Regular newspapers

The story

News before newspapers

Today news arrives in an instant, but in the 16th century it took days or weeks for a piece of news to travel from one city to another. People who needed to know what was happening, such as merchants, bankers and rulers, paid correspondents to write letters full of news: prices, wars, the arrival of ships, the deaths of kings. These letters were called “avvisi”, and in Venice, in the 16th century, they were sold for a small coin called a “gazzetta”: this is where the word “gazette” comes from.

With the invention of printing, in the 15th century, news sheets appeared: single printed sheets that told of an extraordinary event, such as an earthquake, a battle or a monster born in a village. But they were printed when something remarkable happened, not at regular intervals. There was still no newspaper that came out always at the same time and in the same form.

Johann Carolus in Strasbourg

Our main character is a man named Johann Carolus, who in Strasbourg, then a free city of the German Empire, had an unusual job: every week he sold to wealthy people a handwritten sheet with the news he received from correspondents all over Europe. But copying by hand was slow and expensive, and he had few customers.

In 1604 Carolus bought a printing press. In 1605 he asked the city council for permission to print his news and he was the only one allowed to do so, a privilege that protected him from competitors. This is how the “Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien”, that is, “Account of All Distinguished and Memorable Stories”, was born. It came out every week, had four pages full of news, and was bought mainly by the rich, by government men and by merchants, who had the greatest need to keep informed. The copies from 1605 have been lost; the first surviving collection dates from 1609.

Carolus received the news by letter, through the post, and news travelled at the speed of horses and boats: from a faraway city it could take several weeks. For this reason each piece of news was printed with the name of the city it had come from and with the date, so the reader knew where it came from and how fresh it was. The newspaper did not explain or comment: it only reported, like a long list.

Other sheets, other countries

The idea spread. In 1609 a periodical came out in Wolfenbüttel, in Germany. In 1618 in Amsterdam the “Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c.” was born, one of the first newspapers in Dutch. In France, in 1631, a doctor, Théophraste Renaudot, founded the “Gazette”, with the support of Cardinal Richelieu and with the king's privilege. In London the “Oxford Gazette”, later the “London Gazette”, came out from 1665 and is still published today.

These first newspapers were very different from ours. They had no big headlines and no photographs. The news items, with dates and places, were put one after another, in order of arrival, without comment. Above all, newspapers had to pass government checks: rulers and cities granted permission to print, and anyone who wrote too much had to be careful.

Why 1605?

For many years nobody knew which was the first newspaper in history, because some scholars pointed to other sheets. A German scholar, Martin Welke, together with Jean-Pierre Kintz, found in Strasbourg the request that Carolus had written in 1605. In 2005 the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) accepted the evidence that the Relation was being printed as early as 1605 and recognised it as the first printed newspaper. The fact remains that the definition of “newspaper” is a matter of choices, and that other earlier sheets might have been missed.