The Fourth Page
October 5, 2026
On September 25, 1690, Boston printer Benjamin Harris published the first issue of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. It ran three pages of local and international news. The fourth page was blank. Most accounts say Harris left it for readers to write in their own news before passing the paper along.
Boston was an anxious town that fall. New England was at war with the French, smallpox had reached the colony, and, Harris wrote, false reports were being spread maliciously among his neighbors. He wanted people to understand public affairs at home and abroad. He hoped the paper would do something toward “the Curing, or at least the Charming, of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us.” He promised to print only what he had reason to believe was true and to correct any material mistake “in the next.”
There was no next. Within four days the governor and council shut the paper down. Harris had printed without a license, and the authorities objected to what they called “doubtful and uncertain Reports.” No other newspaper appeared in the colonies until 1704.
Histories of the free press usually follow the printers. Harris’s blank page argues that a free press also depends on its readers.
Two and a half centuries later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that freedom of expression belongs to every person, not only those who own the presses. Article 19 protects the freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” These three verbs describe more than the movement of information. We seek information to understand what is happening around us. We receive it to form our own judgments. The third asks more. When we forward a post or repeat a headline over dinner, we become someone else’s source. What we pass along carries our name, like a reader’s handwriting on Harris’s blank fourth page.
Now we have more blank pages than we could ever fill, and we fill them all day. Every comment thread and group chat is a fourth page. What we are losing is the first three: the information a reporter gathered at the city council meeting, checked, and published. A fourth page with nothing in front of it puts us back in the Boston that Harris was writing to, where neighbors passed along whatever they had heard and the “Spirit of Lying” had the run of the town.
Boise still has local news, though one of its largest newsrooms will soon have far less capacity to provide it. Last month, the Idaho Statesman‘s parent company, McClatchy, laid off ten journalists and three editors, cutting more than half of the Statesman’s newsroom as part of nationwide reductions. Michael Lycklama, who chairs the reporters’ union, recalled a newsroom of about 100 people twenty years ago. Soon there will be nine. Nine people cannot sit through every school board meeting, legislative hearing, and zoning session the rest of us miss.
Researchers have measured what places like Boise stand to lose. With less local reporting, communities experience lower voter participation, fewer candidates for office, and higher local government costs. Residents have less information about the decisions that affect their lives and fewer ways to hold public officials accountable. Article 21 of the Declaration promises everyone a voice in government. But a meaningful voice depends on knowing what the government is doing. That knowledge matters even more when leaders try to limit or control the press. Local reporters can follow a decision made in Washington or at the Statehouse to the classroom, the clinic, or the farm where it actually lands. Their reporting gives residents what they need to hold those decisions, and the people who make them, to account.
We cannot write the first three pages ourselves, but we can help make sure someone is still there to write them. We can seek out local reporting by subscribing to a newspaper, supporting public radio or nonprofit newsrooms, and showing up when decisions are on the agenda. We can receive information with care: read past the headlines and talk with neighbors who see things differently. And before we impart anything, we can ask where it came from. When we get something wrong, we can do what Harris promised and correct it in the next.
Harris trusted his neighbors with the fourth page. Three hundred and thirty-six years later, it is still ours to fill with care, and the first three are ours to protect.