news. Newspaper tradition in Boston still asserts that he knew the names of the owner, the captain, and most of the crew of every boat that docked in Boston Harbor in his day. Instead of going to the coffee-houses to get the news retold there by sea captains, he would go down to the wharves, get into a boat, and often go out alone to meet the incoming vessels without regard to what the weather was or to what time of day the vessel would dock. After getting the news from the captain or some member of the crew, he would rush back to the office of The Palladium and there, with the help of his wonderful memory and by a few notes on his cuffs or on his finger nails, he would put the matter into type as he sang to himself in a monotone. If the item was unusually important he never hesitated to stop the press of the paper in order to secure its insertion. In this way he secured for the Marine Department of The Palladium a reputation which put the shipping news of the other Boston papers in the " also-ran" column. Scant justice has been done to "Harry" Blake, who was the father of reporting hi the mod- ern sense of this term. After he left The Palladium, the paper lost its most valuable asset and soon began to lose its subscribers, who no longer found its ship news worth reading. The Palla- dium passed through various hands until it became in 1840 a part of The Boston Daily Advertiser, which had been started on March 3, 1813, and was the first daily paper of any importance in New England.
POULSON OF PHILADELPHIA
The grand old man of the period was Zachariah Poulson, Jr., the editor and publisher of Paulson's American Daily Advertiser in Philadelphia. His life links the journalism of the Early Re- public with the Era of the Penny Press. In September, 1800, Poulson purchased for ten thousand dollars The American Daily Advertiser, the first daily paper in America, and gave it his own name and continued to publish it until December, 1839, when he sold it to the owners of the youngest Philadelphia daily, The North American. When his paper was merged with The North American, The Saturday Evening Post published this tribute to Poulson: "No man probably in this country has ever enjoyed so
