With the advent of wireless telegraphy, oceangoing ships could communicate with stations on either side of the Atlantic. For five dollars, the Marconi Company's station on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, would report the arrival of ships to their steamship companies. In 1901 the New York Herald contracted with Marconi to lease the services of the Nantucket station in order to gather the news from Europe as quickly as possible. The desire of the Herald for news from any incoming ship conflicted with the Marconi Company's policy of noncommunication with any ship that did not lease its services.

Marconi also provided news service in the opposite direction, providing news from shore to passengers on ships. While transmission grew less reliable with distance and the telegraph operators' prose showed considerably less color than that of newspaper writers, passengers enjoyed the novelty of news produced at sea. On...