Chapter Six - From Manuscript to Print: The Multimedia News System

Summary

In the tatler of 17 september 1709, Richard Steele noted that, in the wake of the allied forces’ victory at the battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession, ‘People now spend their Time in Coffee-houses in Reflections upon the Particulars of the late glorious Day, and collecting the several Parts of the Action, as they are produc’d in Letters from private Hands, or Notices given to us by Accounts in publick Papers’ (Steele 1987, I: 41). The news, as Steele represents it, arrives and circulates in multiple media: oral conversation, handwritten letters and printed papers. His own work, he jokily complained, was being neglected as the public fixated on military news. Even an influential print periodical such as the Tatler, which scholars such as Jürgen Habermas have positioned as foundational to the print public sphere, represented itself as immersed in a news ecosystem in which speech and manuscript remained principal media more than 250 years after the invention of printing (Habermas [1962] 1989: 43).

Histories of the development and spread of the newspaper in Britain have often had an implicitly (or explicitly) Whiggish orientation, with the progressive rise of print sweeping away supposedly outdated, inefficient manuscript and oral forms of news transmission along with government restrictions on news circulation. In particular, the establishment of the London Gazette in 1665 has been taken as a foundational event, as the newspaper exhibited the folio half-sheet, two-column format that would remain standard for newspapers well into the eighteenth century, and that remains visually familiar today. For example, James Sutherland writes that the Gazette was a ‘complete innovation, replacing the traditional format of the newsbook with a half sheet in folio: a two-page newspaper, set for the first time in double columns, and costing 1d.’ (Sutherland 1986: 11). Although printed corantos and newsbooks had circulated since the 1620s, with frequent, heated publications during the Civil War period, the government-sponsored Gazette was the first paper to join the broadsheet format to strict periodicity, initially appearing bi-weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Even though the early Gazette was much smaller than today's broadsheet newspaper – about the same size as a sheet of A4 paper – it had the recognisable look of a newspaper, with a standard banner heading, datelines and columns. This format's continued predominance in newspapers today makes the Gazette appear as the inaugurator of a generic legacy.