The Invention Of News: How The World Came To Know About Itself - Plot & Excerpts
In Germany, the Low Countries and particularly England newspapers had captured the public imagination. In London a multiplicity of competing papers fuelled the poisonous politics of the age, and posed those in power unfamiliar problems of news management. But who exactly lay behind this vast increase in the weekly and sometimes daily output of news? Who provided the necessary continuous stream of copy? It will not have escaped the attention of readers that so far we have met remarkably few of those involved in the actual writing of news. Most of the news men who have featured in these pages have been either the proprietors of manuscript news services, or authors who made their name through the publication of what were essentially advocacy pamphlets in serial form – men like Marchamont Nedham or Daniel Defoe. Most of the great journalists of the eighteenth century were either pamphleteers (Defoe and Swift) or wits (Addison and Steele). So although this was the age when the word ‘journalist’ was first coined, it did not yet describe an independent craft.
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