The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (3 page)

The trouble with the newspapers was that they were not very enjoyable. Although it might be important to be seen to be a subscriber, and thus to have the social kudos of one who followed the world's affairs, the early newspapers were not much fun to read. The desiccated sequence of bare, undecorated facts made them difficult to follow – sometimes, plainly baffling. What did it mean to be told that the Duke of Sessa had arrived in Florence, without knowing who he was or why he was there? Was this a good thing or a bad thing? For
inexperienced news readers this was tough going. People who were used to the familiar ordered narrative of a news pamphlet found the style alienating.

News pamphlets offered a very different presentation of news, and one far better adapted to contemporary narrative conventions. Pamphlets concentrated on the most exciting events, battles, crimes and sensations; and they were generally published at the close of the events they described. They had a beginning, a middle and an end. Most of all, news pamphlets attempted an explanation of causes and consequences. By and large, this being a religious age, news pamphlets of this sort also drew a moral: that the king was mighty; that malefactors got their just deserts; that the unfortunate victims of natural catastrophe were being punished for their sins.

The news reporting of the newspapers was very different, and utterly un--familiar to those who had not previously been subscribers to the manuscript service. Each report was no more than a couple of sentences long. It offered no explanation, comment or commentary. Unlike a news pamphlet the reader did not know where this fitted in the narrative – or even whether what was reported would turn out to be important. This made for a very particular and quite demanding sort of news. The format offered inexperienced readers very little help. The most important story was seldom placed first; there were no headlines, and no illustrations. And because newspapers were offered on a subscription basis, readers were expected to follow events from issue to issue; this was time-consuming, expensive and rather wearing.

This was not at all how most citizens of European society in these years experienced news. For them, great events might only be of interest when they impacted their lives directly. Even for the more curious, it was easy to dip in and out, to buy a pamphlet when it interested them, and, when not, to save the money for some other pursuit. This made far more sense in terms of the way events unfolded – sometimes momentous, sometimes frankly rather humdrum. The news pamphlets reflected this reality: that sometimes news was important, and provoked a flurry of activity on the presses, and sometimes it was not.

So it was by no means easy to persuade the inhabitants of seventeenth-century Europe that the purchase of news publications should be a regular commitment. It is not difficult to see why newspapers were so slow to catch on. Consumers had to be taught to want a regular fix of news, and they had to acquire the tools to understand it. This took time; the circle of those with an understanding of the world outside their own town or village expanded only slowly. For all of these reasons it would be well over a hundred years from the foundation of the first newspaper before it became an everyday part of life – and only at the end of the eighteenth century would the newspaper become a major agent of opinion-forming.

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Wochentliche Ordinari Zeitung
, Anno 1629. An early issue of a German newspaper. Crammed with information, but hard-going for the uninitiated.

The birth of the newspaper did not immediately transform the news market. Indeed, for at least a hundred years newspapers struggled to find a place in what remained a multi-media business. The dawn of print did not suppress earlier forms of news transmission. Most people continued to receive much of their news by word of mouth. The transmission of news offered a profound demonstration of the vitality of these raucous, intimate, neighbourly societies. News was passed from person to person in the market square, in and outside church, in family groups. Enterprising citizens celebrated exciting occurrences in song: this too became a major conduit of news, and one quite lucrative to travelling singers who otherwise would have struggled to make a living.
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Singing was also potentially very subversive – magistrates found it much more difficult to identify the composer of a seditious song than to close a print-shop.
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The more sophisticated and knowing could enjoy contemporary references at the theatre. Playgoing, with its repertoire of in-jokes and topical references, was an important arena of news in the larger cities.
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All these different locations played their part in a multi-media news world that coexisted with the new world of print.

These long-established habits of information exchange set a demanding standard for the new print media. We need to keep constantly in mind that in these centuries the communication of public business took place almost exclusively in communal settings. Citizens gathered to witness civic events, such as the arrival of notable visitors or the execution of notorious criminals. They heard official orders proclaimed by municipal or royal officials; they gathered around the church door to read ordinances or libels; they swopped rumours and sung topical songs. It is significant that in this age to ‘publish’ meant to voice abroad, verbally: books were merely ‘printed’.
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Printed news had both to encourage new habits of consumption – the private reading that had previously been an elite preserve – and to adopt the cadences and stylistic forms of these older oral traditions. Reading early news pamphlets, we can often hear the music of the streets, with all their hubbub and exuberant variety. Readers of early newspapers, in contrast, were offered the cloistered hush of the chancery. They were not to everybody's taste.

News Men

The complexities of this trade called for agility on the part of those who hoped to make money from news. Many who tried were disappointed. Pamphlet publishing was highly competitive, and only those whose connections gave them access to reliable sources of information could expect to flourish. Many of the first newspapers were remarkably short-lived. Those that survived often did so with a discrete subsidy from the local prince – hardly a guarantee of editorial independence. For much of Defoe's time writing the
Review
he was paid a secret retainer by one or other of England's leading politicians to promote their policies.
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Sir Robert Walpole coped with a critical press by buying the newspapers and making them his mouthpiece. He went on to become England's longest-serving eighteenth-century prime minister.

For most of this period there was not much money to be made from publishing news, and most of it went to those at the top of the trade. If some did grow rich, they were the proprietors: in the sixteenth century the publishers of the bespoke manuscript services, later the publishers of news-papers. A manuscript news-service was by and large the business of a single well-informed individual. As his reputation grew he might have found it necessary to employ an increasing number of scribes to make up the handwritten copies; but his was the sole editorial voice.

The first newspapers were put together in much the same way. The publisher was exclusively responsible for their content. His task was essentially editorial: gathering reports; bundling them up; passing them on. In
many cases the publisher was the only person professionally involved in this stage of the production process. He employed no staff and no journalists in the modern sense. Much of the information that made up the copy of the first newspapers was provided free: information passing through the rapidly expanding European postal service or sent by correspondence. Some of the newspapers were quasi-official publications with close connections to local court officials, who provided access to reliable information from state papers. Publishers found other ways to augment the meagre pickings from cover-price sales and subscriptions. For many, advertising became the mainstay of the business model; for others, obliging politicians with their gifts, pensions or promises of office paved the way to a better life.

The nature of the newspapers and the means of their compilation left little scope for what we might regard as journalism. The reports were not long enough to leave room for much in the way of comment or commentary. As the newspapers became more established in the eighteenth century some publishers employed a few stringers, men who would hang around the law courts or stock exchange hoping to pick up snippets of publishable material.
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But such men seldom leave much of a mark in the records. Although we will meet some colourful characters in these pages, this was not yet the age of the professional journalist. The information they provided was hardly ever valuable enough to command the exclusive service of one particular paper. Most sold their stories to whomever would have them. It is only with the great events at the end of the eighteenth century – the struggle for press freedom in England and the French and American revolutions – that newspapers found a strong editorial voice, and at that point a career in journalism became a real possibility. But it was always hazardous. As many of the celebrity politician writers of the French Revolution found, a career could be cut short (quite literally) by a turn in political fortunes. At least these men lived and died in a blaze of publicity. For others, the drones of the trade, snuffling up rumour for scraps, penury was a more mundane danger.

The Sinews of Power

The more sophisticated news market that emerged during this period depended on the construction of a network of communications. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries this too was steadily improved. The European postal networks became more intricate and more reliable. News reports became more frequent. It became easier to verify what one had heard from a second or third independent source. That this was possible was largely the result of the creation of far more efficient means of exchanging written
communication over long distances. At the beginning of the fourteenth century only the rich and powerful could afford the cost of maintaining a network of couriers; as a result, those in positions of power largely determined what information should be shared with other citizens. By the eighteenth century relatively ordinary citizens could travel, send and receive mail, or purchase news reports. The process of information exchange had been put on a rational commercial basis. Millions of communications now flowed along the arterial routes of European trade every year. News was abundant: now everyone could have an opinion, and many chose to express it.

In many respects the four prime considerations that governed the business of news – its speed, reliability, the control of content and entertainment value – were remarkably unchanging in these centuries. At different times one or other of these priorities would matter more to consumers of news than others; sometimes they would be in direct conflict. The truth was seldom as entertaining as tall stories; news men were often tempted to pass off the one as the other. But whatever the place and whatever the news medium, these four principles, speed, reliability, control and entertainment, express fairly succinctly the main concerns of those who gathered, sold and consumed the news.

The centuries with which this book is concerned witnessed a vast widening of horizons for Europe's citizens. The discovery of the Americas and the creation of new trade routes to Asia brought a fresh relationship with distant continents. But while these new discoveries have done much to shape our perceptions of those periods, just as important at the time was the quiet incremental revolution that brought citizens in touch with the neighbouring city, the capital and other countries in Europe. Sitting down to their weekly digest of news in any of a dozen European countries in 1750, men and women could experience the fascination of faraway events. They could obtain, through regular perusal, a sense of the leading personalities of European society, and the disposition of its powers. Four centuries previously such knowledge would have been far less widely shared. In this earlier period for the vast majority of citizens news of life outside the village, or the city walls, depended on chance encounters with strangers. Many such citizens would have little knowledge of the world beyond, unless directly affected by the local consequences of high politics or warfare. This was a very different time for news. What we do detect, however, even at this earlier date, is a hunger for information, even if it could only be satisfied for those in the highest reaches of politics and commerce. This was the same hunger that in the centuries that followed would set European society on the road towards a modern culture of communication.

PART ONE

THE BEGINNINGS OF NEWS PUBLICATION