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Concept
History of newspaper publishing
Summary
The modern newspaper is a European invention. The oldest direct handwritten news sheets circulated widely in Venice as early as 1566. These weekly news sheets were full of information on wars and politics in Italy and Europe. The first printed newspapers were published weekly in Germany from 1605. Typically, they were censored by the government, especially in France, and reported mostly foreign news and current prices. After the English government relaxed censorship in 1695, newspapers flourished in London and a few other cities including Boston and Philadelphia. By the 1830s, high-speed presses could print thousands of papers cheaply, allowing low daily costs.
Avvisi, or gazettes, were a mid-16th-century Venice phenomenon. They were issued weekly on single sheets and folded to form four pages. These publications reached a larger audience than handwritten news had in early Rome. Their format and appearance at regular intervals were two huge influences on the newspaper as we know it today. The idea of a weekly, handwritten newssheet went from Italy to Germany and then to Holland.
List of the oldest newspapers and History of British newspapers
The term newspaper became common in the 17th century. However, in Germany, publications that we would today consider to be newspaper publications, were appearing as early as the 16th century. They were discernibly newspapers for the following reasons: they were printed, dated, appeared at regular and frequent publication intervals, and included a variety of news items (unlike single item news mentioned above). Early forms of news periodicals were the so-called Messrelationen ("trade fair reports") which were compiled twice a year for the large annual book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig, starting in the 1580s. Nevertheless, the German-language Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, printed from 1605 onwards by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, is commonly accepted to have been the first newspaper. The emergence of the new media branch was based on the spread of the printing press from which the publishing press derives its name.
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