What is the History of News?

You heard it here first...

Long before we ever flipped through tabloids, binged 24-hour news networks, or doomscrolled down the information superhighway texting and tweeting from the comfort of our couches, yester-millennium’s news was the simple exchange of questions & answers known as cultural transmission.

Darwin first suggested that language development came hand-in-hand with tool-making, so the first news would've likely been in the form of primitive IKEA instructions some 200,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Era (when fully human speech anatomy first appeared).

To the brain, new information produces a dopamine reward just the same as money or food, whether or not said information is particularly useful. As villages turned into towns and towns into civilizations, the insatiable hunger for juicy deets led to the interrogation of travelers for news as a matter of priority.

Town-crier in 17th century London (*source*)

Keeping you posted.

All the news that's fit to sprint: As civilizations expanded, relay runners used to carry messages across distances, taking months or years to reach their destinations, almost always aligned with holders of political power.

The first documented use of an organized courier service for the spread of information came via royal decree by Egyptian Pharaohs in 2400 BCE. Caesar followed with his Acta Diurna.
In West Africa and the Zulu Kingdoms, news spread via griots, oral historians who told tales of births, deaths, marriages, battles, hunts, affairs, and many other 'front-page' fodder.
The world's first written news may have originated in 8th century BCE China, the Tang dynasty in China prepared a report named 'Bao' to keep officials updated with the events.
While as far as the ancient Greeks, town-criers were the primary source of goings-on for most city-dwellers. the 14th-century Florentinos even passed laws as to how often a proclamation was to be read and where to read them and you could even pay to include an ad (the first native advertising, perhaps?).

With an increase in literacy, print media (aka newspapers) became the primary news source for populations (although town-criers were still breaking stories until at least the 19th century!).

While 500,000 books would go into circulation in the 50 years following Gutenberg's printing press in 1440, not until 1609 would Germany produce the world's first-ever regular news publications, known as the called "Avisa" (notice or warning) and "Relations," respectively.

The first-ever photograph to be printed alongside print news occurred on July 1st, 1848 in the French weekly periodical, *L’Illustration*. (*source*)

A picture is worth 1,000 words.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Just as the first town-criers arose in Britain to spread the news of the invasion of William of Normandy in 1066, photojournalism (and much of journalism thereafter) exploded due to the war in Crimea and the American Civil War in the mid-to-late 1800s.

Penny press issues shot in popularity since they sensationalized issues, focused more on gossip than good journalism, giving rise to 'yellow journalism' and can be primarily attributed to Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World.
Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896 to "restore sanity in the print media" and transform it back to the information and 'credible' source of news it had been.

Can you hear me now?
Radio news made its debut in the United States in November of 1920 in Pittsburgh, when the first commercial radio broadcast the live returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.

By 1940, 83% of American households had a radio, and they tuned in regularly.

As Seen on TV.

A Brave News World. In the US, the first official TV broadcast was the 1939 speech by President Franklin Roosevelt in New York during the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair.

TV was still playing second-fiddle to print media as far as news and broadcasting until the 60s– This all changed in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated and his accused killer murdered on live TV.
The percentage of US households owning a TV set grew from 9% in 1950 to 95.3% in 1970.
in 2021, more than 50% of Americans stated they prefer to get their news from digital devices & 35% from television. 7% and 5% from radio and newspapers, respectively.