Journalism is turning information into money. Classy way to open a lecture but it's true. it began in Holland and England in the 1600s and has evolved into the money making leviathan that you can observe today. But how did we get to the point where journalism was even possible? As early as 6000 BC the first recorded system for writing came into being (Chinese pictographic script) begging the question, what were people doing in the millions of years before this. We then moved in the next thousands of years through the Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Sumerian Cuneform script, both ideas slightly too complicated to become standard. A big jump takes us to Latin from which much of our language is taken today. Looking at the picture below of the Lindisfarne Gospel you can see that some of the characters have survived to modern times.
In the 1440s Guttenberg's printing press was invented. Singularly the 'most important invention in history', says Einstein and he should know. He went on to say that: 'it gives man a kind of immortality'. Whereas before, ideas could be written down and lost just as quickly, the printing press gave you immortality because your ideas could live forever in books. This led us on to the Renaissance (for more depth on the subject of the Renaissance, check out my older blogs) where the ideas that had come from the Greeks could finally be written down, recorded and saved before another Dark Ages.
As far as journalism goes, not much happened for a few hundred years until the pamphleteers of the Civil War. Before that though there was one publication that got particular mention in the lecture for its significance to news. Foxes Book of Martyrs turned the pulpit into news media as it documents the persecution of all the important martyrs in history. This was one of the first uses of the printing press that wasn't The Bible; OK so it involved the Bible but it opened the door for the printing press to be used for other more diverse practices. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy brought us not only Charles II but John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, one of the most important pieces we have studied so far, (once again check my previous blogs for notes on John Locke). Eventually, this leads to one of the most important events in the history of journalism; the publication of the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant (picture below). This was the time of the Whigs in Parliament and Daniel Defoe, sometimes thought of as the father of English journalism, was pamphleteering at this time and was often pilloried for it showing the dangers of journalism in these times.
Comment papers such as The Spectator then began to crop up in the Whig Ascendancy, the content was commercial but witty. This was the time of Joseph Addison and the like whose observations are still wholly readable today. The next real innovation in journalism came with Hogarth and his photo journalism. The minute observations that could be seen within his paintings were able to reflect very accurately whole stories that could not be revealed by the actual articles. His most famous work Gin Alley is often referred back to as one of the best examples of photo journalism, even though it is not really a photo.
From this moment on, the aspects of journalism developed until we get to Fleet Street and then modern journalism. It is these early journalists, (Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, not forgetting photo journalist Hogarth), that helped pioneer journalism and make it the profession it is today.
Apologies for taking so long on this blog but it made it eventually.
Stay Classy Internet.
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