The Young Man and Journalism

by Chester Sanders Lord

NEWSPAPER HISTORY—THE MODERN NEWSPAPER

The young man contemplating journalism may be interested in the beginnings of the business. The little known about them is abundantly repeated in various histories. China seems to have been the pioneer at a time before the Christian era. But the records of those early years are hazy. It is known that the Peking Gazette, as the sheet now is called, has been in continuous publication since the year 618 and mention is made of the Peking News as being much older. News-sheets printed in the time of Julius Cæsar speak of their esteemed contemporaries published in China.

Before the invention of type and printing all communications intended for public consumption were written on papyrus sheets and were hanged in the market places, or were read to the people, or were circulated in various ways.

Fifty years before the coming of Christ, the Roman government sent out an official sheet for the information of its public servants, the army, and the people, and this publication was continued for many years. Latterly it was called Acta Diurna (Daily News) and it seems to have been exceedingly popular.

The public appetite for news and gossip appears to have been quite as voracious then as now. The news-sheets were almost sensational in their telling of scandals, of murders, and the details of crime. There seems to have been little regard for the proprieties in those days, for we read in the Acta Diurna that “the funeral of Marcia was performed with greater pomp of images than attendance of mourners.” Extracts from Cicero’s speeches are given, and one commentator writes:

When Cicero was sent as governor to Cilicia he asked a friend to send him the news of Rome. The friend employed scribes, the reporters of that day, to gather the information and prepare the letters. The man who wrote the first letters reported everything from the procedure of the Senate to the result of the latest gladiatorial contest. Cicero objected to his methods and complained that the letters contained items that he would not have bothered with when at home. What he wanted, he explains, was advance information to keep him in touch with the political movements of the time.

It was during the reign of the Cæsars that the news-sheets were in full request. They were written in Latin, of course, and were marvels of the penman’s art on papyrus; and they were expressed with an epigrammic terseness and a snap that might well be imitated to-day. Dr. Johnson translates a few of them in the Gentleman’s Magazine as follows:

The Latin festivals were celebrated, a sacrifice performed on the Alban Mount, and a dole of fish distributed to the people.

A fire has happened on Mount Coelius; two trisulae and five houses were consumed and four damaged.

Demiphone, the famous pirate, who was taken by Licinus Nerva, a provincial lieutenant, was crucified.

The red standard was displayed at the Capitol and the Consuls obliged the youth who were enlisted for the Macedonian war to take a new oath in the Campus Martius.

The Aedile Tertinius fined the butchers for selling meat which had not been inspected by the market overseers. The fine is to be used to build a chapel for the temple of Tellus.

M. Tullius Cicero pleaded in defense of Cornelius Sylla, accused by Torquatus of being concerned in Catiline’s conspiracy and gained his cause by a majority of five judges. The Tribunes of the Treasury were against the defendant. One of the Praetors advertised by an edict that he should put off his sittings for five days on account of his daughter’s marriage.

A report was brought to Tertinius, the praetor, while he was trying cases at his tribunal, that his son was dead. This was contrived by the friends of Coponius, who was accused of poisoning, that the praetor might adjourn the court; but the magistrate having discovered the falsity of the story, returned to his tribunal and continued in taking information against the accused.

After Cæsar’s time the Roman sheets gradually disappeared and newspaper history becomes very misty. News publications reappeared, however, in Vienna and in Augsburg in 1524 and Pendleton in his “Newspaper Reporting in Olden Time and To-day,” after quoting Chalmers in his “Life of Ruddiman,” observes: