The coverage of the fire in the media was the most important influence on how it
was remembered, since this was by far the major means through which everyone,
including Chicagoans, received most of their information about what had happened.
Reporters, writers, illustrators, photographers, editors, and publishers decided for the
waiting world which aspects of the fire should be discussed, where the emphases should
go, and how issues should be framed. In so doing, they made as well as reported the
appalling news from Chicago, especially in those instances where they seasoned their stories with a heavy helping of conjecture, exaggeration, or even fabrication. The process by which this happened was complicated by the fact that the media, then as now, were
influenced by existing conventions of reporting, the technologies they employed, their
assumptions about their audience, and the need to sell their product.
Several things made this occasion special. The inherently spectacular nature of a
great urban fire, and the fact that it had struck proud young Chicago, immediately assured wide and
intense interest. More important, an unprecedented combination of recent
developments--major advances in high-speed and mass-production printing, construction of a national
transportation and international communications network (the transcontinental railroad and
the transatlantic cable were only recently completed), a readership clustering in cities, and
the rise in the number of publishers and professional authors--made the fire the country's
first "instant" media event. While local residents learned of the disaster through the ancient
technology of a tolling bell, the modern telegraph told the rest of the wired world the news
virtually as it happened, so that an enormous audience dispersed over a vast area probably
had a more coherent sense of what was happening than those living through it at the time.
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