Andrew J. Aikens

Andrew Jackson Aikens, Sr. (October 31, 1828 – January 22, 1909) was an American newspaper publisher and editor who was associated for more than half a century with The Evening Wisconsin, a daily newspaper published in the city of Milwaukee.

Aikens is regarded as the creator of the "patent inside" preprinted sheet in 1863 — an early form of syndicated news and advertising content which helped to make the production of small weekly newspapers economically viable. At the time of his death it was estimated that some 10,000 newspapers — half of the weeklies in the United States — made use of some form of the preprinted page pioneered by Aikens.

Early years

Andrew Jackson Aikens, Sr. was born October 31, 1828, in Barnard, Vermont. He was the son of ethnic Scots, with American ancestors on his father's side dating back to colonists arriving in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1660 and his mother tracing family history back to the last surviving member of the Mayflower.

Aikens attended school until the age of 15, when he was graduated from high school. Following graduation, Aikens become an apprentice in the office of a printing office and newspaper located in Woodstock, Vermont. He married a second time in 1893, raising a son born in 1896 to his wife, the former Catherine Vine-Crehore of Minneapolis. Aikens instantly fell in love with the booming small Upper Midwestern town and decided to make a career as a journalist there, He quit the Evening Post not long after arriving to take a job as the first secretary of the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce. Despite his divergent political views, Cramer was quick to snap up the ex-President's namesake, Andrew Jackson Aikens, for his booming local publication, The Daily Wisconsin, which he had owned since June 1847. probably due to the preponderance of patent medicine advertising which they contained.

In 1868, Aikens was rewarded with a partnership in the publishing company which produced The Daily Wisconsin, which was henceforth known as Cramer, Aikens, & Cramer.

Cramer, Aikens, & Cramer soon generated a lucrative business around its "patent insides," with Aikens creating what he called "Newspaper Unions" making use of preprints that he created at dedicated printing facilities in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Nashville, and Memphis. – about half of the weekly papers in the country – used some form of the "patent insides" system of preprinted sheets that Aikens had developed, saving these local publishers millions of dollars in production costs. In June 1918, nearly a decade after Aikens' death, The Evening Wisconsin was sold to a former owner of the Milwaukee Daily News, who sold it in turn before the end of the year to Arthur Brisbane, prominent in the Hearst newspapers chain. The publication was consolidated into the Daily News and the Milwaukee Daily Press by Brisbane at the end of 1918.

Footnotes