NEWSPAPER HISTORY—THE MODERN NEWSPAPER

The young man contemplating journalism may be interested in the beginnings of the business. The little known about them is abundantly repeated in various histories. China seems to have been the pioneer at a time before the Christian era. But the records of those early years are hazy. It is known that the Peking Gazette, as the sheet now is called, has been in continuous publication since the year 618 and mention is made of the Peking News as being much older. News-sheets printed in the time of Julius C?sar speak of their esteemed contemporaries published in China.

Before the invention of type and printing all communications intended for public consumption were written on papyrus sheets and were hanged in the market places, or were read to the people, or were circulated in various ways.

Fifty years before the coming of Christ, the Roman government sent out an official sheet for the information of its public servants, the army, and the people, and this publication was continued for many years. Latterly it was called Acta Diurna (Daily News) and it seems to have been exceedingly popular.

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The public appetite for news and gossip appears to have been quite as voracious then as now. The news-sheets were almost sensational in their telling of scandals, of murders, and the details of crime. There seems to have been little regard for the proprieties in those days, for we read in the Acta Diurna that “the funeral of Marcia was performed with greater pomp of images than attendance of mourners.” Extracts from Cicero’s speeches are given, and one commentator writes:

    When Cicero was sent as governor to Cilicia he asked a friend to send him the news of Rome. The friend employed scribes, the reporters of that day, to gather the information and prepare the letters. The man who wrote the first letters reported everything from the procedure of the Senate to the result of the latest gladiatorial contest. Cicero objected to his methods and complained that the letters contained items that he would not have bothered with when at home. What he wanted, he explains, was advance information to keep him in touch with the political movements of the time.

It was during the reign of the C?sars that the news-sheets were in full request. They were written in Latin, of course, and were marvels of the penman’s art on papyrus; and they were expressed with an epigrammic terseness and a snap that might well be imitated to-day. Dr. Johnson translates a few of them in the Gentleman’s Magazine as follows:

    The Latin festivals were celebrated, a sacrifice performed on the Alban Mount, and a dole of fish distributed to the people.

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    A fire has happened on Mount Coelius; two trisulae and five houses were consumed and four damaged.

    Demiphone, the famous pirate, who was taken by Licinus Nerva, a provincial lieutenant, was crucified.

    The red standard was displayed at the Capitol and the Consuls obliged the youth who were enlisted for the Macedonian war to take a new oath in the Campus Martius.

    The Aedile Tertinius fined the butchers for selling meat which had not been inspected by the market overseers. The fine is to be used to build a chapel for the temple of Tellus.

    M. Tullius Cicero pleaded in defense of Cornelius Sylla, accused by Torquatus of being concerned in Catiline’s conspiracy and gained his cause by a majority of five judges. The Tribunes of the Treasury were against the defendant. One of the Praetors advertised by an edict that he should put off his sittings for five days on account of his daughter’s marriage.

    A report was brought to Tertinius, the praetor, while he was trying cases at his tribunal, that his son was dead. This was contrived by the friends of Coponius, who was accused of poisoning, that the praetor might adjourn the court; but the magistrate having discovered the falsity of the story, returned to his tribunal and continued in taking information against the accused.

After C?sar’s time the Roman sheets gradually disappeared and newspaper history becomes very misty. News publications reappeared, however, in Vienna and in Augsburg in 1524 and Pendleton in his “Newspaper Reporting in Olden Time and To-day,” after quoting Chalmers in his “Life of Ruddiman,” observes:

    But he admits that the first modern sheet of news appeared in Venice about the year 1536, that it was manuscript, and was read aloud in certain parts of the city—a200 journal that proved a great attraction, for it was issued once a month only, and narrated in polished stirring words how the Venetians fared in their war against Turkey. The fee paid for reading this sheet in manuscript was a gazzetta, and the news-sheet gradually got the name of the coin (The Gazette). At least Blount, in his Glossographia published in the seventeenth century, would lead on to this conclusion, giving as the definition of the word gazzetta, “A certain Venetian coin scarce worth one farthing; also a bill of news or short relations of the occurrences of the times, printed most commonly at Venice, and thence dispersed every month in most parts of Christendom.” It was not until 1612 that the gazzettas of the Venetians first appeared as numbered sheets but some years previously the thirst for news—now well-nigh unquenchable in every civilized part of the globe—had spread to England.

All through the Middle Ages the news-letters were restrained both by church and state. The privilege of printing them was withdrawn, and by the year 1500 they virtually had ceased to exist. When they reappeared they were under strict government direction and censorship. The use of movable type and the printing press now facilitated their production, but all authority frowned on them save that authority which made use of them for its own ends.

The newspaper censorship of the next one hundred and fifty years was the severest ever known. Lord Burleigh, who was Prime Minister in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, seems, however, to have understood the value of publicity—understood that a handful of facts is worth a hatful of rumors when it comes to influencing the201 people. The appearance of the Spanish Armada in 1588, with its one hundred and twenty-nine ships, its twenty thousand soldiers and its ten thousand sailors, bent on the invasion of England, had long been looked for, and on its approach the people were overcome with hysterical excitement. But Burleigh had a news-letter printed from day to day telling the exact facts of the situation and the panic subsided.

Dr. James Melvin Lee, head of the Department of Journalism in New York University, believes that the first newspaper to be printed in the English language was published in Amsterdam, December 2, 1620, and in proof of his belief he produces a facsimile of the sheet. It was half sheet folio and had no title. A descriptive of the battle of Weissenberg was its chief feature.

In a discussion as to the early use of the word “reporter,” Mr. Henry N. Cary, a New York journalist, quotes from a pamphlet of 1613 of which the title is:

    The Wonders of this windie winter, by terrible stormes and tempests, to the losse of lives and goods of many thousands of men women and children. The like by Sea and Land hath not been seene nor heard of in this age of the world. London. Printed by G. Eld for John Wright, and are to be sold at his shop neer Christ-church dore.

In this pamphlet is the following:

    Ships were perishing to the number of a hundred, and forty seafaring men, besides other passengers, both of men and women which at that time made their watery graves in the deep sea. This first strooke feare into the hearts of202 people, which hath since seconded with many calamities, which lieth heavily upon the heart of the reporter.

The details of this storm’s destruction are far less interesting to us than is the way they circulated the news in 1613 when there were no newspapers.

For the next one hundred years the news-sheet was the chief source of information to the English people. A few weekly newspapers were started, the first being edited by Nathaniel Butter, in 1622. It was called the Weekly News, but it seems to have had few readers. The people stuck to the news-sheets in which they had confidence. Possibly they did not credit Butter’s yarns. Pendleton quotes two of them as specimens of seventeenth century journalism:

    A true relation of the strange appearance of a man-fish about three miles within the river Thames, having a musket in one hand and a petition in the other, credibly reported by six sailors who both saw and talked with the monster.

    A perfect mermaid was by the last great wind driven ashore near Greenwich, with her comb in one hand and her looking-glass in the other. She seemed to be of the countenancy of a most fair and beautiful woman, with her arms crossed, weeping out many pearly drops of salt tears; and afterwards she, gently turning herself upon her back again, swam away without being seen again any more.

Later in the century the use of the news-sheet became so general as to clog the mails. Macaulay writes interestingly of the disseminating of information in those days:

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    In 1685 nothing like the London daily paper of our time existed or could exist. Neither the necessary capital nor the necessary skill was to be found. Freedom too was wanting, a want as fatal as that of either capital or skill. During the great battle of the Exclusion Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear. None of them was published oftener than twice a week. None exceeded in size a single small leaf. The quantity of matter which one of them contained in a year was not more than is often found in two numbers of the Times. After the defeat of the Whigs, it was no longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the use of that which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered to appear without his allowance; and his allowance was given exclusively to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out only on Mondays and Thursdays. The contents were generally a royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the imperial troops and the Janissaries on the Danube, a description of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two persons of honor, and an advertisement offering a reward for a strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.... The most important parliamentary debates, the most important state trials, recorded in our history, were passed over in profound silence. In the capital the coffee houses supplied in some measure the place of a journal. Thither the Londoners flocked as the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig had been treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what horrible accounts the letters from Edinburgh gave of the torturing of Covenanters, how grossly the Navy Board had cheated the crown in the victualling of the fleet, and what grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had204 brought against the Treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people that lived at a distance from the great theatre of political contention could be kept informed of what was passing there only by means of news-letters. To prepare such letters became a calling in London. The news-writer rambled from coffee room to coffee room collecting reports, squeezed himself into the Sessions House of the Old Bailey if there was an interesting trial, nay perhaps obtained admission to the Gallery of Whitehall and noticed how the King and Duke looked. In this way he gathered materials for weekly epistles destined to enlighten some country town or some bench of rustic magistrates.

    Such were the sources from which the inhabitants of the largest provincial cities and the great body of the gentry and clergy learned almost all they knew of the history of their own times.

    We must suppose that at Cambridge there were as many persons curious to know what was passing in the world as at almost any other place in the kingdom out of London. Yet at Cambridge during a great part of the reign of Charles II, the Doctors of Laws and the Masters of Arts had no regular supply of news except the London Gazette. At length the services of one of the collectors of intelligence in the capital were employed. It was a memorable day on which the first news-letter from London was laid on the table of the only coffee house room in Cambridge.

    At the seat of a man of fortune in the country the news-letter was impatiently expected. Within a week after it had arrived it had been thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the neighboring squires with matter for talk over their October, and the neighboring rectors with topics for sharp sermons against Whiggery and Popery.

    It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no provincial newspapers. Indeed except at the capital and at the two Universities there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom.

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This was the condition of the newspaper business at the end of the reign of King Charles II.—a period distinguished by less interest in literature and study than any period of England’s history after the Elizabethan revival of learning. The reading of books and the search for information had been abandoned in the quest for pleasure. The people had joined in imitating the profligacy, the licentiousness and the revels of Charles’s court. They who champion the newspaper as a great uplifting influence in community might instance these profligate days in which there were no newspapers and compare them with later years.

But the opening of the eighteenth century brought fresh impetus to study and a new interest in literature. Several weekly newspapers had been set going. The first daily newspaper was started in London in 1702. It was called the Courant. It was a small single-sheet publication printed on one side only, and it gave but a meager assortment of news items. It refrained from expressing opinions, the editor saying that “he would give no comments of his own as he assumed that people had sense enough to make reflections for themselves.” Scores of editors even to the present day have launched initial numbers of their editions with this same resolution, expressed in the same way, but somehow it does not last long.

Then came the Review founded by Defoe, and Richard Steele’s Tatler and the Spectator by Steele and Joseph Addison, which publications mark the real beginnings of journalism. By this time Pope and Swift, William Walsh, whom Dryden praised as a great critic, and206 Arthur Maynwaring and others of the famous Kit Cat Club were writing for the periodicals.

Editorial comment, or the expression of editorial opinion seems to have had no place in newspapers until toward the close of the reign of King Charles II. Then, while the London Gazette, appearing under government direction, was printing news only, Sir Roger Lestrange was permitted to print a journal of comment without news, called the Observator. Lestrange had been a Tory pamphleteer, and for a short time had edited small news-sheets and under the government. He had been Surveyor of Printing Offices and Licensor of the Press. The Observator was ferociously against the Whigs and the Protestants. Because editorial comment was new, it focused much attention. Here was the first editor to write violent political editorial articles. He confined his subjects to politics and to religion which was then a part of the politics of the day. He inspired a host of imitators and the leading article, of which he was the parent, has been the leading feature of all journalism ever since. Great in its political use, immediately after him, were Dean Swift in his Examiner, and Daniel Defoe in the Review which he started in 1704 while in jail for political offense.

It was just at the beginning of the eighteenth century that Steele and Addison began their Tatler and Spectator. Their first impulse was to write of politics, for Steele was alive with political zeal and Addison was interested; but presently they seemingly sensed the opportunity for success in the new direction of a207 publication given to the elucidation and the discussion of general topics, of subjects on which politics was unlikely to produce diversion of opinion—social life, play-house............