Introduction
The Evening times-Republican (also known as the Daily times Republican, Marshalltown times-Republican, and Times-Republican). This paper started out as being an eight-page daily newspaper that was published every day with the exception of Sundays. In 1915 the paper was mostly published with having 12 pages per issue but could be as long as 16 pages. In 1900 there appeared to be about 8 pages in each newspaper and each issue had about seven columns. On the other hand, in 1920, each issue appeared to have about fourteen pages and about eight columns per page. In both 1900 and 1920 the newspapers reported mostly local and state news but there were some mentions of international news. As far as advertisements are concerned, the issues in 1900 have a fair number of advertisements on some pages but there are still plenty of pages that do not have any advertisements at all. In 1920 there are clearly a lot more advertisements than there were in previous years.
The front page of these newspapers covered a variety of news stories such as sport news coverage, political news, as well as crime stories such as murder. Mostly national, regional, and local news were covered but there was some international news as well. News stories involving murder in the year 1900 appeared on pages 1 and 3 while 2 of 20 murder stories appeared on page 2. In 1920 the stories of murder appeared on page 1 while 4 of 20 stories appeared on pages 2, 3, and 12.
The stories involving murder were relatively short in length with an average of 114 words. The longest story was a 300-word report from Iowa detailing a trial involving alleged murderer Tim Hickey. The shortest story was a 26-word report from Virginia about an African American man who killed someone and was then hung.