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

by Andrew Pettegree

  This seems an absurd banality, though the tradition of the mundane and parochial still lives on in many a local newspaper. But it does draw attention to the extent to which governments were still the direct source of a large part of the newspapers’ copy. Even at the end of the eighteenth century official publications remained a crucial conduit of news and information. This was last discussed in this book as an element of the expanding sixteenth-century news market, when governments across Europe began to pump out printed proclamations and ordinances, both as broadsheets and in pamphlet form.33 But this did not end with the arrival of new commercial forms of news publication. From the seventeenth century excerpts and entire texts of official publications were simply absorbed into serial news publications. And governments continued to issue their ordinances in traditional ways, posted up in public places and cried out on the market square. In an age before universal literacy such verbal publication continued to play an important role in the dissemination of news.

  For the new classes of readers newspapers were unsatisfactory in other ways. Right up until the end of the eighteenth century, newspapers were wholly unillustrated. Those who wanted to obtain a visual representation of great events had, like Jan de Boer, to buy engravings or woodcuts as separate sheets. This intermittently vibrant market helped those who followed the news to create a picture of great events.34 But the illustrated sheets had then to be combined with the narrative account in the newspaper or pamphlet by the purchasers themselves. The striking, dramatic juxtaposition of words and pictures artfully deployed in the painting of news stories still lay in the future.

  Customers also worried about the accuracy of the newspapers. In 1757 de Boer was trying to keep up with reports of the war between Prussia and Austria. Although he followed the news closely, he was bewildered by contradictory reports: ‘How one is to reconcile all these different reports is quite beyond me, and I shall leave it to those wiser than myself.’35 The real problem was that news from faraway places, which still dominated the newspapers’ pages, was so slow to arrive. In this respect there was no great improvement in the provision of the news from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Groningen papers were actually more up-to-date in their coverage of news stories in 1750 than they would be in 1800.36 The truth was that once the European postal network had been completed in the mid-seventeenth century, nothing much further could be done to speed the news. It would require the major technological innovations of the nineteenth century, the telegraph and the railways, to bring significant change. At that point the results were spectacular. In 1823 foreign news took an average of eighteen days to reach the Leeuwarder Courant. Fifty years later this was reduced to four.37

  Did this matter? In one sense news is fresh to anyone who hears or reads it for the first time. Its value as a recreational or didactic text is not reduced by the time it takes in transit; if it is an older tale refreshed it does not need to be new at all to make its point. This is true for many of the new consumers of news in this book, but certainly not for opinion formers for whom speed of transmission had always been critical. For them, just as four hundred years previously, access to reliable sources of news was a central attribute of power, and they continued to look beyond the newspapers to procure it.

  The Itch Grown a Disease

  Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries the number of those who had regular access to news had expanded enormously. The news media were slow to adapt to this changing public, particularly in their tone and style. It is important to remember that professional news services made their debut in an age when the word ‘client’ described the producer, not the potential purchaser. A news man offered himself to a great nobleman or prince in much the same way that a poet would present his sonnets, or an artist a portrait, in the hope of reward. Even when this service was monetised, the tone in which news writers tendered for custom was very much that of a tradesman plying his wares.38 This tradition of clientage was maintained through to the eighteenth century when paid hands like Daniel Defoe or Samuel Johnson wrote in return for pensions or salaries; or indeed in the long, languid and pampered career of the Paris Gazetteer, his respectful and undemanding hymns to royal prerogatives protected from competition by royal monopoly.

  In a similar way the style of newswriting adhered stubbornly to that developed to inform and brief Europe's ruling classes. News evolved from confidential briefings, to commercial newsletters, and then became embedded in the first newspapers, without substantial change in style or organisation. One could argue that the new generations of readers who bought these papers would be flattered to be treated to information that had previously passed only among the secret counsels of the governing classes. Perhaps they were; but they would have been hard put to understand it. Newspaper men recognised no duty to explain. If readers chose to have these reports of foreign politics explained to them, or indeed if they wanted to find out what was going on in areas more relevant to their own lives, they were forced to rely on traditional mechanisms of news distribution, primarily conversation.

  So much news and most interpretation and analysis were conveyed by word of mouth. This indifference to the real-life experience of the reader, or construction of an imagined reader, continued into the lofty classical allusions of Jean-Paul Marat in the French Revolution. To the end of our period news men give a distinct impression that they are more concerned to earn the approbation of their social superiors, or their fellow writers, than of their hard-pressed readers. News was writer, rather than public, centred. The reader is obliged to take it or leave it; they must buck up and keep up.

  The remarkable thing is that so many of Europe's citizens did choose to enter this esoteric world of printed news. ‘You cannot imagine,’ wrote John Cooper in 1667, ‘to what a disease the itch of news is grown.’ The medical analogy is telling; for many news had become one of the necessities of life.39 That in times of great events they should purchase pamphlets is less surprising. The need for explanations, exhortations or tokens of fidelity provides sufficient explanation of the huge pamphlet surges that accompany all great events in this period. More surprising is the desire to take a regular diet of news even in times, as the newspapers would sometimes disarmingly confess, when there really was none.

  The answer seems to be that newspapers were valued only partly for what they contained, and at least as much for what they represented. They offered readers a glimpse into a world far beyond the experience of the everyday. A glimpse, indeed, into many worlds: of countries they would never visit; battles they would thankfully never fight; of potentates and princes they would never meet, and who would barely spare them a glance if they did. Such worlds they could sample in works of history or travel narratives, but in the newspapers they were brought to them in an unpredictable miscellany, without narrative, and all for the price of a steak pie or a quart of ale. It was possible to be without the newspaper, but once it was there it quickly became an accoutrement of a polite life; a sign that a citizen had reached a certain place in society from which retreat would be painful. Newspapers had entered the lifeblood of European society. There would be no going back.

  Conclusion

  IT is easy to see why, for those engulfed by the tumultuous events at the end of the eighteenth century, it seemed that a decisive moment had been reached in the history of communication. The newspaper had come of age. A French revolutionary journalist, Pierre-Louis Roederer, set out the case with admirable clarity in an essay ‘on the different means of communication of ideas among men in society’. Newspapers, he argued,

  contained only the latest and most pressing news; they had more readers than books or other forms of printed matter that customers had to seek out in bookstores, because, thanks to hawkers and postmen, newspapers sought out their audiences. Journals had a greater social impact than other media because they were read by all classes and because they reached their audience every day, at the same time … in all public places, and because they were the almost obl
igatory diet of daily conversation.1

  News men had endured much in the three centuries since, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, news had first become a commodity. Now they saw the means to achieve not only influence, but dignity. No longer would they be, in their own eyes at least, despised and put-upon tradesmen, but ‘the tribunes of the people’. Here is Camille Desmoulins, writing in Révolutions de France et de Brabant:

  Here I am a journalist, and it is a rather fine role. No longer is it a wretched and mercenary profession, enslaved by the government. Today in France, it is the journalist who holds the tablets, the album of the censor, and who inspects the senate, the consuls and the dictator himself.2

  The sense of unlimited possibilities is palpable, and it captures very well a strand of commentary that continued through the nineteenth century. This would be a great age of newspaper triumphalism. By 1835 an American commentator (naturally a journalist) could ask: ‘What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life?’ ‘Books have had their day – theatres have had their day – religion has had its day …. A newspaper can be made to take the lead in all these great moments of human thought.’3

  This was heady stuff. One can see why the French Revolution, which witnessed the sudden, tumultuous emergence of a voracious press, should have made such an impact on contemporaries. In France the contrast between the controlled press of the Ancien Régime and the freedom of the revolutionary years was particularly stark. But even in their own terms the claims made for the press were somewhat overblown. Was the press really more important than the agitation on the streets, the debates in the National Assembly, or the heated discussions in the Jacobin Club that, for instance, sealed Danton's fate? The Terror was underpinned by Robespierre's control of the Committee of Public Safety, a body of no more than a dozen people.

  In this triumphant praise of the periodical press we see strong echoes of the salutations that accompanied the birth of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, and intermittently ever since. Print was widely celebrated by scholars and printers, themselves heavily involved in the new industry, for its transformative role in society. Looking back we can see in those wide-eyed encomia to progress a great deal of false prophecy and rationalised self-interest. It reminds us that of all the technological innovations of that busy era, print was unique in its capacity for self-advertisement. Guns, sailing ships and improvements in navigation were all critical to the European domination of the non-European world, but none could hymn their own achievements in quite the same way.

  All of this helps explain why, since the history of news first came to be written, the development of the newspaper has traditionally taken centre stage. The first systematic histories of news were all written during a period when the newspaper was not only the dominant form of news delivery, but appeared likely to remain so. The history of news was to a very large extent, at least before the advent of television, the history of newspapers. The period before the invention of the newspaper is reduced to the status of pre-history.

  Now, as we re-enter a multi-media environment in which the future of newspapers looks decidedly uncertain, we can take a rather different perspective. As the first chapters of this book have demonstrated, there was plenty of scope for the circulation of news before newspapers, indeed, before the invention of printing. When newspapers made their appearance their progress was halting and uncertain. From the first (and at the time widely celebrated) experiments with a periodical press at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to the decisive breakthrough at the end of the eighteenth, would be a full two hundred years. Even during this time, a period of rapid expansion for the European economy in every way conducive to the development of an ever more sophisticated news market, the coverage of the periodical press was decidedly patchy. Spain lagged a long way behind developments in other countries, and this was also true of Italy, which had been until the end of the sixteenth century the very heart of the world's news market. Rome had no newspaper before the eighteenth century; here, the manuscript newsletters remained at the heart of the city's vibrant marketplace of news.4 In Spain, even the traditional leaders of society pursued their power struggles by paying for the publication of broadsheet libels that could then be distributed on the streets.5 It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century that newspapers established a relatively full coverage in all parts of western Europe.

  Why was the advance of the newspaper not more rapid? One reason, it is clear, is that the periodical press was attempting to make its way in a complex communications environment, where news was already disseminated relatively effectively in a large variety of ways, by word of mouth, letter, non-serial print, proclamations, pamphlets and so on. To many consumers newspapers did not seem much of an advance on these well-established conduits of news: indeed, in some respects they represented a retrograde step. To drive this point home we only need to look at what have traditionally been regarded as the defining characteristics of periodical news: periodicity and regularity; contemporaneity; miscellany (presenting many different strands of news) and affordability. We can see that what scholars have described as important advances all had drawbacks when seen through the eyes of contemporary consumers.

  First, periodicity. We have seen that the idea of a newspaper, a gather-up of the week's news from many parts of Europe that could be delivered economically to subscribers, initially appeared very attractive. It offered a window onto a sophisticated world of politics and high society previously closed to all but the few. At first it was rather gratifying to be initiated into the complex, exotic world of court life and international diplomacy; but with time it became rather wearing. The constant enumeration of diplomatic manoeuvres, arrivals and departures at court and military campaigns could be repetitive and increasingly mundane: particularly as the significance of these events, if not immediately apparent, was never explained. The apparent virtue of a newspaper, its regularity, became something of a burden.

  18.1 An early issue of a Spanish paper. Despite almost a century since the first newspaper in Germany, the style is still very rudimentary.

  This was not just a new way of reading the news. To many it involved a total redefinition of the concept of news. Most of those who had followed the news to this point would have done so irregularly. When news piqued their interest they could purchase a pamphlet; they were most likely to do so when, for one reason or other, they felt personally touched by events. Now with the newspapers they were offered an undigested and unexplained miscellany of things that scarcely seemed to concern them at all. Much of it must have been completely baffling.

  The extent of this transformation appears more starkly if we look a little more closely at the pamphlets that bore the main burden of reporting contemporary events in the first age of print. Reading these works we get a vivid sense of our ancestors’ fascination with the extraordinary. News pamphlets are filled with disasters, weather catastrophes, heavenly apparitions, strange beasts, battles won, shocking crimes discovered and punished. In contrast, much of what was reported in the newspapers was necessarily routine and unresolved: ships arrive in port, dignitaries arrive at court, share prices rise and fall, generals are appointed and relieved of command. This might have been critical information for those in the circles of power and commerce, but for occasional news readers there was nothing to compare with the sighting of a dragon in Sussex.6

  Pamphlets and news broadsheets allowed the discerning reader to dip in and out of the news as they chose. They also reflected accurately one great truth inimical to the periodical press: that news was actually more urgent at some times than others. Two centuries of regular daily papers and news bulletins have trained us out of an appreciation of this. Yet when we turn on a news bulletin and hear, as the first item, that a committee of legislators has reported that some government activity could be accomplished a little bit better, then perhaps we may conclude that our ancestors had a point.

  So it is with the other great
‘advances’ introduced with the newspapers. The contemporaneity of newspapers, a recital of the latest despatches from nine or ten of Europe's capitals, represented an abandonment of the customary narrative structure of news. A pamphlet would most usually describe a single event from beginning to end. It would be conditioned by knowledge of how matters had concluded – who had won a battle or how many had died in an earthquake. It could offer proximate causes, explanations and draw lessons. The newspapers in contrast offered what must have seemed like random pieces from a jigsaw, and an incomplete jigsaw at that. Even for regular subscribers there was no guarantee that the outcome of events described would be reported in the following issues. There was no way that editors could know which of the strands of the information reported from Cologne or Vienna would turn out to be important. And they had no way to pursue stories independent of the manuscript newsletters and foreign newspapers from which they constructed their copy: they could not contact their own correspondent in those places, because they did not yet have one.

  Confronted with this miscellany of brief reports from Europe's news centres, newspaper readers were offered little help in finding their way to the news of most critical importance. Newspapers had not yet developed the design sophistication, or editorial capacity, to point up the most important stories, or lead their readers into understanding. Because verbatim reports and despatches were regarded as inherently more truthful, newspapers tended to avoid interpolations that would actually have assisted their readers in following the news. This form of editorial guidance was far more likely to be found in pamphlets. As for affordability, in the case of periodicals this was often more apparent than real. Although an individual copy of a newspaper might only cost a couple of pence, a regular subscription represented a more substantial investment. It also required the development of a considerable infrastructure on the part of the publisher so that copies could be delivered to their readers.