speaking with Stephen Pfau, who's the editor at the New Hampshire Gazette. Thanks for joining us, Steve.

Well, happy to be here.

Your newspaper, if I have done a little bit of my research correctly, has a strong history of dissent. To its credit. So I very much look forward to you explaining to me about your newspaper and very much about its history, because we're going back to before the American Revolution, I think, right?

We sure are. In fact, the— it was an act of defiance that got this paper started in the first place. We need to go back to Boston in 1754. The provincial legislature was scheming to put together— to put a tax on spirits, and naturally there were people in the Boston area who didn't think that was a good idea. They were against that. They went to a local printer who was Not a very prominent printer, and they got him to print a pamphlet for them called The Monster of Monsters, and it was a really an eye-popping satire aimed at the members of the legislature. Said all kinds of scandalous things about them and suggested even more. So it was, it was a pretty fiery, fiery little thing. Had boys out on the street hawking the pamphlet, and a member of the legislature got his hands on one, and he looked at it, his blood boiled, and he said to the boy, where did this come from? And all— well, apparently there were several boys selling it, and they had all been instructed if anybody asks, to just look at the inquirer with an innocent look on their face and say, it fell from the moon, which of course went over really big, you know.

Yeah.

So, uh, the thing is, the guy who printed that was Zechariah Fowle. His brother, his older brother Daniel, was also a printer, but I think they had a— I think they had Zechariah pretty well pegged. Uh, I think that they knew that it was he— it was him who did it. They also figured Zechariah being a— he wasn't thought of all that highly as a printer. Daniel, on the other hand, was an up-and-coming, hardworking, well-respected businessperson, and he was also fairly recently married. to the daughter of Hugh Hall, who was a very well-off merchant and, among other things, trader in enslaved people in Boston. His daughter Lydia had married Daniel a couple of— I think a couple of years before, and Daniel had, as I say, was not involved in printing the Monster of Monsters, But he did lend his enslaved pressman, Primus, to his brother Zechariah in order to get the job through the press. So the legislators are just hopping mad about this thing, and they sent the bailiff out to bring in whoever printed this thing. Well, they go to Zechariah's print shop, and Zechariah is a very peculiar guy. As I say, they had, you know, they had reason to suspect that Primus had helped print the thing, and so they said, well, let's get Daniel, drag him into the State House, the Old State House. Now we call it the Old State House. In those days it was the New State House in Boston, and they drug him up before the legislature, and they interrogated him for hours. They didn't like his answers. He didn't like their questions. They sent him up to the attic to cool his heels for a while while they debated what to do. They brought him back down. They interrogated him more, uh, and he gave them some fairly sassy answers. One of them accused him of lying, and he said something to the effect that, uh, I know what a lie is as well as you. The end result of all that, they threw him in the stone jail along with murderers and thieves, and he was there for days. Some people's heads cooled off a little bit and they said, well, maybe you've learned your lesson, uh, you're free to go. And he said, you put me in here most publicly, you can escort me out the same way, but I'll not scurry away in the middle of the night. to make life easy for you. And he stayed there. Meanwhile, being, you know, being the kind of guy he was, he had a pen and paper with him and he's making, furiously making notes about this whole episode. Finally, after he's been in for about 5 days, he gets a note from Lydia. Apparently they were just extremely devoted to each other. So she sent him a note and said, I don't think I'm gonna live. if this goes on. So at that point he says, okay, I'm out of here. He was not a man to let bygones be bygones.

Right.

He wrote a pamphlet titled A Total Eclipse of Liberty, which was a just indignant charge against the legislature for what it had done. And he read them chapter and verse of all the reasons why what they did was just Completely off the books, unreasonable, unwarranted, illegal. Just he just went after him hammer and tong, and then following that, he sued him. He said, "This is this isn't right, and I'm not going to let you get away with this." Well, that suit dragged on and dragged on, and. And eventually he was not able to get any sort of satisfaction from them at all.

Okay.

Finally, he said, okay, that's, that's it. I've got better opportunities elsewhere. And he left Boston, came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, established the first print shop in New Hampshire, and in October of 1756 founded the New Hampshire Gazette, first newspaper in New Hampshire. We'll skip over the next, oh, 25, 30 years, because obviously when I start telling these stories, it just takes far too long. Daniel lived until '87, and, uh, he never did have any, uh, uh, children who survived infancy. Lydia died young, 5 or 6 years after they got up here. Daniel left the paper to his apprentice, John Melcher. Melcher ran it for many years. Daniel also left his enslaved pressman Primus in the care of Melcher. Primus outlived Daniel, and also we have reason to think that we know where Primus is probably buried, which is more than we can say for Uh, for Daniel, whose current whereabouts are unknown. We think that Primus is probably buried over in the Negro Burying Ground, the official title of it, uh, which was discovered, oh, I think it was 2013, over on Chestnut Street here in Portsmouth.

Okay.

They were digging to put in, uh, you know, to do some underground utility work. Discovered a bunch of coffins, looked in the old records. Oh yeah, that's where the old Negro burying ground was. Now that stretch of Chestnut Street is now dedicated to, to that site.

So it's now a historic site.

It is, it is. And, and we suspect that, uh, we suspect that Primus is, you know, almost certainly there. Whereas Daniel, you know, I've, I've looked for, for years in, in the records and can't find a trace of him. He just seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.

And what became of Zechariah?

Zechariah ended up here in Portsmouth. He's, he's a flawed man, you know. He relied on enslaved labor to print everything he printed, uh, this, this newspaper included. And for a guy who was so jealous of his— of the protection of his own liberty, he seemed not to be fully cognizant of the fact that he was depriving Primus of his liberty 24 hours a day. You know, it's the 18th century. He had his good qualities, Daniel did. And he's balanced on one side by his older brother, a gambler and a lunatic, and his younger brother who's just peculiar and, and not a very careful printer at that. Okay, we know so much about these people in large part because Zechariah had an apprentice, fellow by the name of Isaiah Thomas.

Okay.

Now everybody's familiar with Isaiah Thomas the basketball player, but nobody knows a thing about Isaiah Thomas the printer.

Okay.

At the time that Monster of Monsters was going through the press, there was a 6-year-old in the press office, in the printing office, who stood on a, stood on a small stool in order to be able to set type. 6 years old, smart little lad, went on to become the publisher of The Massachusetts Spy, which during the Revolution the British referred to as the Sedition Foundry. It was one of the more rabid patriotic papers of the Revolution. And in fact, when the day of the— Battle of Lexington and Concord, one of the things that was on the British to-do list that day was to grab Isaiah Thomas and put him in jail. But being the clever lad that he was— well, I say lad, he was probably in his 20s at this point— he had had his ear to the ground. He smuggled his press out of Boston and out to Worcester just a day or two before, and in fact may have gone back to Boston and been in Lexington and Concord or that vicinity at the time of the battle, which is my theory on why the Gazette just— I think it was 2, 3 days later, ran one of the first headlines in a— as we think of headlines today, one of the first headlines in an American newspaper. 2 words: Bloody News. And it was a pretty accurate account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the New Hampshire Gazette just a couple of days later. And I, I have a theory that what if Isaiah, who had this, you know, long-standing attachment, you know, connections with the Fowles, had sent a note up to, uh, you know, from, from Boston, from Massachusetts, from Worcester, up to Portsmouth and said, hey, get this to Daniel Fowle up in Portsmouth, he'll want to see this.

Okay.

That may be how it got there. And then just to, just to wrap up with Isaiah, and I know this is— your patience is probably wearing thin at this point, but just to wrap up, one of the reasons we know so much about the fowls and the Gazette and all these goings-on is that in 1810, Isaiah Thomas published A history of printing in America.

Take me through this as to how you are related to those Fowles so many years ago.

Happy to. Daniel Fowle is my 3rd cousin, 5 times removed.

Okay, I don't quite know how that works.

It's collateral descent. If it wasn't for the fact that when I was about probably 10 years old, my father asked me, What are you going to do when you grow up?

Okay.

And I told him, uh, I was going to be a pirate. Uh, and I think that in order to instill in me, uh, if not necessarily respect for authority, maybe a little fear of authority, he said, you know, there was a printer in the family way back in the olden days, and he printed something the authorities didn't like. And they threw him in jail. That was it. That was the story. And I think I've got it word for word. I'm about 10 years old when I hear this.

Okay.

30 years later, I'm wandering through the stacks of the University of New Hampshire Library. And I, by this time, I've worked in newspapers. I've worked for newspapers in New Hampshire. For some reason, it hit me that day. I wonder what I can find. I wonder if— I wonder, I wonder. Looked in the card catalog, used to have card catalogs in those days. Printing, history of, go to the stacks, Isaiah Thomas, look in the index, Fowle, Daniel. This was the first I'd ever heard of Daniel Fowle. Now, That's how obscure the New Hampshire Gazette had become, that I'd been working in newspapers in New Hampshire for 10 years and never heard the name of the guy that founded the first newspaper in New Hampshire, and the paper which had gone on to become— in 1837, when the Maryland Gazette folded, That was the year when the New Hampshire Gazette became the nation's oldest newspaper. You know, despite what should have been its prominence, the paper was obscure to the point of, you know, near nonexistence. Well, what had happened was the paper, the Gazette, was bought in 1866 more or less, or sometime in the mid-19th century, by a fellow who ran the Chronicle here in New Hampshire, the Daily Chronicle. It was common in those days to run a weekly and a daily in tandem. You'd save some of the set type from the daily and use it in the weekly and send that out to the surrounding towns. So people would subscribe to the Weekly and they'd have, you know, it would cost less, they'd have a paper once a week, they'd see what's going on, sort of a brief summary. Those— that became the pattern of the Weekly and the Daily. A guy bought the— well, bought the both of them in the 1890s.

Oh, wow.

Fernando Wood Hartford. And being a clever fella, he said, I'll bet I can make more money if I buy all the other papers and fold them. So he did. So he nuked all the— he nuked the landscape, you know. There was nothing left but his Portsmouth Herald and the New Hampshire Gazette. He bought that when he bought the Chronicle.

Wow.

And he ran the two of them in tandem until 1960. Well, by that time he died and his son took over. They made the inexplicable decision to stop calling their Saturday paper, the New Hampshire Gazette, the nation's oldest newspaper. They were still billing it, you know, as the nation's oldest newspaper. Inexplicably, they said, well, we're going to change the name to the Herald Weekend Edition. By my lights, that would have been the end of the Gazette, except for one thing. The Herald added a line to its masthead saying, Portsmouth Herald, blah, blah, blah, blah, continuing the New Hampshire Gazette, the nation's oldest newspaper.

Okay.

So they combined the papers, 1960. Fast forward, 1980s, '89, I'm sort of scrambling, you know, working here and there at newspapers, trying to keep body and soul together. And the paper I was working for was being bought out from under us by a guy who none of us on the staff We're looking forward to working for this guy. We knew him too well. We've been covering him for a lot— for a long time. Work for him? I've got a way out. I'm going to take it.

Okay.

One of the things we thought of doing was, well, what if we scraped together all the money we got, which wasn't much, and started a competing paper, and we can put his paper out of business. And, you know, we'll have our own and we'll do it right. You know, every newspaper person's dream. You know, if I had my own paper, I could do it right. One of the things that we were going to have to do if we were going to put together a competing paper was, what's the name of your newspaper? Well, we don't have a name. No, you got to have a name. At that point, I'd been looking into this New Hampshire Gazette for a little while now.

Yeah.

And it occurred to me, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We could— what if we called it the New Hampshire Gazette? Well, you can't do that unless you've got the rights to the trade name.

Okay.

So I went to Concord, asked at the Secretary of State's office, is it— who Who's got the trade name New Hampshire Gazette? And he said, nobody. Would you like it? I said, yes, please. The former owners, the Portsmouth Herald, had failed to continue the registration of the trade name New Hampshire Gazette.

Okay.

So I wrote the Secretary of State a check for $40, and it was mine.

Okay.

And so all this because of, you know, this story that my father had told me 30 years before.

Right.

And the funniest thing about it all is that years later, after I'd been publishing the Gazette for probably 10 years at that point, my father asked me, he said, how did you ever Figure out that you could get your hands on that. And I told him, I said, well, you told me, you told— it all started when you told me that story about the printer in the family way back in the olden days.

Okay, so where we are now then with the newspaper.

Yes, yes.

You are, you're carrying on the tradition though that Daniel started with it, are you not?

Well, I like to think so. I mean, here's our latest right here.

All right. So if I'm correct, I don't know how you would describe this. From what I see in terms of descriptions, people will define it as an alternative newspaper.

I wouldn't argue with them.

Okay. Usually 8 pages?

Always.

Always 8 pages. Why 8 pages?

Well, we used to, we used to, We used to run more pages, sometimes 12, sometimes 16, but it— there was a point where it just got to be too much to handle. And so I said, you know, hey, we can do what we want. We'll make it 8 pages. And it turns out to be a very convenient size for us. We have 360 or so subscribers around the country. And by folding the paper up, we can mail it. We send it out first-class bulk mail. It arrives in a couple of days, and it costs us the cost of, you know, well, 60 cents these days is the cost of 1 ounce. It weighs just under an ounce. That's the point I'm trying to make. It weighs just under an ounce. And so Zing for our subscription operation is just, you know, it's the sweet spot, you know, it's great.

I see. Okay.

And it's big enough so that you can, you know, if you use the space wisely, it's a pretty good read, you know, it'll keep you occupied for a little while, distract you. Well, It won't distract you from the woes of the day. In fact, all it will do is, you know, immerse you further in them. But, but, but, but it'll do it. It'll do that from a certain point of view, which, which may, which may help.

Okay. Yeah. And how often do you publish?

Every 14 days. It's a fortnightly newspaper, the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

Yeah, the only one I know of also. So now, what made you choose that?

That schedule?

Yeah.

It seemed manageable.

Okay.

You've got to— when I first got my hands on the paper, I published it in the form of a, you know, what a ledger-sized sheet of paper is, 11 by 17.

Yeah.

I was living in Hillsborough, New Hampshire at the time. There was a local print shop. I traded my typesetting skills for their printing skills, and we printed the paper, both sides of a ledger sheet folded up in a sort of a complicated manner, and I Mailed it. I had a mailing list that I had built in order to publish careful warning, fair warning. There was a plan in 1986 to put a high-level nuclear waste dump in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. And if you ever want to see a town wake up quick, just tell them, hey, there's a high-level nuclear waste dump coming to town.

That's right.

Holy cats. It's a, it's a working-class sort of a community. You know, there's not a lot of— there's a few wealthy people in town, but not many. It's people who work for a living. If they have any net worth, any, any wealth at all, it's in the house. Well, guess what a nuclear waste dump is likely to do to that? So I started an ill-fated a publication called the New Hampshire Home Defender, and basically it, it, it took the editorial line, yeah, over my dead body you will.

Okay.

And, uh, it was, you know, it was poorly thought out. It came together, you know, instantaneously and poorly, uh, but I, uh, I, in the process of doing that, I built a mailing list. Just to wrap up that end of things, after 6 months of seeing the response from the community, Hillsboro was one of 26 locations around the eastern half of the country that were being considered.

Right.

And I mean, if you Google this thing, it's like this whole thing just evaporated. It went down the memory hole. The Department of Energy saw the kind of reaction they got. They said, no, we don't need, uh, we don't need an uprising.

Okay.

So they killed that project, and there's still no place to put high-level nuclear waste. And at the rate we're going, there never will be. When I started up the Gazette in 1990, I used that mailing list, sent out a— sent out the first copy to 600 people. I think I had 600 names on that list. And I got back a huge— what I thought to be a huge response. I mean, they say in direct mail that, you know, any response over 2% is highly successful.

Yeah.

I think my response was like 15, 20%. I don't know, just a whole mess of people said, yeah, send me that. Hey, here's my $5, I think it was, send me the first 6 issues of this thing. And it sort of stumbled along as an episodical for a long time.

Yeah.

And finally I got it together to move over to Portsmouth and do the thing properly on a on a web press. And so at that point, this is all in answer to your question, why fortnightly? This is why people so rarely interview me. They said, did you see the last time somebody tried to interview that guy?

No, no, this is fine. So tell me, what does the subscription cost these days?

$25 a year.

26 issues. Okay. So describe for me how How you would explain your particular editorial slant, if you will.

Because we're the nation's oldest newspaper, I feel like we've got the license to do just about anything.

Okay.

And who's to tell us we can't?

Okay, fair enough. So give me an idea of what's on your front page.

The top of the front page extends down below the fold is the fortnightly rant, and that's likely to be almost anything.

Okay.

Then we've got the alleged news, which lately I've been using a fair amount of work that is available under Creative Commons license.

Perfect.

It provides some variety. There's a lot of people out there doing a lot of good work, and in our current information environment, there's— things have evolved to the point where people do that, and I'm happy to take them up on it because it allows me to to fill the paper with stuff that is worth reading. We've got— we've got our own cartoonist, a fellow named Mike Dater, who has a unique talent for conveying the peculiarity of living in a world that runs the way the one does that we're living in now, apparently. When I see people on the street, they say, tell Mike his latest work is his best yet. In the, in the middle of the paper, we've got MASH notes, hate mail, and other correspondence. People seem to, people seem to like that too.

Okay, so are you responding to hate mail or You're writing hate mail to other people?

Fair question. We don't get very much hate mail, which I find disappointing. I wish we got more hate mail because it's so much fun. If everybody agrees with you, what's the point of—

Anything. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I like to— I like a little resistance. Uh, and then on the back we've got, uh, Admiral Fowles' Piscataqua River Title Guide, not for navigational purposes. And, uh, it shows the state of the tide for the upcoming fortnight.

Yeah.

And then, uh, these tiny little columns here are just various odd events that have taken place on that date in history.

Okay.

And that's, that's one of my favorite parts of the whole paper. I, uh, I, when I'm putting the paper together, I always start there and work my way from the back to the front.

I see. Okay. So, so given that yours is a rather unique type of publication, do you believe you have any competition?

Every paper that I'm aware of is Getting a day older every day. But frankly, I don't think any of them are going to catch up.

Okay. Okay. Are there—

I mean, there are papers out there. I'm sure that there are papers out there with better qualified editors who are providing a better editorial package. But I'm doing the best I can. There are other papers out there that are— I mean, there's any number of news organizations out there that are trying to do what a newspaper's job is, I think, and that is to say, what in the world is going on out there? One of the things that disturbs me about Uh, just get your average paper. Say, let's just take your average paper. Okay, your average paper belongs to some huge chain. It's being strangled. Uh, it is inadequately resourced. It is constrained by old habits that should have been discarded a long time ago. And it's afraid to walk up to— it's afraid to confront the monster of monsters. Well, in our paper, it's not a problem. You know, we can just confront— we can confront the truth head-on and say, yeah, we are in— we're really in a pickle here. And our standard methods of conducting politics don't seem to be doing a terrific job of countering the magnitude of that problem. Gotcha.

Okay, I see where you're coming from. All right, and now I want to talk to you about truth though, because I have a question. Because I have noticed as I've been going through names and old newspapers and other old media outlets Everybody claims something, and sometimes multiple places claim the same thing. So it's a little confusing. So, okay, you say you are the oldest newspaper in America, but the Hartford Courant also says that. So—

They were founded later.

Okay.

How can they be older if they were founded later?

I don't know. You explain this to me. I'll ask them to explain it to me, but I'd like your take on this.

Well, I think that I— it's been a long time since I've had to confront this issue. My recollection is this, that they used to say that they were the oldest newspaper, and then they— and I think that they have since then dialed it back a little bit. and begun calling themselves the oldest daily paper.

Oh, okay.

And since we're not a daily, you know, we don't have to— and, you know, we don't claim to be the oldest daily. We're not the oldest daily. We're not a daily.

Gotcha. Okay.

I kind of like the, you know, in journalism, fewer words is frequently better. You know, there's a lot to be said for being succinct. And I like the fact that we can state unreservedly that we are the nation's oldest newspaper.

Okay. Do you consider yourself a journalist?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

And the writings that are in the paper, do you do most of the writing yourself, or—

Yeah, if it's got somebody else's name on it, they wrote it. But if it's got nobody's name on it, I probably wrote it.

I have a general question that I kind of ask everyone.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, why do you do what you do?

Well, I think the reason— and we're in danger here of wandering down a very dark path into a very dark place. As I hinted earlier, I was not exactly— I was not completely with the program when I was younger. And we're talking, well, graduated from high school in '66.

Okay.

Applied to some colleges and they all said, eh, we'll pass.

Okay.

One thing led to another. I ended up in the Army, uh, and I ended up in Vietnam. Well, that was a very eye-opening kind of experience. Have you ever seen a, uh, a piece of video of a— one of those huge industrial presses in an automobile manufacturing plant where they like stamping out the hoods of cars?

Uh-huh.

Yeah, it's this mammoth thing and it comes down with a huge crunch, and then what had been a flat sheet of steel comes out the hood of a car. Well, it had that kind of effect on me, and it took me a long time to figure things out. A long time. And it took me a lot of time in company with other guys who'd been through You know, that particular mill, uh, uh, in order to, uh, kind of come to terms with it. So for a long time after Vietnam, I sort of bounced around, uh, doing— I, I, I used to call it, uh, taking the geographical cure. Maybe if I go someplace else, I'll fit better on the planet, you know.

Okay, yep.

And, you know, gradually it dawned on me, no, that's not working either. What it amounts to is that it's an alchemical process. You know, I described this huge stamping machine.

Mm-hmm.

That's sort of a mechanical process. It turned out what I needed was an alchemical process. I needed to convert that thing, that experience, into something else. And it turns out that And it sort of ties together kind of neatly too, because the reason we were in Vietnam was because a lot of people lied to us. And they kept on lying to us all the way through it. And ever since, they've continued lying to us about it and about other things.

Right.

And so the only antidote for a world It's just overrun with lies, is to try to tell the truth. And, you know, what better tool than an ounce of newsprint?

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