English Roots of the Free Press

Brian Winston

The origins of journalism are similar across Europe. The newspaper grows out of the time-honored twin impulses to report significant political and economic events or sensational, curious (often trivial) ones. These impulses long pre-date the introduction of moveable type so the arrival of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century was not in itself a necessary cause for the development of the modern newspaper. The printed newspaper, in the form of an unbound, sequentially issued, independently edited publication using the same title but differentially dated does not appear until about a century and a half after European printing began—in other words, around 1600. During that delay, intermittently printed prose news-books on major individual events, as well as occasional digests of news, would be produced featuring stories real or imagined (e.g., battles and royal progresses as well as miracles, disasters, crimes, and celestial phenomena). The fictional as well as the factual ...

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