In 1605 Johann Carolus of Strasbourg applied to the local magistrates for permission to print his weekly news service. This is now universally accepted as the first newspaper. Europe already had a lively market for printed news, and an established *genre of manuscript news services (known as avvisi). Carolus himself ran one such news agency, so his new print version was in effect mechanizing an existing service. The Strasbourg Relation is the first newssheet taken to meet the criteria that distinguish a newspaper from other forms of printed information: regularity, frequency, general availability (in contrast to the limited readership of the manuscript avvisi), and a miscellany of news reports.
The new innovation spread very quickly, particularly in the German Empire (Strasbourg was at this point a German city). The year 1631 saw the foundation of the Paris Gazette, a state-sponsored venture that would, with regional reprints, hold an effective monopoly of printed news in France for 150 years. The newspapers also found a ready audience in the Dutch Republic. By 1618, Amsterdam had two competing weekly newssheets, each of which would be in continuous publication for over fifty years (elsewhere, newspapers often failed to find a sustainable commercial model and quickly failed). The Dutch were also the first to introduce paid advertising, first for newly published books, then for other goods and services. This showed the way toward commercial viability: elsewhere in Europe newspapers often depended on government subsidy to continue publishing. In England, confusions of royal policy inhibited the growth of the press, but with the foundation of the London Gazette in 1665, the English press embarked on a trajectory that would, with the growth of London and precocious party politics, soon place it at the center of the newspaper world.
The seventeenth century also saw the development of an embryonic code of journalistic ethics. The difficulties of news supply obliged newspapermen to pay special attention to the accuracy and reliability of news reports. Newspapers were careful to record when a report was uncorroborated or uncertain. The first papers relied on a miscellany of reports from around the European news hubs. Those who gathered the news, often also the suppliers of the more exclusive manuscript news services, remained largely invisible: none of the reports in the newspapers, headed only with a terse dateline (“from Rome, 3 January”) were signed. The editor played no organizational role beyond choosing which news to place in the newspaper, typically a miscellany of ten to fifteen short paragraphs totaling around two thousand words. The reports were presented with no commentary or explanation. Newspapers had no opinion: the concept of the editorial lay far in the future.
This high-minded austerity began to break down in the eighteenth century, first in England under the pressure of party politics, then with the American and French Revolutions. In London, the audience for news was large enough to sustain competing Whig and Tory papers. To defend his policies, Prime Minister Robert Walpole assembled a stable of newspapers whose editorial loyalty was ensured by government subsidy. Despite the high-profile campaigns by John Wilkes for liberty of speech, most London newspapers remained paid instruments of either government or opposition to the end of the century. In the American colonies, the high-minded principle of political neutrality, eloquently encapsulated by Benjamin Franklin, was sustained until the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765. The attempt to impose on the colonial papers the same regime of taxation applied in London united the colonial press in indignant opposition. Although the Stamp Act was quickly withdrawn, the newspapers remained politically engaged. In France, the revolutionary years produced a torrent of new publications, many essentially publicity vehicles for revolutionary leaders such as Robespierre, Marat, and Brissot. Yet some principles survived the revolutionary assault: although newspapers engaged in vigorous mutual denunciation, they did not compete on price.
One of Napoleon’s first acts on taking power was to rein in the press. The reactionary regimes established in continental Europe after the Congress of Vienna (1815) generally followed suit. In the United States, in contrast, the newspapers were rewarded for their patriotic fervor by a constitutional guarantee of press freedom. As important, and uniquely, the federal post office was obliged to transport newspapers at low cost: this was a conscious attempt to create an informed political nation. Between 1776 and 1800, the number of newspapers in the United States increased from twenty-five to 230. By 1850, this had grown to twenty-five hundred, including 373 dailies.
In many respects, the nineteenth century was the golden age of the newspaper. Innovations in design and business practice, technological breakthroughs, and a huge advance in male and female *literacy created a true mass market. Newspapers led political debate and became by far the most important suppliers of news. On the production side, the most crucial innovation was the incremental introduction from the 1820s of the steam press. This allowed a huge multiplication of the number of copies that could be printed in a day, crucial in the major metropolitan markets, London, Paris, and New York. But the costs of the new technology were prohibitively high, and traditional handpresses continued to be used in the smaller markets (here, the substitution of an iron frame for the wooden handpress had already doubled production capacity).
The advent of the railways improved distribution and offered some improvement in the speed of news gathering. Here the crucial, transforming innovation was the invention of the telegraph (1837). In contrast to the telephone at the end of the century, the telegraph spread quickly. Access to news improved immeasurably, particularly for newspapers outside the metropolitan hubs. In the 1860s and 1870s, the introduction of wood-pulp paper reduced production costs.
Newspapermen were not slow to realize the opportunities of the new reading public. In 1830s New York, two innovative editors, Benjamin Day (the Sun) and James Gordon Bennett (New York Herald), published papers that mixed trenchant political commentary with reports of lurid crimes and local scandal: certainly there was no return to the age of innocence, and little pretense of objectivity. Most newspapers took a strongly political stance, and many editors, among them Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid, harbored political ambitions. In continental Europe political turbulence, especially the revolutions of 1848, were propelled by a mass of newly published newspapers. When the revolutions were extinguished, so was the radical press.
Outside the United States, press controls, either by taxation or by prepublication censorship, were dismantled only in the period 1860–80. Even after this, most newspapers were solid supporters of the prevailing political and social orthodoxies. This was even more the case as newspapers expanded over the globe with the imperial powers. India had its first paper, the Bengal Gazette, in 1780; in Australia the Sydney Gazette was established in 1803. Newspapers reached New Zealand with the first major immigrant settlement in 1839; Hong Kong had its government Gazette in 1841. Another enduring legacy of the nineteenth century was the establishment of the press agencies: Reuters in 1851, the Associated Press in 1848, and the Press Association in 1868. They continue to play a vital role today in providing newspapers around the world with a supply of copy.
In the twentieth century, the birth of radio, then television, challenged the newspaper monopoly of fresh news. Newspapers adapted, with more pages and new features, reflecting the new appetite among customers with increased leisure time and spending power for sports news and soft lifestyle stories. Improvements in photography opened further new avenues for reporting and more attractive designs. Journalism finally became a recognized profession, with the first training courses, and attempts by men like Walter Lippmann to adumbrate new theories of ethical journalism. These ethical principles were sorely tested by the great world conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–45. In Soviet Russia, Germany, and Italy the press became the supine vehicle of government propaganda; in the fighting democracies, the search for victory imposed irresistible pressures toward conformity. In occupied countries such as the Netherlands, a vibrant underground press helped salvage battered self-respect, as it would again in communist Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989.
None of these existential challenges damaged demand for newspapers. Despite the competition of broadcasting, circulation remained strong, though a consolidation of local markets gradually reduced the number of titles. The *digital challenge, at the end of the twentieth century, was of a different order. The inexorable progress of the *internet giants gave new consumers unmediated access to multiple sources of free news, and, most crucially, ravaged newspapers’ advertising income. The number of journalists employed fell precipitately as newspapers frantically cut costs. Some were able to compete by entering the digital market as purveyors of online news, trading on their established authority and professionalism. This was all the more welcome as the cacophony of news stories placed the core values of truth telling and objective reporting under ever greater strain. For the first time in over four centuries, the place of newspapers in the ecology of news and political debate seems seriously under threat.
Andrew Pettegree
See also censorship; newsletters; political reporting