mass media, 1882 style

Cincinnati, June 17, 1882.  The Philadelphia Athletics are in town and a game is scheduled.  It has been raining all night and into the morning, finally stopping at 10 o’clock.  Even once the rain stops, the ball field will be a mud pit.  The general assumption is that there will be no game.  But Lew Simmons, the manager of the Athletics (and a pioneer of blackface minstrelsy) insists on playing the game.  It is 1:15 in the afternoon.  Games normally start at 3:00 o’clock.  How to get the word out?

“It was now nearly 2 o’clock, and the news of the game must be gotten over town some way, and that right soon. The banner at Hawley’s was run out across Vine street. A bulletin was put up at this place also, announcing the game would be called at 4 o’clock, Manager Simmons consenting to this to give an extra hour to the grounds to dry up. An express wagon was called into use and sided with muslin placards announcing “game at 4 o’clock.” A band of music was an impossibility in the short time required to make the announcement, and by hard labor a drum and fife quartette were at last secured, put into the wagon, and the news was in this way run around town between 3 and 4 o’clock. It was the best that could be done, and even under these discouragements every body was surprised to see the attendance so large. Fifteen hundred and twenty-five people paid to enter the grounds, which the guarantors made fully sixteen hundred. The grounds were very soggy, and made running an uncertain amusement.”  Source: Cincinnati Commercial June 18, 1882

That is mass media as she was done in 1882