Title: The Invention of News
Author: Pettegree, Andrew
Published by: Yale University Press
Year: 2014
First published: Yale University Press, 2014
Date reviewed: 11.15
ISBN: 978-0-300-17908-8

This is a moderately heavyweight and academic account of the development of news media in Europe over the 15th to 18th centuries, but it is not dry or sterile. It describes the changes in spoken, written and printed transmission of ‘news’, illustrated with reference to the major and some minor historic events of the times.

At the start of the 15th century, and for a long time before then, secular and religious rulers and merchants relied on messengers, envoys and travellers for reports of what was happening outside their domains. For most people who could not afford access to such networks news spread slowly by word of mouth, proclamation in town squares and marketplaces, gossip and songs in taverns. Travellers were avidly quizzed – “What news?” The status of the messenger was important in judging the reliability of the news he brought.

Around this time or a little earlier the rich and powerful in some parts of Europe could subscribe to manuscript newssheets, ‘avvisi’, duplicated by copying by hand and distributed via the vagaries of messengers taking their chances on the roads. In one form or another avvisi lasted into the eighteenth century before finally giving way to the emerging dominant media, the newspaper.

The arrival of printing in the mid-15th century gave an easier and cheaper way of duplicating newssheets and over the next hundred years more and more people could afford either the terse unembellished reporting of received news of the manuscript or printed newssheets, or the more lurid and illustrated broadsheets sold for a few coins to the general public.

The first printed newspapers appeared in Germany and the Low Countries in the early 16th century. Their spread was closely tied to the growth of postal networks across Europe, which Pettegree documents in detail. The Thirty Years War and the English Civil War were the catalysts of a swift growth of the early newspapers in the first half of the 17th century, and the American War of Independence and the French Revolution similarly boosted the development of this medium at the end of the 18th century.

Throughout the period the printed press was heavily regulated, and publishing was an occupation which could easily land the publisher in trouble. Governments and rulers only wanted good news stories, and the canny printer would practise a fair degree of self-censorship in return for a lucrative monopoly granted by the state. The varying degree and nature of regulation in different parts of Europe, together with the different pace at which postal services (also regulated) grew meant that new media spread at remarkably different rates in different countries.

By the end of the period Pettegree covers, the periodic newspaper – daily or twice/thrice weekly – was establishing itself as the dominant medium for the dissemination of news. It was to hold this position for at least a century and a half before newer technologies – the telegraph, railways, radio, television – challenged its supremacy. Our appetite for ‘news’ is a great as ever but how we get it is changing, just as it has always done.