She Kept the Paper Coming

Cedar Valley News
August 10, 2026
She Kept the Paper Coming
By Teresa Nikas

Last week I wrote a sentence mildly critical of a county decision. Nothing fiery. A few lines suggesting the road money might have been better spent. I ran it, the paper went out, and the worst thing to happen all week was a frosty voicemail from a man who disagreed. I did not think about it again. There is the whole point. I did not have to think about it again.

There was a time when putting out a paper with a sentence like mine could cost you everything. Anna Catharina Zenger lived then.

In the autumn of 1734, in New York, the royal governor had a newspaper publisher arrested. His name was John Peter Zenger, whose small weekly paper had spent a year needling the governor for greed and abuse of office. The charge was seditious libel, which did not care whether the words were true. Truth, the court held, made the offense worse, not better, since a true insult stung the powerful more sharply than a false one. Zenger was thrown in jail, where he sat the better part of a year while they built their case.

And here is the part history mostly forgets. The paper did not die with his arrest. It missed a single issue, the very next one, which is easy to understand. It takes a week to get organized when the man who runs things is suddenly in a cell. And then it missed no more. Week after week the paper came out on time, needling the governor as before, put out now by Zenger’s wife, Anna. She published the paper her husband was jailed for publishing, and kept it coming until the day he walked free. She is remembered now, when she is remembered at all, as the first woman to publish a newspaper in America. Mostly she is not remembered.

When the trial came, in August of 1735, Zenger’s lawyer argued something nobody was supposed to say out loud. He told the jury the words were true, and asked them to decide whether a true thing could be a crime. The judge instructed them it could. Twelve ordinary New Yorkers went out, came back in a few minutes, and said, not guilty. The room erupted. And a plain idea, radical for its hour, took root in American soil. Truth is a defense. You cannot be punished for publishing what is so.

I think about Anna Zenger when I put this paper to bed at night. Because the freedom I use so casually, to write a mild complaint and never fear a knock at the door, was not handed down from the powerful. The powerful were the ones doing the jailing. It came up from below. From a publisher stubborn enough to keep needling from a cell. From a wife stubborn enough to keep the paper coming without him. From twelve neighbors stubborn enough to look a hand-picked judge in the eye and refuse him. Ordinary people, all of them, doing the unglamorous work of not backing down.

There is a phrase this paper tries to live by. The real power is not in persuasion but in truth. I did not understand, until I read about Anna Zenger, how literally it was once meant. Truth was the defense. It was the thing you stood on when the governor came for you. She stood on it week after week, while the man who shared her name sat in the dark, waiting to learn if the truth would be enough to save him.

It was. Barely, and late, but it was.

The next time this paper runs something you disagree with, pick up the phone and tell me so. I am glad you can. I am gladder still neither of us has to be brave to do it. Somebody was the brave one already, and she asked no credit and got very little. Her name was Anna Zenger. My part in this paper is only the words, and this morning they cost me nothing. Hers was to publish them, when doing so could have cost her everything, and after the first hard week she did not stop until her husband walked free.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Whose quiet courage do you owe a freedom you use without thinking? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the town of Cedar Valley is fictional, the Zengers were real. In seventeen thirty-four the royal governor of New York had the newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger jailed for seditious libel over his New-York Weekly Journal, which had criticized the governor; under the law of the day, the truth of a statement was no defense. During the roughly nine to ten months of his imprisonment, his wife, Anna Catharina Zenger, kept the paper in publication, missing only the first issue after his arrest and then continuing it every week until his release, and she is often called the first woman to publish a newspaper in America, though its content was largely guided by his allies. On August fourth, seventeen thirty-five, a jury acquitted Zenger, accepting attorney Andrew Hamilton’s argument for truth as a defense. The case is regarded as a milestone toward American freedom of the press. Sources include the Historical Society of the New York Courts and Britannica.

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