Why did journalism even appear?
(Yes: the printing press. But not because of printing newspapers.)
Journalism emerged from the same source as modernity and the public sphere: the printing press freed thousands of learned men from copying old texts. They started writing new ones. Read more in Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
Journalism as a profession and social institution emerged circa the 16th–17th centuries. Three main factors contributed to the rise of early journalism:
1) The printing press liberated a huge amount of the literati’s time from the need to copy manuscripts.
2) The increased literacy of merchants and the middle class (driven, again, by the printing press and the rapid proliferation of books) spurred their appetite for recorded news.
3) The commercial proliferation of Venetian avvisi—initially private newsletters, which later evolved into public newssheets, or gazettes—expanded the distribution of recorded news.
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Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) that, in the past, copying manuscripts kept scholars in early Modern Europe extremely busy. She noted that,
This point is especially important when considering technical literature. The difficulty of making even one “identical” copy of a significant technical work was such that the task could not be trusted to any hired hands. Men of learning had to engage in “slavish copying” of tables, diagrams and unfamiliar terms.
There was nothing noteworthy about the fact that manuscript copying kept educated men busy. Something remarkable happened, however, when Gutenberg’s invention—the printing press (circa 1450)—liberated them from this repetitive task, “producing a new situation which released time for observation and research” (ibid., KL 1315).
The printing press turned thousands of scholars and scribes into thousands of writers who, all of a sudden, had nothing to write. The printing press took their predetermined content away from them, leaving them with a desperate need to find out on their own what to write about.
A new medium not only took over the job of an old one but also liberated people’s time and skills, allowing them to do something new. This indirect media effect of the printing press enabled the emergence of the so-called Respublica Literaria—the Republic of Letters—the international network of scholars. The appearance of an army of literate individuals eagerly searching for something worthy to be inscribed on paper—something “noteworthy”—resulted in their recording everything and anything that caught their avid gaze and minds. Within their scholarly network, they began exchanging newsletters brimming with philosophical thoughts, local political and general news, and social or historical observations (resembling the conditions of the early blogosphere with its emancipated authorship).
The emancipation of educated man-hours, multiplied by network effects, directed intellectual power toward the exploration of nature and society. Next came the Scientific Revolution and then the Enlightenment.
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The surge in original writings, spurred by the availability of millions of educated man-hours, made the recording of current affairs a sort of duty for the literati. The search for something noteworthy fostered a recording criterion that we now call “newsworthy.”
Respublica Literaria became a network of correspondents who supplied not only scholarly treatises but also religious, political, local, and global news to each other and to the noble houses and the clergy. As many literati served at courts, they became correspondents for princes and bishops. A new genre of court correspondence emerged, focusing on political, royal, military, and religious events, with reports on commerce, prices, battles, marriages, alliances, taxes, shipments, and the populace’s well-being. Here we already see the structure and format of the news media that have remained in place to this day.
This scholarly and court correspondence created a flow of political and business newsletters, reflecting the newly emerged supply and demand for news. Interestingly, it was the abundance of literate people with the time and ambition to record current news that became the driving force behind this activity. In other words, it was the supply that spurred the demand, not the other way around. The political, religious, and business elites became accustomed to reading news from other lands, enjoyed it, and wanted more.
Thus, the impact of the printing press on the formation of journalism at first had nothing to do with the printing of newspapers. Rather, it lay in the creation of a network of writers whose literary time were freed from the dull labors of manuscript copying. With great zeal, they launched themselves into the task of exploring and recording reality in all its forms.
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Between 1500 and the 1550s, Venice had already become famous for its regular handwritten newsletters, avvisi. As a major maritime and commercial hub in Early Modern Europe, Venice was a place where abundant commercial and political news arrived with ship captains and letters delivered by ships. Avvisi combined merchants’ and captains’ accounts of events overseas with the literati’s correspondence from foreign courts, producing valuable reports on affairs that could affect trade and politics…
Read more in Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
See other books by Andrey Mir:
The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025) The first tweetise in history: the book is entirely written in tweets.
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
