“Our Reporter Is Just Come From The Ruins”: Reporting Practices and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster

Abstract

The largest industrial disaster ever to have occurred on American soil at the time, the gruesome January 10, 1860, collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provides an opportunity to study early breaking news reporting in the nineteenth century narrative and illustrated press. Using newspapers at the local, regional, and national level, the study examines reporting strategies, story structures, and the journalistic standards undergirding this content. This research finds that by 1860 newspapers had adopted a scope of reporting strategies and editorial practices that fulfilled complex, evolving roles for the press. It also reveals that, despite the scope and sensational nature of the calamity, the story quickly transitioned from news, to myth, to forgotten in national memory.