The first newspapers
Newspaper development can be seen in three phases: first, the sporadic forerunners, gradually moving toward regular publication; second, more or less regular journals but liable to suppression and subject to censorship and licensing; and, third, a phase in which direct censorship was abandoned but attempts at control continued through taxation, bribery, and prosecution. Thereafter, some degree of independence has followed.
Commercial newsletters in continental Europe
The newsletter had been accepted as a conventional form of correspondence between officials or friends in Roman times, and in the late Middle Ages newsletters between the important trading families began to cross frontiers regularly. One family, the Fuggers, were owners of an important financial house in the German city of Augsburg; their regular newsletters were well-known even to outsiders. Traders’ newsletters contained commercial information on the availability and prices of various goods and services, but they also could include political news, just as the contemporary financial editor must consider the broader sweep of events likely to influence economic transactions. The commercial newsletter thus became the first vehicle of “serious” news, with its attempt at regular, frequent publication and concern with topical events generally.
The newsletter usually accorded primacy as a definite newspaper is the Relation of Strasbourg, first printed in 1609 by Johann Carolus. A close rival is the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung (Zeitung is the German word for “newspaper”), founded in the same year by Heinrich Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. In 1605, in the Low Countries, Abraham Verhoeven of Antwerp had begun publication of the Nieuwe Tijdingen (“New Tidings”), although the earliest surviving copy is dated 1621. In any case, this historical rivalry is evidence of a fairly sudden demand for newspapers at the start of the 17th century, and the continuous publication of the Nieuwe Tijdingen indicates that this demand soon became well-established. Although these publications were emerging throughout western Europe, it was the Dutch, with their advantageous geographical and trading position, who pioneered the international coverage of news through their corantos, or “current news.” The Courante uyt Italien, Duytsland, &c. (“News from Italy, Germany, and Elsewhere”) began to appear weekly or twice-weekly in 1618.
Similar rudimentary newspapers soon appeared in other European countries: Switzerland (1610), the Habsburg domains in central Europe (1620), England (1621), France (1631), Denmark (1634), Italy (1636), Sweden (1645), and Poland (1661). English and French translations of Dutch corantos were also available. But signs of official intolerance emerged fairly soon, and censorship stifled newspaper development in the late 17th century and into the 18th century in continental Europe. In Paris in 1631, the Nouvelles Ordinaires de Divers Endroits (“Common News from Many Places”), a publishing venture by the booksellers Louis Vendosme and Jean Martin, was immediately replaced by an officially authorized publication, La Gazette, published under the name of Théophraste Renaudot but with influential backing by Cardinal de Richelieu. The new publication was to continue (as La Gazette de France) until 1917, casting the shadow of authority over nonofficial newspapers throughout its life. The first French daily—Le Journal de Paris—was not started until 1777; and although the Revolution of 1789 brought a temporary upsurge in newspaper publishing, with 350 papers being issued in Paris alone, the return to monarchy brought another clampdown. Napoleon I had his own official organ—Le Moniteur Universel, first published by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (one of a family of booksellers and writers) in 1789 and lasting until 1869—and during his reign there were only three other French newspapers.
In Germany, early newsletter development was soon hampered by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), with its restrictions on trade, shortage of paper, and strict censorship. Even in peacetime censorship and parochialism inhibited the German press. Among the important regional newspapers were the Augsburger Zeitung (1689), the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin (1705), and the Hamburgische Correspondent (1714). In Austria the Wiener Zeitung was started in 1703 and is considered to be the oldest surviving daily newspaper in the world. The oldest continuously published weekly paper was the official Swedish gazette, the Post-och Inrikes Tidningar; begun in 1645, it adopted an Internet-only format in 2007. Sweden is also notable for having introduced the first law (in 1766) guaranteeing freedom of the press, but the concept of an independent press barely existed in most of Europe until the middle of the 19th century, and until then publishers were constantly subject to state authority.
Early newspapers in Britain and America
Britain
The British press made its debut—an inauspicious one—in the early 17th century. News coverage was restricted to foreign affairs for a long time, and even the first so-called English newspaper was a translation by Nathaniel Butter, a printer, of a Dutch coranto called Corante, or newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France, dated September 24, 1621. Together with two London stationers, Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer, Butter published a stream of corantos and avisos (Spanish: “warnings” or “announcements”), including a numbered and dated series of Weekley Newes, beginning in 1622. But a number of difficulties confronted a prospective publisher: a license to publish was needed; regular censorship of reporting was in operation from the earliest days; and foreign news no longer appeared because of a decree by the Court of the Star Chamber (in force from 1632 to 1638) completely banning the publication of accounts of the Thirty Years’ War.
Between the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 and the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649, publishers enjoyed a short spell of freedom from strict official control. Publication of domestic news began to appear more regularly, shedding the original book form. News and headlines increasingly replaced the old title page. The English Civil Wars (1642–51) acted as a stimulus to reporters and publishers, and 300 distinct news publications were brought out between 1640 and 1660, although many of these were only occasional reports from the battle front, such as Truths from York or News from Hull. Some contemporary publications, using words such as Intelligencer, Scout, Spy, or Post in their names, reflected the bellicosity of the times, but the less-politicized word Mercury still abounded on many newspaper mastheads, including those of propaganda papers such as Mercurius Academicus (Royalist) and Mercurius Britannicus (Parliamentarian). The Parliamentarian victory brought strict control of the press from 1649 to 1658, and the restored monarchy was even more absolute, with the press being restricted to just two official papers. During the period of the Licensing Act (1662–94), an official surveyor of the press was given the sole privilege of publishing newspapers. The concept of the newspaper of record—the public documentation of legal notices—was established with the Oxford Gazette (founded 1665 and renamed the London Gazette within months), which was eventually followed by the Edinburgh Gazette (founded in 1699) and the Dublin Gazette (founded in 1706, but renamed Iris Oifigiúil in 1922 when the Belfast Gazette was founded). The Glorious Revolution (1688–89) produced a return to more permissive publishing laws and the first provincial presses were set up, starting with the Worcester Post Man (1690).
As it developed, the British press would remain principally a national one centred on Fleet Street in London. Appearing briefly was Lloyd’s News (1696), issuing from Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, which had become a centre of marine insurance. The subsequent Lloyd’s List and Shipping Gazette (from 1734), with its combination of general and shipping news, exemplified both the importance of the City of London’s financial activities to the newspapers and the importance of a reliable and regular financial press to business.
In the early years of the 18th century, the British newspaper was approaching its first stage of maturity. After 1691, improvements in the postal system made daily publication practical, the first attempt at doing so being the single-sheet Daily Courant (1702–35), which consisted largely of extracts from foreign corantos. A more radical departure was the triweekly Review (1704–13), produced by Daniel Defoe, in which the writer’s opinion on current political topics was given, introducing the editorial, or leading article. Defoe had been imprisoned, in 1702, for his pamphlet The Shortest Way with Dissenters, but many eminent British writers were being attracted to the newspapers. Henry Muddiman had gained eminence as the “journalist” who edited the London Gazette (from 1666). John Milton had edited the Mercurius Politicus under Oliver Cromwell, and Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, The Spectator (published daily 1711–12). The Spectator and The Tatler (triweekly, 1709–11, also written by Steele) are commemorated in the modern magazines of the same name (see below Magazine publishing), but their incorporation of social and artistic news and comment influenced the content of the contemporary newspaper permanently. Sales of the popular Spectator sometimes ran as high as 3,000 copies, and already this circulation level was enough to attract advertising. An excise duty on advertisements was introduced by the Stamp Act (1712), along with other so-called taxes on knowledge aimed at curbing the nascent power of the press. The rate of duty, at one penny on a whole sheet (four sides of print), was the same as the cover price of The Spectator, and this effective doubling of the price killed it, along with many other newspapers. But the newspaper had already become a permanent part of the social and literary life in London, and not even higher duties could prevent the proliferation of newspaper titles throughout the century.
Typical of the new breed of English papers was The Daily Advertiser (1730–1807), which offered advertising space along with news of a political, commercial, and social nature. An important gap in the political pages was filled from 1771, when the right to publish proceedings in Parliament had been granted. This right was not won lightly, for illicit accounts of debates in the House had appeared in the monthly Political State of Great Britain (1711–40) and every effort had been made to stop them. But campaigners such as the political reformer John Wilkes (with the North Briton, 1762) eventually won out. Politicians of both Whig and Tory sympathies ran their own often scurrilous newspapers or simply bribed journalists with occasional handouts and annual stipends, but later in the century there emerged a more sophisticated reader who demanded, and received, an independent viewpoint. Eminent newspapers of the time included the Morning Post (1772), The Times (from 1788, but started as the Daily Universal Register in 1785), and The Observer (1791). Censorship continued in the guise of frequent libel prosecutions, and as late as 1810 the radical political essayist William Cobbett was imprisoned and fined for denouncing flogging in the army, but the principle of a free press, at least in peacetime conditions, had been firmly established.
North America
In North America, publication of newspapers was deterred during colonial times by the long arm of the British law, but after independence the United States could boast one of the world’s least restrictive sets of laws on publication. A first attempt at publishing, albeit abortive, was made in Boston by a radical from London, Benjamin Harris, in 1690. His Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, intended as a monthly series, was immediately stopped by the governor of Massachusetts. It was clear that free speech and a nonofficial press were not to be tolerated in the colonies. Boston was also the site of the first official newspaper, The Boston News-Letter (1704), with which the authorities replaced the proclamations, pamphlets, and newsletters previously used to convey news from London. In 1719 the original title was replaced by the Boston Gazette, printed by Benjamin Franklin’s elder brother, James, who soon produced the first independent American newspaper, the New-England Courant of 1721. William Bradford founded the first New York City newspaper, the New-York Gazette, in 1725, and his son Andrew was the first newspaper proprietor in Philadelphia. Further expansion of the colonies created 37 different titles by the outbreak of the American Revolution.
Colonial editors were aware of their responsibilities in creating a historical record of what was to be the new nation, and they cooperated in passing news to one another. In the absence of municipal offices, the printing office and newspaper headquarters often became a vital centre of community life. But frontier tensions led to passionate arguments, and newspapers became closely involved with political change. The Boston Tea Party (1773) itself is said to have been planned in a back room of the Boston Gazette, already nicknamed “Monday’s Dung Barge” by loyalists. After independence the burning issues created with the new republic were aired in many new papers, most of which took up highly partisan stances. Thomas Jefferson and the first Republicans (later Democrats) were supported by the Philadelphia Aurora (1790), while Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists benefited from the support of the Gazette of the United States (1789–1818). Many city papers moved from weekly to daily publication, the first of these being the Pennsylvania Evening Post in 1783. The Pennsylvania Packet changed its name to Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser when it became a daily in 1784, indicating a new source of revenue for newspapers; and this was confirmed by the New-York Daily Advertiser (1785), the first to be published as a daily from the beginning.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically guaranteed “the freedom of speech or of the press.” The right to criticize the government had been established as early as 1735, however, when John Peter Zenger, the publisher of the New-York Weekly Journal, was acquitted of criminal libel. After the temporary Alien and Sedition Acts (1798–1801), which included censorship clauses, were repealed, newspapers in the United States returned to polemics and public campaigns and set off on a course that was to help shape the modern character of the popular newspaper worldwide.
Early newspapers in Japan
A long tradition of news publication existed in Japan in the form of yomiuri (“sell and read,” as the papers were sold by reading them aloud) or kawara-ban (“tile-block printing,” the method of production). The kawara-ban broadsheets appeared continuously throughout the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), reporting popular festivals, natural disasters, important events such as the siege of Osaka Castle in 1615, and personal scandals—notably the double suicides fashionable during the Genroku period (1688–1704). Although much reporting concerned fairly innocuous occurrences, most writers preferred to remain anonymous for fear of the punishments that could be imposed by the shogunate officials for unauthorized public discussion of political and social problems.
Era of the Industrial Revolution
By 1800 educated citizens of most European countries and the United States could expect some access to independent news coverage and political comment, even if it was only to be found in clandestinely published newssheets. The basic formulas for serious newspapers and commercially successful, if sensational, popular newspapers had been worked out by shrewd writers and editors—members of the new profession of journalism. These formulas were to be elaborated throughout the 19th century, and by the end of the century the modern pattern of newspaper ownership and production had already been set in the United States and Britain, with newspapers passing from the realm of literature to that of big business.
Technological advances
New technology influenced newspapers both directly, through the revolution in printing techniques, and indirectly, through the rapid developments in transport and communications. In printing technology, necessity determined invention when the demand for newspapers exceeded the few thousand weekly copies required of the most popular titles. In 1814, the steam-driven “double-press” was introduced at The Times in London, allowing an output of 5,000 copies per hour. The higher output was a contributing factor in the rise of The Times’s circulation from 5,000 to 50,000 by the middle of the century. The hand-operated wooden press used for books, newspapers, and single sheets alike was further pushed into obsolescence by the invention of mechanical lead type, the Fourdrinier machine (which produced cheap cellulose paper in rolls), curved printing plates, automatic ink-feeds, and, in 1865, the cylindrical rotary press.
The main breakthrough, however, did not take place until the end of the century, with the introduction of automatic typesetting on Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine. Until then, each line of words to be printed had to be lined up and justified (made to fill exactly the allotted space between margins) by hand. After printing, the letters were replaced in alphabetical order by hand for reuse. The new machines were operated by a keyboard which selected a matrix for the correct letter from a channel in the magazine; the line of text was automatically justified (made to fill the line exactly by adjusting the space between words); the line of lead type was cast; and the matrices were automatically returned to the correct channels, thus saving the need for the lengthy process of manual distribution. The first Linotype machines were introduced at the New York Tribune in 1886 and in Britain at the Newcastle Chronicle in 1889. By 1895 every publisher in Fleet Street (then the centre of London newspaper publishing) was using the new machines. Linotype keyboard operators could set copy six times faster than the hand compositor. Electricity, introduced in 1884, was also a spur to the printing industry, as were machines that could not only print but could also cut, fold, and bind together newspapers of any size.
The content of newspapers was also transformed by the speeding up of communication, which allowed news to be gathered instantly from distant cities via the telephone or even from foreign countries through the seabed cables laid between Dover, England, and Calais, France, in 1851 and across the Atlantic in 1866. In 1815, when the mounted courier and the packet boat represented the chief means of getting news, it ordinarily took four days before news of an event as near as Brussels could be reported in London. The railway and other improvements in communications, such as the telegraph, revolutionized the news reporter’s conception of time and space. The railway networks not only moved reporters rapidly to and from their destinations but also helped to distribute newspapers, thus making them a more urgent and attractive commodity. Rapid and widespread delivery, especially in Britain and France, gave the larger newspapers based in capital cities a national status.
Foundations of modern journalism
The creation of new industrial occupations in society as a whole was reported by a new set of newspaper reporters who had far more specific jobs than their 18th-century predecessors. Earlier journalists might write, edit, and print each copy of the paper by themselves. Even in the 19th century, James Gordon Bennett handled nearly every aspect of publishing a daily newspaper when he founded the New York Herald in 1835. With the expansion of newspapers, full-time reporters, whose job was to go and get the news, were recruited, and they replaced many occasional correspondents, although there was always room for the stringer, a part-time reporter based in a small town or a remote region. William Howard Russell, a reporter for the London Times during the Crimean War (1853–56), became famous as one of the first war correspondents, and his writings inspired Florence Nightingale to take up her mission to Crimea. More than 150 war correspondents reported on the American Civil War (1861–65). The reporter could become as celebrated as the soldier, and vigilant reporting could perhaps prevent some of the atrocities perpetrated in wartime. In peacetime the fearless on-the-spot reporter hoping to “scoop” rival papers for a big story also became a folk hero, and his byline (the name or nom de plume published with the article) could become better known than that of the editor.
The expense of employing a large team of reporters, some of whom could be out of the office for months, proved impossible for smaller papers, thus paving the way for the news agency. The French businessman Charles Havas had begun this development in 1835 by turning a translation company into an agency offering the French press translated items from the chief European papers. His carrier-pigeon service between London, Paris, and Brussels followed, turning the company into an international concern that sold news items and that, eventually, also dealt in advertising space. Paul Julius Reuter, a former Havas employee, was among the first to exploit the new telegraphic cable lines in Germany, but his real success came in London, where he set up shop in 1851 as a supplier of overseas commercial information. Expansion soon led to the creation of the Reuters service of foreign telegrams to the press, an organization that grew with the spread of the British Empire to cover a large part of the world. In the United States, meanwhile, a very different type of agency—the newspaper cooperative—had arisen. Six New York City papers were the founding members; they suspended their traditional rivalries to share the cost of reporting the war with Mexico (1846–48) by establishing the New York Associated Press agency. Between 1870 and 1934, a series of agency treaties divided the world into exclusive territories for each major agency, but thereafter freedom of international operation was reinstated. The press agencies ensured a continuous supply of international “spot news”—i.e., the bare facts about events as they occur—and raised standards of objective news reporting. For their feature pages, American newspaper editors came to rely on the feature syndicates, which supplied ready-to-use material that could range from medical columns and book reviews to astrological forecasts and crossword puzzles.
