Track one.

What if the Civil War were tweeted?

[tweeting] In the past few years, social media has revolutionized the way we get our news and the way we connect.

Within seconds, we get updated information about what's happening in the world delivered to our phones and our computers.

But it wasn't always like this.

Printing newspapers was a slow, laborious process, and most news came by word of mouth or rumor.

In this episode, we're going to look at how the way we get our news today got its start during the Civil War.

And how technology, along with the public's appetite for up-to-the-minute minute news, laid the groundwork for our modern day news cycle.

Obviously, newspapers have been around for centuries.

This is John Powell, an exhibits writer at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

Prior to the 1840s and the invention of the telegraph, news could take days or weeks to reach most people.

Especially during times of war.

The chaos and distance of battle meant that news of victory or defeat could take weeks to reach the homefront.

But this began to change with the outbreak of the Civil War.

You know this was a huge news story, obviously.

Everyone knew someone who was affected by the Civil War, and they wanted up-to-date information.

The speed of news and the speed of printing, you know, increased during this period dramatically.

This was right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.

The steam engine was revolutionizing not only industry, but our entire society.

CRAIG BENZINE: And this leap forward in technology allowed for the mass printing and circulation of newspapers.

But nothing was more influential than the telegraph.

MATT WEBER: Developed by Samuel Morse, the guy who invented Morse code, the telegraph allowed instant communication across vast distances via wires.

Soon telegraph lines were connecting major cities.

And shortly after the war started, telegraph lines connected the West and the East Coast, allowing news and information to be transmitted farther and faster than ever before.

It was really during the Civil War period that this incredible technological revolution enabled news used to travel within minutes.

This was unprecedented.

News could travel from the battlefield into the front page on the same day that it happened.

This really fueled a boom in the newspaper business.

At the beginning of the 1800s, there were only around 200 newspapers in circulation in America.

At the start of the Civil War, there were over 3,000, most of their information coming in via telegraph.

Before the telegraph, editors from distant newspapers had to mail each other their news stories, and news of national events could only be disseminated as fast as the postal service or the Pony Express, in some cases, would allow.

But with the advent of the telegraph, newspapers could finally print national news in a timely manner, linking the country together, and putting the Pony Express out of business.

And this was brand new.

This was kind of the Twitter feed of its day.

These bursts of information were sent directly from where the news was happening.

I think of it as kind of the beginning of the modern news industry.

So because there was such a demand for up-to the-minute news and technology to get stories from all over the country, for the first time, it was a real race for newspapers to get their stories out first and scoop their competition.

As a result, news stories became more succinct so that they could be transmitted over the telegraph faster.

They started to emphasize facts-- the who, what, when, where, why, how.

And since you had to pay per word when sending a message via telegraph, a more concise news story was a cheaper story.

Despite all these innovations, it was still a lot of work to put together a newspaper back then.

JOHN :Powell: For instance, type was set by hand.

It was very difficult to change a story.

So instead of changing a story, whenever a newspaper received new information on breaking news, they'd print a new edition of the paper with the updated story in it alongside the original story.

CRAIG BENZINE: Kind of like an analog version of a Twitter feed.

And so you see sometimes conflicting reports.

And you just had to kind of look for the latest date stamp, time stamp, to see, oh, OK.

I can disregard that.

This is what's happening now.

One of my favorite newspapers in this exhibit is we have a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting the first battle of Bull Run.

The battle was won by the Confederates, but the Philadelphia Inquirer rushed the news that the Union side had won before the battle was even completed.

So they had to print a correction later that day, which had their readers up in arms.

They were very angry that they had been essentially lied to.

So it's very different from what you'd expect in a newspaper today.

Certainly around this time you do see a shift in the reporting style.

And it is much more the model of today's breaking news style.

A lot of people actually point to the reporting of President Lincoln's assassination as the beginning of this.

CRAIG BENZINE: On April 14th, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer.

MATT WEBER: The news of the assassination went out almost immediately.

I would say this is the biggest breaking news story of its time, and it's the first time that people can actually get up-to-the-minute information from newspapers.

An unprecedented seven editions of the New York Herald were produced during that day, April 15th, 1865.

CRAIG BENZINE: Seven editions, this was the most editions printed in one day ever.

The public's intense concern for the President, and the various technological innovations of the day, like steam power, telegraph, and modern news techniques, made it possible.

And so this was really one of the first newsfeeds of its day.

You can picture the writers and the typesetters in the news office just cranking these papers out as N as they could print them.

And certainly the New York Herald had the resources and the staff to be able to cover a story of this magnitude.

You know, the Lincoln assassination was, for newspapers, what the Kennedy assassination was for TV.

In 1963, almost 100 years later, President John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.

Instead of the newspaper, people turned to the TV to get their late breaking news about the assassination.

With the advent of social media, the way breaking news is reported has continued to evolve.

No question that Twitter and social media in general is changing journalism dramatically, and in the same way, I would say that the telegraph really affected reporting at this time.

This is the first time that you're able to get news from across the country within minutes.

And so it did eventually change the way that news was reported in the same way that Twitter and social media are changing things today.

Today, we receive our news on a virtually constant and instantaneous basis from a variety of sources.

While the technology has certainly changed since the Civil War, our appetite for up-to-the-minute news remains as insatiable as ever.

So what do you guys think?

Does technology fuel our desire for up-to-the-minute news?

Or have we always had this desire, and technology is just now catching up?

Let us know.

Let us know right now.

Right up to the minute.

This episode was brought to you by PBS Learning Media, a great source for classroom resources on Civil War history.

If you're interested in finding more videos and lesson plans on what we talked about today, you can find our page on Learning Media.

And for a more dramatic take on the Civil War, check out the new series "Mercy Street" on PBS.

A lot of what we explored in this episode gets talked about on that show too, so head over to pbs.org to find out more.

It might be a little more dramatic over there.

Better acting.

Worse, in my opinion, but-- Better looking people too.

Here, not there.

Hmm, well, it's debatable.