The Boston Globe's Early 20th Century Website

In the days before radio, fans crowded Newspaper Row (a section of Washington Street downtown) to follow big games on the Globe’s scoreboard. Hundreds “watched” the Red Sox beat the New York Giants four games to three in the 1912 World Series. (photo dated Oct. 18, 1912)

Chris Marstall (h/t The Dish):

But this isn’t the first time the paper has tried a free, real-time, ad-supported product. From at least the turn of the century until the 1950s, Globe staff shuttled back and forth throughout the day from the newsroom to the street. There they wrote breaking news headlines and sports scores on four blackboards and two enormous sheets of newsprint. Behind the Globe’s windows? Ads.
Breaking news – a bank holdup, a bus accident, the death of FDR – was quickly featured on the storefront (NB: usually in 140 characters or less). The storefront even offered streaming multimedia of a kind: telegraph dispatches of boxing matches and baseball games were shouted out play by play through a pair of loudspeakers.
Different “layouts” were used. During World War II an outsized map of Europe loomed over the storefront. For Red Sox World Series appearances, a scaffold was built. Sports desk hacks stood on it to chalk up the scores for bowler-hatted crowds numbering in the hundreds.

I remember in the movie Eight Men Out where people were crowded around a big board with a diamond and scoreboard in a hotel lobby, and were "watching" the game.  It was the exact same setup as ESPN Gamecast, which I would use to track the Reds during a day game at work.  Here are pictures of the same thing in Boston.  It is interesting to think that things haven't changed that much since the invention of the telegraph, but the speed has only increased significantly.  There is no actual difference between Donald Rumsfeld's aide Tweeting that Bin Laden is dead or somebody who was in the telegraph office when news of the assassination of McKinley came in running down to the tavern and telling people.  I forget things like that sometimes.