These days we take the news for granted. The mix of factual reporting about things that happened recently, editorial commentary, and subscriptions advertising for financial support, seems obvious and permanent, whether it's in legacy print media, 24/7 cable, or radio supported by listeners like you. But of course, this wasn't always the case. There was a time when news itself was novel.


Russkaja - Here Is The News

Pettegree walks through the technological and social revolution that created news as we know it, from the 14th century to the 18th century. This revolution relied on two key bits of technology. The first was the printing press, and mechanical reproduction of text. The second was the postal service, as the ad hoc communication systems of the Middle Ages were converted to reliable and rapid courier routes that blended imperial political authority with commercial needs.

The social revolution is more diffuse, but roughly tracks with the rise of the bourgeois. Initially, the class of people who had to be informed of events was the relatively small political elite of the aristocracy, their religious counterparts in the leading figures of the Catholic Church, and a handful of international merchants. But through the early modern period, this grew to encompass the rising urban bourgeois, as well as those who saw themselves ideologically linked with the new conflicts of the Protestant Reformation.

The mature newspaper appears only at the end of this period, but Pettegree traces several intermediates. The first are printed pamphlets, a common and profitable venue for print shops which had filled out local demand for bibles and Greek and Latin classics. Pamphlets covered a single topic in detail, which could be news-like, such as significant recent battle, but often were astonishing and monstrous occurrences (fire in the sky, animals born of women, etc), and lurid accounts of murder that could be reprinted for decades after the actual event.

Another format was the avvisi, a hand-written account of significant events dispatched to a distant place. Avvisi's were born in Italy, and were narrow insider accounts of political maneuverings, private intelligent subscribed at great cost for an elite audience. But the information of the avvisi penetrated into the public sphere of oral accounts and rumors, passing from the great and influential to the small and often drunk. "What news?" became a greeting on the strength of reliable and distant truths in avvisis.

The newspaper, a serial, subscribed, and printed account of news only emerged in the late 17th century. Newspapers rapidly fell into two camps. One was anodyne official gazettes which collected foreign news and avoided domestic reporting aside from pro-government propaganda, whatever that domestic government might be. A second form was the journal, an opinionated, specialist periodical, whether for men of philosophy, fashionable gentlemen, or those engaged in a particular branch of commerce. Journals were often one-man shows, and lasted until the writer-editor-publisher-circulation agent burnt out under the constant need for new content. Journals also pioneered the combination of advertising and reporting which is the devil's bargain of news. Much like the posts, which relied on government subsidy and commercial access to enable reliable transmission of letters, ordinary people are unwilling to fund the peacetime infrastructure to get the facts they need in moments of crisis.


The book ends just as it gets interesting, with newspapers playing a key political role in the democratic revolutions in America and France that ended the 18th century. I think there's a really sharp 100 page monograph in here, which is covered over with interesting, but vaguely irrelevant details. For me, this book answered a question which had been raised in Anderson's Imagined Communities about the role of newspapers in creating nationalism, by showing how newspapers created themselves and their readership.