History of journalism

The history of journalism, or the development of the gathering and transmitting of news, spans the growth of technology and trade, marked by the advent of specialized techniques for gathering and disseminating information on a regular basis that has caused, as one history of journalism surmises, the steady increase of "the scope of news available to us and the speed with which it is transmitted. Before the printing press was invented, word of mouth was the primary source of news. Returning merchants, sailors and travelers brought news back to the mainland, and this was then picked up by pedlars and travelling players and spread from town to town. This transmission of news was highly unreliable, and died out with the invention of the printing press. Newspapers have always been the primary medium of journalists since 1700, with magazines added in the 18th century, radio and television in the 20th century, and the Internet in the 21st century.[1]

Early Journalism

World

Before the advent of the newspaper, there were two major kinds of periodical news publications: the handwritten news sheet, and single item news publications. These existed simultaneously.

The Roman Empire published Acta Diurna ("Daily Acts"), or government announcement bulletins, around 59 BC, as ordered by Julius Caesar. They were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places.

In China, early government-produced news sheets, called tipao, were commonly used among court officials during the late Han dynasty (2nd and 3rd centuries AD).

Europe

In 1556, the government of Venice first published the monthly Notizie scritte ("Written notices") which cost one gazetta,[2] a Venetian coin of the time, the name of which eventually came to mean "newspaper". These avvisi were handwritten newsletters and used to convey political, military, and economic news quickly and efficiently throughout Europe, more specifically Italy, during the early modern era (1500-1800) — sharing some characteristics of newspapers though usually not considered true newspapers.[3]

However, none of these publications fully met the modern criteria for proper newspapers, as they were typically not intended for the general public and restricted to a certain range of topics.

Early publications played into the development of what would today be recognized as the newspaper, which came about around 1601. Around the 15th and 16th centuries, in England and France, long news accounts called "relations" were published; in Spain they were called "relaciones".

Single event news publications were printed in the broadsheet format, which was often posted. These publications also appeared as pamphlets and small booklets (for longer narratives, often written in a letter format), often containing woodcut illustrations. Literacy rates were low in comparison to today, and these news publications were often read aloud (literacy and oral culture were, in a sense, existing side by side in this scenario).

By 1400, businessmen in Italian and German cities were compiling hand written chronicles of important news events, and circulating them to their business connections. The idea of using a printing press for this material first appeared in Germany around 1600. The first gazettes appeared in German cities, notably the weekly Relation aller Fuernemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien ("Collection of all distinguished and memorable news") in Strasbourg starting in 1605. The Avisa Relation oder Zeitung was published in Wolfenbüttel from 1609, and gazettes soon were established in Frankfurt (1615), Berlin (1617) and Hamburg (1618). By 1650, 30 German cities had active gazettes.[4] A semi-yearly news chronicle, in Latin, the Mercurius Gallobelgicus, was published at Cologne between 1594 and 1635, but it was not the model for other publications.

The news circulated between newsletters through well-established channels in 17th century Europe. Antwerp was the hub of two networks, one linking France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands; the other linking Italy Spain and Portugal. Favorite topics included wars, military affairs, diplomacy, and court business and gossip.[5]

After 1600 the national governments in France and England began printing official newsletters.[6] In 1622 the first English-language weekly magazine, "A current of General News" was published and distributed in England[7] in an 8- to 24-page quarto format.

The first newspaper in France, the Gazette de France, was established in 1632 by the king's physician Theophrastus Renaudot (1586-1653), with the patronage of Louis XIII.[8] All newspapers were subject to prepublication censorship, and served as instruments of propaganda for the monarchy. Jean Loret is considered to be one of France's first journalists. He disseminated the weekly news of music, dance and Parisian society from 1650 until 1665 in verse, in what he called a gazette burlesque, assembled in three volumes of La Muse historique (1650, 1660, 1665).

Britain

Germany

United States

Asia

China

India

The first newspaper in India was circulated in 1780 under the editorship of James Augustus Hickey. Named The Bengal Gazette ,[9] it mainly printed the latest gossip on the British expatriate population in India. On May 30, 1826 Udant Martand (The Rising Sun), the first Hindi-language newspaper published in India, started from Calcutta (now Kolkata), published every Tuesday by Pt. Jugal Kishore Shukla.[10][11] Maulawi Muhammad Baqir in 1836 founded the first Urdu-language newspaper the Delhi Urdu Akhbar. India's press in the 1840s was a motley collection of small-circulation daily or weekly sheets printed on rickety presses. Few extended beyond their small communities and seldom tried to unite the many castes, tribes, and regional subcultures of India. The Anglo-Indian papers promoted purely British interests. Englishman Robert Knight (1825-1890) founded two important English-language newspapers that reached a broad Indian audience, The Times of India and the Statesman. They promoted nationalism in India, as Knight introduced the people to the power of the press and made them familiar with political issues and the political process.[12]

Latin America

British influence extended globally through its colonies and its informal business relationships with merchants in major cities. They needed up-to-date market and political information. El Mercurio was founded in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1827. The most influential newspaper in Peru, El Comercio, first appeared in 1839. The Jornal do Commercio was established in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1827. Much later Argentina founded its newspapers in Buenos Aires: La Prensa in 1869 and La Nacion in 1870.[13]

Radio and television

The history of radio broadcasting begins in the 1920s, and reached its apogee in the 1930s and 1940s. Experimental television was being studied before the 2nd world war, became operational in the late 1940s, and became widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, largely but not entirely displacing radio.

Internet journalism

Further information: Online journalism and online newspapers

The rapidly growing impact of the Internet, especially after 2000, brought "free" news and classified advertising to audiences that no longer cared for paid subscriptions. The Internet undercut the business model of many daily newspapers. Bankruptcy loomed across the U.S. and did hit such major papers as the Rocky Mountain news (Denver), the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, among many others. Chapman and Nuttall find that proposed solutions, such as multiplatforms, paywalls, PR-dominated news gathering, and shrinking staffs have not resolved the challenge. The result, they argue, is that journalism today is characterized by four themes: personalization, globalization, localization, and pauperization.[14]

Historiography

Journalism historian David Nord has argued that in the 1960s and 1970s:

"In journalism history and media history, a new generation of scholars . . . criticised traditional histories of the media for being too insular, too decontextualised, too uncritical, too captive to the needs of professional training, and too enamoured of the biographies of men and media organizations."[15]

In 1974, James W. Carey identified the ‘Problem of Journalism History’. The field was dominated by a Whig interpretation of journalism history.

"This views journalism history as the slow, steady expansion of freedom and knowledge from the political press to the commercial press, the setbacks into sensationalism and yellow journalism, the forward thrust into muck raking and social responsibility....the entire story is framed by those large impersonal forces buffeting the press: industrialisation, urbanisation and mass democracy.[16]

O'Malley says the criticism went too far, because there was much of value in the deep scholarship of the earlier period.[17]

See also

Sources

References

  1. ↑ Shannon E. Martin and David A. Copeland, eds. "The Function of Newspapers in Society: A Global Perspective (Praeger, 2003) p. 2
  2. ↑ Wan-Press.org, A Newspaper Timeline, World Association of Newspapers
  3. ↑ Infelise, Mario. "Roman Avvisi: Information and Politics in the Seventeenth Century." Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 212,214,216-217
  4. ↑ Thomas Schroeder, "The Origins of the German Press," in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron. (2001) 123-50, especially page 123
  5. ↑ Paul Arblaster, Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European system of communications," Media History (2005) 11#1-2 pp: 21-36
  6. ↑ Carmen Espejo, "European Communication Networks in the Early Modern Age: A new framework of interpretation for the birth of journalism," Media History (2011) 17#2 pp 189-202
  7. ↑ "The Age of Journalism".
  8. ↑ Gérard Jubert, Père des Journalistes et Médecin des Pauvres (2008)
  9. ↑ Parthasarathy, Rangaswami (2011). Journalism in India. Sterling Publishers Pvt Ltd. p. 19. ISBN 9788120719934.
  10. ↑ Hena Naqvi (2007). Journalism And Mass Communication. Upkar Prakashan. pp. 42–. ISBN 978-81-7482-108-9.
  11. ↑ S. B. Bhattacherjee (2009). Encyclopaedia of Indian Events & Dates. Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. pp. A119. ISBN 978-81-207-4074-7.
  12. ↑ Edwin Hirschmann, "An Editor Speaks for the Natives: Robert Knight in 19th Century India," Journalism Quarterly (1986) 63#2 pp 260-267.
  13. ↑ E. Bradford Burns; Julie A. Charlip (2002). Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History. Prentice Hall. p. 151.
  14. ↑ Jane L. Chapman and Nick Nuttall, Journalism Today: A Themed History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) pp. 299, 313-314
  15. ↑ David Paul Nord, "The History of Journalism and the History of the Book," in Explorations in Communications and History, edited by Barbie Zelizer. (London: Routledge, 2008) p 164
  16. ↑ James Carey, "The Problem of Journalism History," Journalism History (1974) 1#1 pp 3,4
  17. ↑ Tom O'Malley, "History, Historians and the Writing Newspaper History in the UK c.1945–1962," Media History, (2012) 18#3 pp 289-310

Further reading

Asia

Britain

British Empire

United States

Magazines

Historiography

Online sources

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