A brief history of news

This post is part of a series of blog posts that should have been published all throughout last semester, but I’m only getting to know because life is tough.

While researching the “history of news”, I came across this video. In five minutes, Professor Mitchell Stephens does an effective job explaining what news is and how it developed. At the very bottom, you’ll find my scratch notes/timeline, but first some key takeaways.

News was not always for sale

The idea of “buying news” is a relatively new concept. Before that, news was more of a means of survival. We told each other stories, or we discussed what we saw on the road between cities as we passed travelers. Most importantly, news was an amateur activity. I find this so fascinating because, at least for me, news and journalism have always been held up to such high esteem.

When news was an amateur’s job, we trusted people to give us information because there wasn’t as much incentive to artificially shape a story or flat out lie. Although, it would be naive to say that propaganda didn’t exist.

Certain people became privileged to “tell us” the news

This is such a consequential shift. At a certain point, with the help of technologies like the telegraph, people realized the value of sending people to seek out new information from far away places. This is what led to modern day newspapers like The New York Times. Most importantly, this set up a new news dynamic — those “on high” who were privileged enough to tell us what happened (the journalists) and the plebes who had no choice but to consume what we were given.

Thankfully, the idea of the press was deemed almost sacred by all the players involved, so stories had to be sourced, off the record comments were honored, and journalists who disobeyed these sacred rules would be fired. So even though all our news had to pass through a filter, it was, for the most part, reliable and effective.

The internet ruined everything

It’s cliche at this point to talk about how the internet is ruining news and basic truth gathering. In about five minutes, a single person can publish an article online that looks as good on Facebook or Twitter as anything the editorial staff from the Times produces. That’s a pretty scary reality. Up to this point, you needed the manpower and technical prowess to distribute news at a massive scale. Now it takes zero skill, zero time and zero dollars. In other words, news has been given back to the amateurs. This is both scary and exciting.

Amateur news is scary when you consider something like the reach of Breitbart or Mark Cernovich, but exciting when you think about things like De Correspondent which started on Kickstarter and has an aggressively different interpretation of what news should be.

We need to keep in mind that we are still at the beginning of this process. The internet only recently started to affect policy debates and elections. You might argue it started in the 2000s as the popularity of political blogs or in 2004 with Howard Dean’s campaign. You might point to Obama’s ’08 campaign which was the first with a real digital team or to 2016 with the Trump campaign that was greatly affected by social media (by Trump and the Russians).

A very sloppy chronology

• Probably just pointing to things and grunting. I.e. grunt….*points to tiger*….grunt, which loosely translates to “oh shit, a tiger, let’s be careful”
• Development of language
• News is innate to being human. We have an instinctual desire to be aware of things. I.e. “hey friend, you better watch out, there’s a tiger up the road”
• Papers/posters handwritten by skilled monks or whatever
• Printing press — ability to mass distribute information
• Steam press (~150 years ago?) made it possible to make money selling news
• Telegraph
• Reporting. Ppl on staff to actually go out and seek news. Early 19th century, earlier in England. It made news valuable. Created rise of mass circulation newspapers.
• Everything after that (radio, television) expanded the audience but the basic practice is the same
• Television turned a 1MM into millions
• Became more and more difficult for “average people” to contribute to the news
• It also RAISED the barrier to entry for new competitors
• Internet
• Reduced the cost of creating content to $0
• Advantage professional journalists have over us has been reduced so so greatly
• We can watch the same source and make our own damn opinions
• Let’s go back to the tiger:
• At least before, you felt decently confident that if I told you there was a tiger, you would believe me. Why would i lie?
• Now, Rachel Maddow is saying, “A tiger? What are you talking about? Don’t be silly” and Sean Hannity is going, “Of course there’s a tiger! Don’t go down that road or you will be killed and eaten” Meanwhile the Tiger Lobby is paying Rachel Maddow to not tell anyone about the tigers. And now you’re dead.