Because this blog is highly topical, it is important that we examine only those events that are cutting edge and happening right now.

Now, much ink has been spilled (or should I say many keys stroked?) in attempting to explain how the man who was assumed to be a joke candidate ended up in office. The explanations are many, but something that caught my eye was the incredible number of articles more or less blaming new technology for the election of Trump and the erosion of democracy. According to these commentators, we are all living in filter bubbles that distort what we see of the world, causing us to have our own views reflected back at us, while eschewing opposing points of views.

This is hardly the first time technology has changed how we receive our news, however. With many current journalists harking back to the “good ol’ days” when newspapers were the primary gateway to current affairs (no vested interest there, of course), many forget that print itself was a revolutionary technology when it came to accessing news.

Interestingly, published news predates the printing press by almost two millennia. There are competing claims for the title of first published news, but a good contender is the Chinese dibao.¹ This was essentially a sort of gazette, or imperial bulletin published by the government. It was intended for bureaucrats and nobility, but seemed to have ended up in the hands of just about everyone. It was copied by hand, which, considering the breadth of China, is not mean feat. Even more impressively, these gazettes were put out by the Chinese government up until 1911.

China also lays claim to the first commercial news production. Amazingly, this was still before the invention of the printing press. During the early sixteenth century, literacy was massively on the rise in China, to the point where contemporary sources claimed “even within backwater counties, ‘many read books, and few even of the common people in the poorest villages are illiterate'” (p. 172). Consequently, business sprung up, copying and distributing news sheets by hand. Although at first almost certainly based on the dibao, these publishers seem to have supplemented these sources with their own news and information from the region, often contradicting what was said in the official gazettes.

Accounts of these businesses are sketchy, and no original copies of their work remain. In fact, the earliest reference we have to them comes from a high-ranking Chinese official writing an essay on border protection. Dated to the end of the 16th century, he was unhappy about the panic spread by supposedly false information about the military situation on the Northern border and wondered why these operators weren’t “strenuously prohibited” (p. 172).

China was not the only region where handwritten news was widely distributed. Although not centralised under any one government, written news was widely disseminated through Europe. In particular, merchants developed surprisingly elaborate networks of hand written letters to spread news. The greatest collection of letters appears to have belonged to a merchant from Prato, central Italy, Francesco Datini. During the late fourteenth century, he amassed a collection of more than 140,000 letters from 285 European and Mediterranean cities.

This system of news-letters was not just for merchants, however. In fact, there were many subscription services offered throughout Europe at the time, and many of these continued to operate even after the invention of the newspaper in 1605. One example was the service run by Giovanni Quorli, run between 1652 and 1668. During this time, he had roughly 60 subscribers and mailed each of them 245 letters from Venice, Paris, Milan, London, Vienna and Cologne. The first few pages would be written by the gazetteer, as they were known, and the rest were simply transcriptions of the news-letters being sent round. Quorli himself did not write all the letters, of course, and had others transcribe his words. He did leave careful instructions for his employees however, that the letters ought to be written with large writing so “Germans and the elderly might understand” (p. 60).

Interestingly, it seems that it was these subscription services that lead to the first modern newspaper. The first printed news periodical was the Mercurius Gallobelgicus. Rather than a regular newspaper, however, it was semi-annual. It was also so infamously inaccurate and poorly written that it was featured in poems by John Donne.²

Instead, the first regular newspaper was a weekly German paper with the catchy title: Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien. Unfortunately, rather than a milestone in the quest for truth, knowledge and objectivity, the success of the newspaper seems to have come about from laziness and stinginess. Although there is no surviving first edition of Relation, we do have a copy of a petition by the first author/editor Johann Carolus to begin the paper in 1605. In it, he basically argues that individually handwriting gazettes (which he had been doing up to that point) was far too long and arduous, and that, seeing as he’d already gone to the trouble of buying a printing press, he’d like to start printing newspapers for mass consumption.

The other half of the equation is why, under the Holy Roman Empire—an institution not known for its love of democracy and universal education—were newspapers allowed to exist? The short answer is that they seem to have been cheaper for the regime. Maintaining scribes to report on the various goings on at regional magistrates courts and such was expensive. Furthermore, the reports often couldn’t be trusted, as the scribes seemed to never forget who was paying their salaries. Consequently, even by 1695, one of the first people to study newspapers, Kasper Stieler, was able to conclude that newspapers were more objective “than correspondence from paid courtly flunkeys” (p. 77). In fact, he went so far as to advocate that scribes ought not to comment on the news “because one one does not read the newspaper in order to get educated and trained in analyzing the issues, but in order to know what happens here and there” (p. 78).

While much may have changed in how we receive the news today, it is good to know that some things never change, and that annoyance at overly political journalism is as old as newspapers themselves.

Bibliography

Brook, T 1999, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Infelise, M 2010, ‘News Networks Between Italy and Europe’ in Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, Asgate Publishing, Farnham.

Raymond J 2005, The Invention of the Newspaper: English newsbooks 1641-1649Oxford University, Oxford.

Weber J 2010, ‘The Early German Newspaper’, in Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, Asgate Publishing, Farnham.