A
BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWSPAPERS
To Worcester
belongs the distinction of being served by the oldest surviving
newspaper in the World. THE BERROW'S WORCESTER JOURNAL. The
dissemination of news is as old as history. Records of the
building of Babylon exist to this day in the crude brick tablets
of the Assyrians. In later times the Romans kept a news journal,
published by the Senate, the Acta Diurna, which gave
regular accounts of the happenings of the period, of fires,
and executions, and hail-storms; but it was not until the
fifteen century AD that the forerunners of newspapers as we
know them first appeared. News, before the coming of the newspaper,
was circulated by News Letters and Circulars, written in Venice,
Nuremburg, Augsburg, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Paris
and London by paid letter writers, who sent their news budgets
to their principals in various capitals. Of these, the most
famous generally regarded as the forerunners of the modern
newspaper, were the Fugger News Letters, first issued at Augsburg
early in the fifteenth century by the mercantile house of
Fugger, which had its agents scattered throughout Europe.
Several thousand of these News Letters are housed to-day at
the Vienna Museum, covering a period of thirty-six years from
1568 to 1604.
The
Fugger News
The Fugger
News letters, nevertheless, were not printed newspapers. The
first printed newspaper in the world emanated from Nuremburg,
though for a time people believed that the English Mercurie said to have been produced in 1588, had that honour. But it
was proven, some years ago, that the English Mercurie was
a forgery, produced for the collector, and the claims of the
Venice Gazetta of 1570 were unchallenged for a considerable
period. But it was not to be. Nuremburg, the home of Albrecht
Durer, preceded the Venetian news sheet by over a hundred
years, and we have proof today that the first printed newspaper
beyond any shadow of doubt was produced in 1457, five years
after Peter Schoeffer first cast metal type in matrices at
Nuremburg, with the title of Gazette. Next in 1534, came the Neue Zeitung aus Hispanien and Italien, published at
Cologne, and from that date onwards the growth of the newspapers
may be said to have begun.
First
English Newspaper
The first
printed English newspaper did not appear for sale until Nathaniel
Butters, called the ''Father of the English Press'' brought
out his Weekly News in London on May 23, 1622, while twenty
years afterwards, another newspaper, equally famous, made
its appearance in 1663. This was L'Estrange's Public Intelligencer,
which preceded the Oxford Gazette by two years. Between
1640 and the Restoration no fewer than thirty thousand printed
pamphlets, called ''News Letters'' and ''News Papers'' in
their day, saw the light of publication in Great Britain,
and of these, the British Museum possesses over two thousand
in its archives. The following table shows a few of the principal
journals which flourished in Europe between 1615 and 1720:
- Frankfort
Gazette..1615
- Weekly
Newes..1622
- Leipzig
Gazette..1660
- Public
Intelligencer..1663
- London
Gazette..1665
- Worcester
Post-man..1690
- Stamford
Mercury..1695
- Newcastle
Courant..1711
- Berlin
Gazette..1722.
Of these,
Berrow's Worcester Post-Man still exists as Berrow's Worcester
Journal. From the end of the seventeenth century, newspapers
were produced regularly in the larger towns throughout Europe,
although the first English daily newspaper did not appear
until 1702, in the reign of Queen Anne. This was the Daily
Courant. Paris had its first daily newspaper in 1777, the
Journal de Paris ou Poste au Soir, and the United States first
saw a daily journal with the advert of the American Daily
Advertiser, published in Philadelphia in 1784.
