What is an Ink Slinger?

^ĭngk ● sl^ĭng^ər

The "ink-slingers," as frontier editors were fond of calling themselves, followed, or perhaps even preceded, settlement at nearly every, tiny town site throughout the western frontier. Like the cowboys on the northern plains, they usually were young and from the East, with names and biographies mostly forgotten by historians. Their writings clung to an older-style journalism oriented to liberally mixing fact and opinion as necessary. Because so many newspapers lived and died on the western frontier at the tail of the last century, it is tempting to paint them with one brush, mostly alike in presentation and substance. Sometimes they launched self-righteous crusades; other times they downplayed local problems. Sometimes they were political, sometimes impartial. Sometimes they relied on the "patent insides," sheets pre-printed on one side with general news and advertisements and shipped in from large eastern cities. Other times they disdained ready-print.

Excerpt from COWBOYS AND COW TOWN NEWSPAPERS IN DAKOTA TERRITORY ● Volume 3, Number 1 ● North Dakota State University ● Ross F. Collins ●