“In this system, newspaper editors doubled as local party officials. They could speak on behalf of the campaign and routinely held formal positions on local or state committees. This gave Jackson an independent outlet for coordinating and spreading the Democratic Party message, an outlet owned and operated by the campaign and facilitated in no small part by postal laws that permitted newspapers to circulate through the mail free of charge. Editors took advantage of the free postage by subscribing to a multitude of papers from across the country and excerpting what other editors were writing, creating something of a crude national political message machine.[snip]
“In terms of what they produced and how they worked creatively with the technology at their disposal, what Jacksonian Democrats did with inexpensive printing technology more closely models today’s progressive bloggers than any subsequent media-influenced political transformation.”