In studying the history of the American press, little attention has been given to printing networks and the apprenticeship system, factors which permitted the press not only to survive but to grow. Essential to press growth was the apprenticeship system, vocational education which replenished and augmented the craft's practitioners. Apprentices provided cheap labor, but they could also be used, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated, to create a printing network, an informal web of printers formed by Franklin's decision to make partners of apprentices and journeymen whose character, skill, work ethic, and political ideology impressed him. With Franklin supplying the capital and materials for his workers to set up shop, his partners formed associations and became economically viable. This signaled a movement away from reliance on political and social elites, who had helped support the press in order to control a means of articulating and generating support for their views. The fact that a segment of the laboring class assumed control of American mass communication presaged an increase in political activity among the lower classes. The printing activities of Franklin and his cohorts indicate the significance of loosely-formed but influential networks among printers. These structures enlarged the scope of the early-American printing trade, aided in the dissemination of information and opinion, and impressed the significance of journalism upon the collective consciousness of early America. (Fifty-nine footnotes are appended.) (MM)