As society and technologies have evolved, so too has The Berea Citizen

Long before the internet came along and revolutionized news delivery, newspapers were continually changing how they presented information as society and technologies evolved. 

The Berea Citizen, formerly The Citizen, is no exception. Like other newspapers at the time, its earliest editions were blocks of text, packed closely together. 

It didn’t have headlines like the headlines seen today, only headings.  No photos broke up the text and provided visual interest. 

Advertising took up a good part of the front page, a practice that later became taboo among many newspapers (but later came back, with many papers running ads along the top and/or bottom of their front pages). 

The front page also contained a section detailing the paper’s vision for itself. 

“This paper aims to bring the best reading to every fireside,” it says in part. “Reading is a great thing, but it makes a big difference what you read. The Citizen brings, first of all, the news —not every tale of crime or horror, but the important news.” 

It goes on to detail that the news will include news from Washington and the state capital, as well as from soldiers and “our neighbors.”

Fifty years later, The Citizen had changed drastically. It contained photos, and the sort of headlines seen today. 

By 1970, the paper’s name had been changed to The Berea Citizen, and the look of the paper had evolved even more. Photos took up a little more of the space, though text remained tightly packed, and very short stories were added onto the bottom of columns under other stories. 

Ten years later, the Berea Citizen had again changed in some ways. Stories had begun to be jumped (started on one page and then continued on another). The pages also looked more like today’s papers in how their stories were laid out, with each having a headline. Gone were the tiny stories tucked into columns. 

It wasn’t until the 1980s that desktop publishing had taken off, to at least some extent. Until then, newspaper text had to be manually typeset, and ads and images arranged around the text. It was a long, painstaking process that required great care, as mistakes were not easily fixed.