The Earliest Newspapers
In Caesar’s time Rome had a newspaper. The Acta Diurna (actions of the day), written on a tablet, was posted on a wall after each meeting of the Senate. Its circulation was one, and there is no reliable measure of its total readership. However, it does show that people have always wanted to know what was happening and that others have helped them to do so.
The newspapers we recognize today have their roots in 17th-century Europe. Corantos, one-page news sheets about specific events, were printed in English in Holland in 1620 and imported to England by British booksellers who were eager to satisfy public demand for information about Continental happenings that eventually led to what we now call the Thirty Years’ War.
Englishmen Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, and Nicholas Bourne eventually began printing their own occasional news sheets, using the same title for consecutive editions. They stopped publishing in 1641, the same year that regular, daily accounts of local news started appearing in other news sheets. These true forerunners of or daily newspaper were called diurnals.
The Modern Newspaper Emerges
At the turn of the 19th century, urbanization, growing industries, movement of workers to the cities, and increasing literacy combined to create an audience for a new kind of paper. Known as the penny press, theses one-cent newspapers were for everyone. Benjamin Day’s September 3, 1833, issue of the New York Sun was the first of the penny papers. Day’s innovation was to sell his paper so inexpensively that it would attract a large readership, which could then be “sold” to advertisers. Day succeeded because he anticipated a new kind of reader. He filled the Sun’s pages with police and court reports, crime stories, entertainment news, and human interest stories. Because the paper lived up to its motto, “The Sun shines for all”, there was a little of the elite political and business information that had characterized earlier papers.
Soon there were penny papers in all the majorities. Among the most important was James Gordon Bennett’s New York Morning Herald. Although more sensationalistic than the Sun, the Herald pioneered the correspondent system, placing reporters in Washington, D.C., and other major U.S. cities as well as abroad. Correspondents filed their stories by means of the telegraph, invented in 1844.
Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was an important penny paper as well. Its nonsensationalistic, issues-oriented, and humanitarian reporting established the mass newspaper as a powerful medium of social action.
