News

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  News is information about current events, and the famous dictum holds that "Dog Bites Man" is not news, while "Man Bites Dog" is. That single inversion captures something strange about the thing humans have chased for thousands of years. We want what is new, unusual, deviant, out of the ordinary. Government proclamations about royal ceremonies, laws, taxes, public health, and criminals have been called news since ancient times. Yet the word itself is young. So how did people learn what was happening before there were newspapers, before radio, before the internet pushed an insurmountable flow of stories into every pocket? Who controlled the channels the news travelled through, and why were those channels almost always tied to power? And what happens to the very idea of news when the line between the reader and the writer blurs beyond recognition?

• 2. The Word And Its Newness

  ›

  In the 14th century, the English word "news" emerged as a special use of the plural form of "new". In Middle English the equivalent was newes, much like the French. The same pattern appears across Slavic languages, in cognates from Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, the Polish nowiny, the Bulgarian novini, and Russian novosti. The Celtic languages echo it too, in the Welsh newyddion and the Cornish nowodhow. The newness baked into the word gives news an uncertain quality. This separates it from the careful investigations of history. Historians tend to see events as causally related expressions of underlying processes. News stories instead describe events in isolation and leave out the relationships between them. To make the news, an ongoing process needs a "peg", an event in time that anchors it to the present moment. Jessica Garretson Finch is credited with coining the phrase "current events" while teaching at Barnard College in the 1890s. That phrase named something people had always sought, even when the most important parts of a story happened long ago or were expected far in the future.

• 3. Criers, Couriers, And Proclamations

  ›

  In thirteenth-century Florence, criers known as banditori arrived in the market regularly to announce political news, convoke public meetings, and call the populace to arms. Laws set in 1307 and between 1322 and 1325 governed their appointment, conduct, and salary. The rules stipulated that a banditoro repeat a proclamation forty times and specified where in the city to read it. Announcements regarding the plague carried an extra protocol and were also read at the city gates. These proclamations followed a standard format. They opened with an exordium, then a statement, a request upon the listeners, and the penalty for those who would not comply. Smaller announcements, called bandi, might concern petty crimes, requests for information, or notices about missing slaves. Niccolò Machiavelli was captured by the Medicis in 1513, following a bando calling for his immediate surrender. The impulse to broadcast official words reaches much further back. In Egypt around 2400 BC, Pharaohs used couriers to spread their decrees across the territory of the state. Julius Caesar, on becoming dictator of Rome, began publishing government announcements called Acta Diurna, carved in metal or stone and posted in public places. Across cultures the spreaders of news stayed closely aligned with holders of political power, whether the runners of the Zulu Kingdom, the griots of West Africa, or the criers of the Ottoman Empire who read announcements in marketplaces and along highways.

• 4. Where News Gathered

  ›

  Among Zulus, Mongolians, Polynesians, and American Southerners, anthropologists documented the practice of questioning travelers for news as a matter of priority. Sufficiently important news would be repeated quickly and often, spreading by word of mouth across a large area. Public gathering places became natural hubs. News passed through the Greek forum and the Roman baths. Coffeehouses, traced from Arab countries and introduced to England in the 16th century, served as important sites for spreading news even after telecommunications became widely available. Travelers on pilgrimage to Mecca stayed at caravanserais, roadside inns that became hubs for gaining news of the world. In the Muslim world, people exchanged news at mosques and other social places. In late medieval Britain, reports called "tidings" of major events drew great public interest, as chronicled in Chaucer's 1380 The House of Fame. Even after printing presses came into use in Europe, news for the general public often still travelled orally, carried by monks, travelers, and town criers from one place to the next.

• 5. The Networks That Carried It

  ›

  The "Royal Road" traversed the Assyrian Empire and served as a key source of its power. The spread of news has always been linked to the communications networks in place to disseminate it, so political, religious, and commercial interests historically controlled and monitored those channels. The Roman Empire maintained a vast network of roads, the cursus publicus, for the same purpose. In China, the Han dynasty developed one of the most effective imperial surveillance and communications networks of the ancient world. Government-produced news sheets called tipao circulated among court officials during the late Han dynasty in the second and third centuries AD. Between 713 and 734, the Kaiyuan Za Bao, or "Bulletin of the Court", of the Tang dynasty published government news, handwritten on silk and read by officials. The world's first written news may have originated in eighth century BCE China, in reports compiled as the Spring and Autumn Annals, whose compilation is attributed to Confucius. In 1582 came the first reference to privately published newssheets in Beijing, during the late Ming dynasty. Japan built effective postal networks at several points in its history, first with the Taika Reform in 646 and again during the Kamakura period from 1183 to 1333. Runners called hikyaku and relay stations let news travel between Kyoto and Kamakura in 5-7 days, while horse-mounted messengers managed 170 kilometers per day. The Edo-period postal system reached average speeds of 125-150 km per day and express speeds of 200 km per day. Private services emerged, founding their own guild, a nakama, in 1668, and built an optical telegraphy system using flags by day and lanterns and mirrors by night.

• 6. Handwritten Sheets And The First Newspapers

  ›

  In 1556, the government of Venice published the monthly Notizie scritte, which cost one gazetta. These handwritten newsletters, the avvisi, conveyed political, military, and economic news to Italian cities between roughly 1500 and 1700. Sold by subscription under military, religious, and banking authorities, they reached clerics, diplomatic staff, and noble families. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, long passages from avvisi appeared in published monthlies such as the Mercure de France. For the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Maximillian I in 1490 authorized two brothers of the Italian Tasso family, Francesco and Janetto, to create a network of courier stations linked by riders. Beginning with a line between Innsbruck and Mechelen, the network expanded to Spain in 1505 under Maximilian's son Philip, with riders covering 180 kilometers in a day. The system became the Imperial Reichspost, run by Tasso descendants later known as Thurn-und-Taxis, who received exclusive operating rights in 1587. In 1620, the English system linked with Thurn-und-Taxis, and the German lawyer Christoph von Scheurl and the Fugger house of Augsburg became prominent hubs. The printing press changed the character of the news itself. With new markets in the 1500s, reporting shifted from factual, precise economic detail toward a more emotive and freewheeling format. The first newspapers emerged in Germany in the early 1600s. Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, from 1605, is recognized as the world's first formalized newspaper. The new format mashed together unrelated and sometimes dubious reports from far-flung locations, creating a jarring experience for readers used to a single, trusted correspondent.

• 7. Control, Boom, And The Press Unbound

  ›

  By 1530, England had created a licensing system for the press and banned "seditious opinions". Under the Licensing Act, publication was restricted to approved presses, exemplified by The London Gazette, which bore the words "Published By Authority". When Parliament let the Act lapse in 1695, a new era of Whig and Tory newspapers began, though the Stamp Act still limited distribution by making papers expensive. Censorship was even more constant in France, so many Europeans read newspapers from beyond their borders, especially from the Dutch Republic where publishers could evade state censorship. The new United States saw a newspaper boom from the Revolutionary era onward, spurred by subsidies in the 1792 Postal Service Act. By offering free postage to papers exchanging copies, the Act subsidized a growing network through which stories could percolate, since American papers got many stories by copying each other. By 1880, San Francisco rivaled New York in number of newspapers and copies per capita. Alexis de Tocqueville described the 1830s American as "a very civilized man prepared for a time to face life in the forest, plunging into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers." In France, the Revolution brought an abundance of newspapers and press freedom, then repression under Napoleon, with the Revolutionaries setting up a news ministry, the Bureau d'Esprit, in 1792. Newspapers reached sub-Saharan Africa through colonization. The Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser appeared in 1801, followed by papers in 1822 and the Liberia Herald in 1826, most promoting colonial governments. The first newspaper in a native African language was the Muigwithania, published in Kikuyu by the Kenyan Central Association, which took a strong stance for African independence.

• 8. The Wire And The Screen

  ›

  On the 11th of May 1857, a young British telegraph operator in Delhi signaled home to alert the authorities of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The electrical telegraph, often running along railroad lines, let news travel faster and farther, and concentrated it in the hands of wire services in major cities. Charles-Louis Havas founded Bureau Havas, later Agence France-Presse, in Paris, beginning in 1832 on the French government's optical telegraph network and turning to pigeons in 1840. His protege Bernhard Wolff founded Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau in Berlin in 1849, and another disciple, Paul Reuter, established the Reuters agency in London after immigrating there in 1851. Reuter pushed Reuters into a dominant position with the motto "Follow the Cable", opening outposts in Alexandria in 1865, Bombay in 1866, Melbourne and Sydney in 1874, and Cape Town in 1876. In 1865 Reuters had the scoop on the Lincoln assassination, reporting it in England twelve days after the event. By around 1900, Wolff, Havas, and Reuters formed a news cartel dividing the global market into three sections, each matching the colonial sphere of its mother country. The agencies prized distilling events into "minute globules of news", 20-30 word summaries, and gave rise to the "inverted pyramid" model that put key facts first. Broadcasting carried the news into the home. The British Broadcasting Company began transmitting radio news from London in 1922, hiring only broadcasters who spoke with upper-class accents, and gained importance during the May 1926 general strike when newspapers closed. By 1939-58% of Americans surveyed by Fortune considered radio news more accurate than newspapers, and 70% chose it as their main source. Television news watching rose sharply in the 1950s and supplanted radio by the 1960s. Ted Turner's creation of the Cable News Network in 1980 began a new era of 24-hour satellite news, and in 1996 the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera emerged as a powerful alternative to Western media, hiring many workers laid off when BBC Arabic Television closed in April 1996.