Like Niall Ferguson (but without the snide commentary), the breathless anecdote is how Pettegree likes to tell his history. His stories cover a range of communications that might be described as ‘news’: imperial postal services, couriers, public proclamations, handwritten newsletters, published pamphlets, professional or scientific journals, dispatches from ambassadors and spies, topical ballads, travellers’ tales, personal correspondence, gossip from the marketplace or tavern, and eventually what we would recognise as newspapers. Despite this catholic definition, if one needs an example of how presentation can create a misleading impression, it is not necessary to look further than the book’s title. The ‘world’ portrayed here is Western Europe during a brief period in its history (the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), and North America in a briefer period still. Varied as the examples of news transmission are, they exclude smoke signals, tsarist dispatches, and the recording of events by China’s mandarins. Pettegree tells only a small piece of the story of how the world came to know about itself, and gives no particular reason for setting the ‘invention’ of the news in these places and times.

Louis XIV of France by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701

Nevertheless, there is much to interest the reader in this treasure trove of historical snippets. Other stories show how control of news was never far from the agenda of rulers, religious enthusiasts, and other influential groups. It should come as no surprise that the first state-controlled newspaper was established by Cardinal Richelieu. Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France banned newspapers other than their own, which could be used to explain and justify policies, including new legislation and taxes. Political parties adopted and funded their own news reports. Many states at many times tried regulation or censorship, though they were seldom effective for long. Most of the key French revolutionaries were journalists, and the press was invited to cover all discussion in the revolutionary assembly before Robespierre acknowledged the risks and banned them in 1793.

Early newspapers struggled to compete with other forms of news, especially pamphlets. The first person to apply print to what had been manuscript newsletters, Johann Carolus in Strasbourg in 1605, was so pleased with his invention that he applied for a ‘patent’ (monopoly). Within a century he had two hundred competitors in Germany alone. The early papers had a limited following, being dry reports, often culled from overseas dispatches and manuscript newsletters and stating source and date; many prided themselves on not expressing an opinion. Content was put together largely by publishers who had a business to run and no time for intelligent reporting. The original journalists were ill paid and of low status and were given no bylines; their major employer was government. Pamphlets had the advantage of irregular publication which meant there was no need to publish unless something important happened, at which point a pamphlet could focus exclusively on it and add thoughtful commentary.

If the reader is looking for a reassuring tale of human progress from hearsay and gossip towards some sort of journal of record, she will not find it here, though within the stories, powerful themes recur: a verbal report from someone trustworthy was always the most reliable source (letters of accreditation warranted the messenger, often without referring to the message). Content is always liable to interference, even without state control. Until mass markets and advertising revenue transferred power to the publisher, financial constraints regularly drove news purveyors to accept funding in exchange for some influence over content. People generally depend on multiple sources for news (as Pettegree shows through diaries). All sources have their own characteristics and varying degrees of trustworthiness, as well as different ways of telling a story. Samuel Johnson’s assertion that accuracy ‘is the first demand made by the reader of a journal’ is not necessarily true; it is just something publishers sometimes find useful. There is a minimum credibility requirement for news, but massive licence in practice to shape how it is presented. Entertainment, by some definition or other, has always been a major determinant of the news media we select. As a result of these changing variables, some types of news media dominate for a short while under particular conditions, but they are regularly challenged and give way to others as events, appetites, and communication systems evolve. The eventual dominance of newspapers reflected a desire for connectedness to major events and the status that comes from access to information normally denied to ordinary people. Now sources of information are fragmenting again and newspapers are losing their pre-eminence.

Over sixty illustrations give a good sense of how publishers presented their work to various audiences. The range of Pettegree’s research is evidenced by the huge bibliography, though the publisher’s decision to separate the footnotes from the text means that fewer readers will refer to it. In a curious lapse of editing, the words ‘wideless’ (sic) and ‘night’ appear with no apparent connection to anything else on page ninety-seven and make a nonsense of consecutive sentences.

Andrew Pettegree

Pettegree can be more than a good storyteller. The four forces he cites as determining the shape of news media – speed, reliability, control of content, entertainment – provide a compelling framework. Applied to the present day, they can be used to construe the Murdoch strategies described in Nick Davies’s Hack Attack (2014) and might contribute to a constructive reframing of discussions on the role of a public broadcaster. It is unfortunate that Pettegree does not apply them more explicitly in this history. Jumping from instance to instance, the reader struggles to derive or retain general lessons. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of determining the principles behind the book’s structure. It is neither chronological nor geographical: the facility with which Pettegree lands us in improbable European cities at unpredictable times would do credit to a budget airline. If he is tracking the historical development of something important, it is very hard to tell what. One begins to suspect that almost any other grouping of the material into chapters and sections would have done just as well. Nevertheless, it is an important work: the wealth of material provides a valuable basis for understanding how we got where we are. A still more valuable sequel would present a more carefully structured explanation of why news media developed as they did, and would do more to explore what that means for us today.