The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself
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Authors: Andrew Pettegree
Copyright © 2014 Andrew Pettegree
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pettegree, Andrew.
The invention of news: how the world came to know about itself/Andrew Pettegree.
pages cm
ISBN 978–0–300–17908–8 (hardback)
1. Journalism—Europe—History. I. Title.
PN5110.P48 2014
070.09—dc23
2013041978
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: All the News that's Fit to Tell
Part I THE BEGINNINGS OF NEWS PUBLICATION
17 How Samuel Sewall Read his Paper
Maps
1
The imperial postal system in the sixteenth century2
Major European trade routes,
c.
15003
The circulation network of the
Gloucester Journal
, 1725
Introduction
All the News that's Fit to Tell
I
N
1704 the English writer Daniel Defoe embarked on the publication of a political journal: the
Weekly Review of the Affairs of France
.
1
This was not yet the Defoe made famous by his great novel
Robinson Crusoe
; he would discover his vocation as a novelist only late in life. Up to this point Defoe had tried his hand at many things, and often failed. The
Review
(as it soon became) was the latest of many attempts to find a way to make money. This time it worked. Within a few months Defoe's publication had found its new form, as a serial issued two or three times a week, consisting largely of a single essay on an item of topical interest.
Defoe was lucky. He had launched the
Review
at a time when the reading public was expanding rapidly, along with a market for current affairs. Naturally Defoe made the most of it. When, in an essay in 1712, he turned his mind to this buoyant market for news publishing, he did not hold back. The present times, wrote Defoe, had seen a media explosion. He recalled a time, even in his own lifetime, when there had been no such torrent of newspapers, state papers and political writing. The rage for news was transforming society, and Defoe was happy to be in the thick of it.
1
Defoe was not the only one to remark the current passion for news, and the rancorous tone of political debate that seemed to come with it. But if he truly thought this was new he was very much mistaken. The conflicts of the English Civil War over sixty years previously had stimulated a torrent of pamphlets, news reports and abusive political treatises. The first continental newspapers were established forty years before that. Long before Defoe, and even before the creation of the newspapers, the appetite for news was proverbial. ‘How now, what news?’ was a common English greeting, frequently evoked on the London stage.
1
Travellers could buy phrase books that offered the necessary vocabulary, so they too could join the conversation: ‘What news have you? How goeth all in this city? What news have they in Spain?’
1
If there was a time when news first became a commercial commodity, it occurred not in Defoe's London, or even with the invention of the newspaper, but much earlier: in the eighty years between 1450 and 1530 following the invention of printing. During this period of technological innovation, publishers began to experiment with new types of books, far shorter and cheaper than the theological and scholarly texts that had dominated the market in manuscripts. These pamphlets and broadsheets created the opportunity to turn the existing appetite for news into a mass market. News could become, for the first time, a part of popular culture.
This book, which traces the development of the European news market in the four centuries between about 1400 and 1800, is the story of that transformation. It follows the development of a commercial news market from the medieval period – when news was the prerogative of political elites – to a point four hundred years later when news was beginning to play a decisive role in popular politics. By the time of the French and American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, news publications were not only providing a day by day account of unfolding events, they could be seen to play an influential role in shaping them. The age of a mass media lay at hand.
Trusting the Messenger
Of course the desire to be informed, to be in the know, is in one respect as old as human society itself. People would go to some lengths to find out the news. In the eleventh century two monasteries in rural Wales, one hundred miles apart across rugged terrain, would every third year exchange messengers who would live in the other house for a week, to share the news.
1
This tale, related in a Tudor chronicle, points up one other important aspect of the information culture of that earlier period. Our medieval ancestors had a profound suspicion of information that came to them in written form. They were by no means certain that something written was more trustworthy than the spoken word. Rather the contrary: a news report gained credibility from the reputation of the person who delivered it. So a news report delivered verbally by a trusted friend or messenger was far more likely to be believed than an anonymous written report. This old tradition, where the trust given to a report depended on the credit of the teller, had an enduring influence over attitudes to news reporting. But this early news world is not easy to reconstruct. Verbal reports in the nature of things leave little trace for the historian: studying the early history of news is a matter of combing through scraps and fragments.
Bernard of Clairvaux, architect of the Cistercian order, sat at the centre of one of medieval Europe's greatest news networks. Those who visited Clairvaux in eastern France would bring him news of their travels; sometimes they would carry his letters away with them when they departed. We are unusually well informed about Bernard's news network, because over five hundred of his letters survive.
1
But in some respects Bernard is utterly characteristic of the news world of the medieval period. At this time regular access to news was the prerogative of those in circles of power. Only they could afford it; only they had the means to gather it. But even for these privileged individuals at the apex of society, news gathering was not unproblematic. They were fully aware that those who brought them news were likely to be interested parties. The travelling cleric who brought Bernard news of a distant episcopal election might be supporting one candidate; the ambassador writing home from abroad might be seeking to influence policy; merchants hoped to gain from a fluctuating market. Merchants, in particular, had a keen awareness of the value of information, and the dangers of acting on a false rumour. For the first two centuries of the period covered by this book merchants were both the principal consumers of news and its most reliable suppliers.
1