In 1850 Milwaukie and Portland each boasted a weekly (98), and Oregon City stll had the Spectator. The census of 1850 listed two newspapers for Oregon territory (99), classifying one as miscellaneous, with a circulation of 624 and the other as political, with a circulation of 510. These statistics are probably useful chiefly as indicating the slowness of communication in those pioneer days; for the papers referred to are, doubtless, the Spectator, and, probably, either the Free Press, Oregon City, April to December, 1848, or the Oregon American and Evangelical Unionist, Tualatin Plains, between June, 1848, and May, 1849.
The two papers in 1850 were the Western Star, at Milwaukie, launched in November, and the Oregonian, at Portland, launched the next month, both too late for inclusion in the census of 1850. As a matter of strict accuracy, unless some paper of the late 40's is here overlooked, Oregon was entitled to credit for but one newspaper in the 1850 census, the twice-a-month Oregon Spectator, which became a weekly in 1850; both the others had been dead for months before 1850 arrived. The seventh census (1850) credited Oregon with three editors and 11 printers. The territory was credited with a population of 13,294.
The census of 1860, which listed its newspaper figures under the heads of Mortality and Miscellaneous Statistics, credited Oregon with two dailies before the Oregonian, eleven weeklies, and one religious weekly. Several of these papers had come into the field between the time when statehood was granted and the deadline for the figures for the 1860 census. To give an idea of how Oregon stood journalistically in relation to the rest of the country, it is noted here that the 1860 census credited Washington territory with four weeklies and no dailies; California with 22 dailies, 3 biweeklies, 2 tri-weeklies, 1 monthly, or a total of 96 newspapers, besides 4 religious weeklies and 2 religious monthlies, 9 "literary" weeklies and 1 literary monthly. The country at large had 372 dailies, 74 bi-weeklies (100), 84 tri-weeklies, 2,694 weeklies, 15 monthlies, 1 quarterly, and 2 annuals, a total of 3,242 publications listed as "political" papers. The two other divisions (religious and literary) totaled 277 and 298, respectively.
The two Oregon dailies had a circulation of 800; twelve weeklies had 14,820 weekly, both together total slightly above 1,000,000 annually, in whole number of copies, or about three days' supply for the Portland of today. This is something close to 20,000 copies a week. Washington territory had 2,350 weekly circulation, and California papers had 58,444 daily, 131,249 weekly, and enough of other frequencies to bring the annual whole-Number total to 26,111,788, or about 25 times the Oregon total.
The distribution for the country at large was close to 900 times as much as that for Oregon, or 927,951,548 copies.
