The Origins of Newspapers
The history of newspapers is an often-dramatic chapter of the human experience going back some five centuries. In Renaissance Europe handwritten newsletters circulatedprivately among merchants, passing along information about everything from wars and economic conditions to social customs and “human interest” features. The first printed forerunners of the newspaperappeared in Germany in the late 1400’s in the form of news pamphlets or broadsides, often highly sensationalized in content. Some of the most famous of these report the atrocities against Germans inTransylvania perpetrated by a sadistic veovod named Vlad Tsepes Drakul, who became the Count Dracula of later folklore.
In the English-speaking world, the earliest predecessors of the newspaper werecorantos, small news pamphlets produced only when some event worthy of notice occurred. The first successively published title was The Weekly Newes of 1622. It was followed in the 1640’s and 1650’s by aplethora of different titles in the similar newsbook format. The first true newspaper in English was the London Gazette of 1666. For a generation it was the only officially sanctioned newspaper, thoughmany periodical titles were in print by the century’s end.
Beginnings in America
In America the first newspaper appeared in Boston in 1690, entitled Publick Occurrences. Published without authority,it was immediately suppressed, its publisher arrested, and all copies were destroyed. Indeed, it remained forgotten until 1845 when the only known surviving example was discovered in the BritishLibrary. The first successful newspaper was the Boston News-Letter, begun by postmaster John Campbell in 1704. Although it was heavily subsidized by the colonial government the experiment was anear-failure, with very limited circulation. Two more papers made their appearance in the 1720’s, in Philadelphia and New York, and the Fourth Estate slowly became established on the new continent. By the eve…
