In a manner that astounded foreign observers and citizens alike, newspapers defined new republic of United States as did no other institution. By 182Os roughly six hundred newspapers, including sixty big-city dailies, were being pulled off nation's presses, a quantitative accomplishment in which editors took understandable pride.1 In 1814 Nathan Hale of Boston Daily Advertiser wrote, we have any striking traits of national character, their origin may be clearly discerned in our universal relish for newspaper reading, and in general character of newspapers we read.2 While London press could boast of its superiority in terms of literary talent and mechanical execution, Hale and his brother printers countered by pointing to America's numerical preeminence: more newspapers, more subscribers, and more readers could be found in their nation than in any other.3 In 1810 Isaiah Thomas, first historian of American journalism and a former editor, estimated that United States published about twenty-two million papers annually, compared to twenty-one million for Great Britain and Ireland.4 Eleven years later Essex Register of Salem, Massachusetts, put number for United States at eighty million, substantially above fifty-six million papers produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1824 William Coleman of New York Evening Post reported that annual production of newspapers in his state exceeded that for all of England. He believed there were two newspapers published in United States for every one in England, Scotland, and Ireland combined. If number of newspapers published drew editorial comment, so too did number of newspapers read. In 1821 Joseph Gales of quasi-official Daily National Intelligencer guessed that United States had 350,000 newspaper subscribers and 1.5 million newspaper readers.5 In other words, one of seven Americans read a newspaper for free. These nonpaying readers were both agents and beneficiaries of a massive giveaway that helped democratize culture of print. This essay addresses a central question implicit in Gales's numbers: how were newspapers transformed from everyday commodities into a form of public property?The quantitative explosion of newspaper circulation at opening of nineteenth century signaled a major transformation in relationship between public and news. With an intensity that would have astounded their colonial forebears, Americans of early national period came to believe that access to news, and therefore to newspapers, was their birthright. This new sense of entitlement sprang from confluence of two ideological currents that have often been treated as if they ran in opposite directions. The ideology of republicanism stressed importance of a well-informed citizenry.6 Because newspapers had no rival as an instrument of general enlightenment and a primer of civic values, didactic republicans had special reason to regard them as the book of people. The ideology of liberalism attached equal significance to well-informed consumer.7 Newspapers contained information that Americans needed in order to make intelligent decisions about enticing new world of consumer goods opening before them. Recent scholars have demonstrated that republican and liberal impulses, far from working at cross purposes, could produce a shared political vocabulary of sufficient flexibility to blur differences in meaning. Thus virtue required to sustain a liberal republic might be understood as either citizen's capacity to sacrifice for common good or economic self-restraint that consumers were called upon to exercise in ultimate den of temptations, marketplace.8 Whether legitimated by republican representations of enlightened citizen or by liberal constructions of enlightened consumer, newspapers came to be seen as an indispensable entre to modern, democratic life. …