History of Newspaper

A newspaper is a regularly scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a day. The worldwide recession of 2008, combined with the rapid growth of web-based alternatives, caused a serious decline in advertising and circulation, as many papers closed or sharply retrenched operations.

General-interest newspapers typically publish stories on local and national political events and personalities, crime, business, entertainment, society and sports. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing editorials written by an editor and columns that express the personal opinions of writers. The newspaper is typically funded by paid subscriptions and advertising.

A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers, including editorial opinions, criticism, persuasion and op-eds; obituaries; entertainment features such as crosswords, sudoku and horoscopes; weather news and forecasts; advice, food and other columns; reviews of movies, plays and restaurants; classified ads; display ads, television listings, inserts from local merchants, editorial cartoons and comic strips.

Definition

Newspapers typically meet four criteria:

• Publicity: Its contents are reasonably accessible to the public.
• Periodicity: It is published at regular intervals.
• Currency: Its information is up to date.
• Universality: It covers a range of topics

Gazettes and bulletins

Before the invention of newspapers in the early 17th century, official government bulletins were circulated at times in some centralized empires.

In Ancient Rome, Acta Diurna, or government announcement bulletins, were made public by Julius Caesar. They were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places.

In China, early government-produced news sheets, called tipao, circulated among court officials during the late Han dynasty (second and third centuries AD). Between 713 and 734, the Kaiyuan Za Bao ("Bulletin of the Court") of the Chinese Tang Dynasty published government news; it was handwritten on silk and read by government officials. In 1582, there was the first reference to privately published newssheets in Beijing, during the late Ming Dynasty;

In Early modern Europe the increased cross-border interaction created a rising need for information which was met by concise handwritten newssheets. In 1556, the government of Venice first published the monthly Notizie scritte, which cost one gazetta. These avvisi were handwritten newsletters and used to convey political, military, and economic news quickly and efficiently to Italian cities (1500–1700) — sharing some characteristics of newspapers though usually not considered true newspapers.

However, none of these publications fully met the classical criteria for proper newspapers, as they were typically not intended for the general public and restricted to a certain range of topics.

Newspapers

Europe

Title page of Carolus' Relation from 1609, the earliest newspaper

See also: History of British newspapers

The emergence of the new media branch in the 17th century has to be seen in close connection with the spread of the printing press from which the publishing press derives its name.

The German-language Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, printed from 1605 onwards by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, is often recognized as the first newspaper.^[8][9] At the time, Strasbourg was a free imperial city in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; the first newspaper of modern Germany was the Avisa, published in 1609 in Wolfenbüttel.

Other early papers include:

The Dutch Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. of 1618 was the first to appear in folio- rather than quarto-size. Amsterdam, a center of world trade, quickly became home to newspapers in many languages, often before they were published in their own country.

The first English-language newspaper, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, etc., was published in Amsterdam in 1620. A year and a half later, Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys. was published in England by an "N.B." (generally thought to be either Nathaniel Butter or Nicholas Bourne) and Thomas Archer.

The first newspaper in France was published in 1631, La Gazette (originally published as Gazette de France).

The first newspaper in Portugal, Gazeta, was published in 1641 in Lisbon. The first Spanish newspaper, Gaceta de Madrid, was published in 1661.

Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (founded as Ordinari Post Tijdender) was first published in Sweden in 1645, and is the oldest newspaper still in existence, though it now publishes solely online.

Opregte Haarlemsche Courant from Haarlem, first published in 1656, is the oldest paper still printed. It was forced to merge with the newspaper Haarlems Dagblad in 1942 when Germany occupied the Netherlands. Since then the Haarlems Dagblad appears with the subtitle Oprechte Haerlemse Courant 1656 and considers itself to be the oldest newspaper still publishing.

Merkuriusz Polski Ordynaryjny was published in Kraków, Poland in 1661.

The first successful English daily, The Daily Courant, was published from 1702 to 1735.

North America

Untitled watercolor of a man studying a newspaper, about 1863, by Henry Louis Stephens. The paper's headline reports the Emancipation Proclamation.

Front page of The New York Times on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.

See also: History of American newspapers

In Boston in 1690, Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. This is considered the first newspaper in the American colonies even though only one edition was published before the paper was suppressed by the government. In 1704, the governor allowed The Boston News-Letter to be published and it became the first continuously published newspaper in the colonies. Soon after, weekly papers began publishing in New York and Philadelphia. These early newspapers followed the British format and were usually four pages long. They mostly carried news from Britain and content depended on the editor’s interests. In 1783, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first American daily.

In 1752, John Bushell published the Halifax Gazette, the first Canadian newspaper.

By 2007, there were 1,456 daily newspapers in the U.S., selling 55 million copies a day.

Industrial Revolution

By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspaper-type publications though not all of them developed in the same way; content was vastly shaped by regional and cultural preferences. Advances in printing technology related to the Industrial Revolution enabled newspapers to become an even more widely circulated means of communication. In 1814, The Times (London) acquired a printing press capable of making 1,100 impressions per minute.

Soon, it was adapted to print on both sides of a page at once. This innovation made newspapers cheaper and thus available to a larger part of the population. In 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Penny press papers cost about one sixth the price of other newspapers and appealed to a wider audience. In France, Émile de Girardin started "La Presse" in 1836, introducing cheap, advertising-supported dailies to France. In 1848, August Zang, an Austrian who knew Girardin in Paris, returned to Vienna to introduce the same methods with "Die Presse" (which was named for and frankly copied Girardin's publication).

Impact of television and Internet

By the late 1990s the availability of news via 24-hour television channels and then the Internet posed an ongoing challenge to the business model of most newspapers in developed countries. Paid circulation has declined, while advertising revenue — which makes up the bulk of most newspapers’ income — has been shifting from print to the new media, resulting in a general decline in profits. Many newspapers around the world launched online editions in an attempt to follow or stay ahead of their audience.

However, in the rest of the world, cheaper printing and distribution, increased literacy, the growing middle class and other factors have more than compensated for the emergence of electronic media and newspapers continue to grow.

On April 10, 1995, The American Reporter became the first daily newspaper, with its own paid reporters around the world and all-original content, to start on the Internet. The editor-in-chief and founder is Joe Shea. The site is owned by 400 journalists.

Categories

While most newspapers are aimed at a broad spectrum of readers, usually geographically defined, some focus on groups of readers defined more by their interests than their location: for example, there are daily and weekly business newspapers and sports newspapers. More specialist still are some weekly newspapers, usually free and distributed within limited areas; these may serve communities as specific as certain immigrant populations, or the local gay community.

Daily

Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, seen in its Hebrew and English editions

A daily newspaper is issued every day, sometimes with the exception of Sundays and some national holidays. Saturday and, where they exist, Sunday editions of daily newspapers tend to be larger, include more specialized sections and advertising inserts, and cost more. Typically, the majority of these newspapers’ staff work Monday to Friday, so the Sunday and Monday editions largely depend on content done in advance or content that is syndicated. Most daily newspapers are published in the morning. Afternoon or evening papers are aimed more at commuters and office workers.

Weekly

Weekly newspapers are common and tend to be smaller than daily papers. In some cases, there also are newspapers that are published twice or three times a week. In the United States, such newspapers are generally still classified as weeklies.

National

Most nations have at least one newspaper that circulates throughout the whole country: a national newspaper, as contrasted with a local newspaper serving a city or region. In the United Kingdom, there are numerous national newspapers, including The Independent, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Express and The Daily Mirror. In the United States and Canada, there are few national newspapers. Almost every market has one or two newspapers that dominate the area. Certain newspapers, notably The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in the US, and The Globe and Mail and The National Post in Canada are available throughout the country. In India, newspapers like the Times of India, The Hindu, and the Hindustan Times are extremely popular and have large reader bases. Large metropolitan newspapers have also expanded distribution networks and with effort can be found outside their normal area.

Reading the newspaper: Brookgreen Gardens in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, United States.

International

There is also a small group of newspapers which may be characterized as international newspapers. Some, such as The International Herald Tribune, have always had that focus, while others are repackaged national newspapers or "international editions" of national-scale or large metropolitan newspapers. Often these international editions are scaled down to remove articles that might not interest the wider range of readers.

As English became the international language of business and technology, many newspapers formerly published only in non-English languages have also developed English-language editions. In places as varied as Jerusalem and Mumbai, newspapers are printed to a local and international English-speaking public. The advent of the Internet has also allowed the non-English newspapers to put out a scaled-down English version to give their newspaper a global outreach.

Online

Diario de Pernambuco, founded in 1825 is the first newspaper in all South America.

Virtually all printed newspapers have online editions, which depending on the country may be regulated by journalism organizations such as the Press Complaints Commission in the UK.^[24] But as some publishers find their print-based models increasingly unsustainable, Web-based "newspapers" have also started to appear, such as the Southport Reporter in the UK and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,^[25] which stopped publishing in print after 149 years in March 2009 and went online only.

Customized

A new trend in newspaper publishing is the introduction of individualization through on-demand printing technologies. Customized newspapers allow the reader to create their individual newspaper through the selection of individual pages from multiple publications. This "Best of" approach allows to revive the print-based model and openes up a new distribution channel to increase coverage beneath the usual boundaries of distribution. Customized newspapers online have been offered by MyYahoo. I-Google, CRAYON, ICurrent.com, Kibboko.com, Twitter.times and many others.

Organization and personnel

Newsboy, Iowa City, 1940, Arthur Rothstein.

In the United States, the overall manager or chief executive of the newspaper is the publisher. In small newspapers, the owner of the publication (or the largest shareholder in the corporation that owns the publication) is usually the publisher. Although he or she rarely or perhaps never writes stories, the publisher is legally responsible for the contents of the entire newspaper and also runs the business, including hiring editors, reporters, and other staff members. This title is less common outside the U.S. The equivalent position in the film industry and television news shows is the executive producer.

Most newspapers have four main departments devoted to publishing the newspaper itself—editorial, production/printing, circulation, and advertising, although they are frequently referred to by a variety of other names—as well as the non-newspaper-specific departments also found in other businesses of comparable size, such as accounting, marketing, human resources, and IT.

Throughout the English-speaking world, the person who selects the content for the newspaper is usually referred to as the editor. Variations on this title such as editor-in-chief, executive editor, and so on are common. For small newspapers, a single editor may be responsible for all content areas. At large newspapers, the most senior editor is in overall charge of the publication, while less senior editors may each focus on one subject area, such as local news or sports. These divisions are called news bureaus or "desks", and each is supervised by a designated editor. Most newspaper editors copy edit the stories for their part of the newspaper, but they may share their workload with proofreaders and fact-checkers.

Reporters are journalists who primarily report facts that they have gathered. Reporters writing longer, less news-oriented articles may be called feature writers. Photographers and graphic artists provide images and illustrations to support articles. Journalists often specialize in a subject area, called a beat, such as sports, religion, or science. Columnists are journalists who write regular articles recounting their personal opinions and experiences.

Printers and press operators physically print the newspaper. Printing is outsourced by many newspapers, partly because of the cost of an offset web press (the most common kind of press used to print newspapers) and also because a small newspaper's print run might require less than an hour of operation, meaning that if the newspaper had its own press it would sit idle most of the time. If the newspaper offers information online, webmasters and web designers may be employed to upload stories to the newspaper's website.

The staff of the circulation department liaise with retailers who sell the newspaper; sell subscriptions; and supervise distribution of the printed newspapers through the mail, by newspaper carriers, at retailers, and through vending machines. Free newspapers do not sell subscriptions, but they still have a circulation department responsible for distributing the newspapers.

Sales staff in the advertising department not only sell space to clients such as local businesses, but also help advertisers design and plan their advertising campaigns. Other members of the advertising department may include graphic designers, who design ads according to the customers' specifications and the department's policies. In an advertising-free newspaper, there is no advertising department

History of Internet

Although the history of the Internet arguably begins in the 19th century with the invention of the telegraph system, the modern history of the Internet starts in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of computers. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular lead to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.

In 1982 the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and again in 1986 when NSFNET provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s and the Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail, text based discussion forums, and the World Wide Web. The research and education community continues to use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) and Internet2. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbps, 10-Gbps, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, by commerce and entertainment, and by social networking.

Precursors

The Internet has precursors that date back to the 19th century, especially the telegraph system, more than a century before the digital Internet became widely used in the second half of the 1990s. The concept of data communication - transmitting data between two different places, connected via some kind of electromagnetic medium, such as radio or an electrical wire - predates the introduction of the first computers. Such communication systems were typically limited to point to point communication between two end devices. Telegraph systems and telex machines can be considered early precursors of this kind of communication.

Early computers used the technology available at the time to allow communication between the central processing unit and remote terminals. As the technology evolved, new systems were devised to allow communication over longer distances (for terminals) or with higher speed (for interconnection of local devices) that were necessary for the mainframe computer model. Using these technologies it was possible to exchange data (such as files) between remote computers. However, the point to point communication model was limited, as it did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary. The technology was also deemed as inherently unsafe for strategic and military use, because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of an enemy attack.

Three terminals and an ARPA

In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited in that they only allowed communications between the stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Sullivan, Illinois, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.

A fundamental pioneer in the call for a global network, J.C.R. Licklider, articulated the ideas in his January 1960 paper, Man-Computer Symbiosis.

"A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions."

—J.C.R. Licklider,

In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man Computer Communication", one of the first descriptions of a networked future.

In October 1962, Licklider was hired by Jack Ruina as Director of the newly established Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within DARPA, with a mandate to interconnect the United States Department of Defense's main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, the Pentagon, and SAC HQ. There he formed an informal group within DARPA to further computer research. He began by writing memos describing a distributed network to the IPTO staff, whom he called "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network". As part of the information processing office's role, three network terminals had been installed: one for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, one for Project Genie at the University of California, Berkeley and one for the Compatible Time-Sharing System project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Licklider's identified need for inter-networking would be made obvious by the apparent waste of resources this caused.

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. [...]

I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet."

—Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with The New York Times,

Although he left the IPTO in 1964, five years before the ARPANET went live, it was his vision of universal networking that provided the impetus that led his successors such as Lawrence Roberts and Robert Taylor to further the ARPANET development. Licklider later returned to lead the IPTO in 1973 for two years.^[3]

Packet switching

At the tip of the problem lay the issue of connecting separate physical networks to form one logical network. During the 1960s, Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), produced a study of survivable networks for the US military. Information transmitted across Baran's network would be divided into what he called 'message-blocks'. Independently, Donald Davies (National Physical Laboratory, UK), proposed and developed a similar network based on what he called packet-switching, the term that would ultimately be adopted. Leonard Kleinrock (MIT) developed mathematical theory behind this technology. Packet-switching provides better bandwidth utilization and response times than the traditional circuit-switching technology used for telephony, particularly on resource-limited interconnection links.

Packet switching is a rapid store-and-forward networking design that divides messages up into arbitrary packets, with routing decisions made per-packet. Early networks used message switched systems that required rigid routing structures prone to single point of failure. This led Tommy Krash and Paul Baran's U.S. military funded research to focus on using message-blocks to include network redundancy, which in turn led to the widespread urban legend that the Internet was designed to resist nuclear attack.

Networks that led to the Internet

ARPANET

Len Kleinrock and the first Interface Message Processor.

Promoted to the head of the information processing office at DARPA, Robert Taylor intended to realize Licklider's ideas of an interconnected networking system. Bringing in Larry Roberts from MIT, he initiated a project to build such a network. The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969.

"We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...", Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

"Do you see the L?"

"Yes, we see the L," came the response.

We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O."

"Yes, we see the O."

Then we typed the G, and the system crashed...

Yet a revolution had begun"....

By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet, the ARPANET grew rapidly. By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added approximately every twenty days.

ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used. ARPANET development was centered around the Request for Comments (RFC) process, still used today for proposing and distributing Internet Protocols and Systems. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.

International collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For various political reasons, European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks. Notable exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to the Tanum Earth Station and Peter Kirstein's research group in the UK, initially at the Institute of Computer Science, London University and later at University College London.^[12]

NPL

In 1965, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) proposed a national data network based on packet-switching. The proposal was not taken up nationally, but by 1970 he had designed and built the Mark I packet-switched network to meet the needs of the multidisciplinary laboratory and prove the technology under operational conditions. By 1976 12 computers and 75 terminal devices were attached and more were added until the network was replaced in 1986.

Merit Network

The Merit Network^[14] was formed in 1966 as the Michigan Educational Research Information Triad to explore computer networking between three of Michigan's public universities as a means to help the state's educational and economic development. With initial support from the State of Michigan and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the packet-switched network was first demonstrated in December 1971 when an interactive host to host connection was made between the IBM mainframe computer systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Wayne State University in Detroit. In October 1972 connections to the CDC mainframe at Michigan State University in East Lansing completed the triad. Over the next several years in addition to host to host interactive connections the network was enhanced to support terminal to host connections, host to host batch connections (remote job submission, remote printing, batch file transfer), interactive file transfer, gateways to the Tymnet and Telenet public data networks, X.25 host attachments, gateways to X.25 data networks, Ethernet attached hosts, and eventually TCP/IP and additional public universities in Michigan join the network. All of this set the stage for Merit's role in the NSFNET project starting in the mid-1980s.