The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

The first to make money from selling news were a group of discreet and worldly men who plied their trade in the cities of Italy. Here in Europe's most sophisticated news market they offered their clients, themselves powerful men, a weekly handwritten briefing. The most successful ran a shop full of scribes turning out several dozen copies a week. T

If we examine the management of opinion in one particularly important jurisdiction – the great imperial city of Augsburg – it is striking how often these interventions were prompted not by print but by seditious singing. In 1553 a bookseller got into trouble when he passed around a tavern a song mocking Charles V's recent humiliation at the siege o

Couriers were expected to keep to strict timetables. In the 1420s couriers from Florence were expected to reach Rome in five or six days, Paris in twenty to twenty-two, Bruges in twenty-five and Seville, a journey of two thousand kilometres, in thirty-two days. The annotations on the letters exchanged between Andrea Barbarigo in Venice and correspo

The broadsheets concentrated on the most arresting cases, such as the man who allegedly disguised himself as the Devil to commit his crimes.38 Cases like this shaded easily into the wider literature of sensational and supernatural events that were the stock in trade of the news broadsheets. Publishers and woodcut artists turned out a steady diet of

Since the Protestant Reformation these systems of pre-publication inspection of copy (more theoretical than practical) had been reinforced by brutal penalties for any who challenged the local orthodoxy. Printers knew they had to tread carefully. But it would be wrong to ascribe the overwhelmingly loyalist tone of the news pamphlets primarily to cen

It is always possible in retrospect to isolate nuggets of truth in a blizzard of contradictory intelligence reports, and marvel that they were not acted upon. At the time it is never so obvious. The English government already possessed by 1586 an exact logistical plan of the proposed Spanish invasion of England. But even as the Armada prepared to s

The Neue Zeitungen were comparatively brief texts, almost invariably continuous pieces of prose devoted to a single news report. This marks them out from the more varied digests of news presented in the merchant correspondence, or in the manuscript newsletters that would be the true ancestors of the newspaper.38 This prose structure did, however, a

The trouble with the newspapers was that they were not very enjoyable. Although it might be important to be seen to be a subscriber, and thus to have the social kudos of one who followed the world's affairs, the early newspapers were not much fun to read. The desiccated sequence of bare, undecorated facts made them difficult to follow – sometimes,

In the sixteenth century this yearning for swift and reliable information also led to the establishment of the first private news offices, dealing in confidential news on a subscription basis. These news agencies, with their commercially distributed manuscript news-sheets, are by far the least known of the communication media of the period. But the