Conclusions

Summary

The Thirty Years War generated demand for news. It led to a Europe-wide expansion in printed periodicals that started in the Protestant northwest and gradually spread. A great deal of public news was shared across confessional and dynastic communities and the flow of news allowed its readers to construct a coherent view of events. News crossed the Channel into London so that, by the 1620s, there was a thriving and popular interest with more news available and available more quickly than ever before. Publishers in London began combining material culled from a number of publications from Germany and the Netherlands, making England one of the early countries to have its own series: the first printed news periodicals thus became established in Jacobean England.

Periodical news reporting was not, in itself, revolutionary since the news networks that were to supply the presses during the Thirty Years War had been connecting cities across Europe and developing for over a century. However, the step into print made the whole enterprise more visible. This drove forward the development of the industry because periodical publication needs to be sustained with settled and effective relationships with suppliers, the authorities, within the trade (London booksellers, distribution connections and carriers), and with readers. Publishers drove the development of these relationships. It involved a far greater level of responsibility and entrepreneurial risk taking than ever before. This expansion of their role was recognised at the time and led to the use of the term ‘publisher’ in dialogue with the reader.

The news series established by the syndicate of publishers in 1622, after false starts the year before, meant a commitment to continuity and recognition of a need to steer a careful course between the Crown (and later Parliament), licensers and the Stationers’ Company. This allowed them to maintain working relationships and to stay in business week after week, weathering the storms of sensitive times, changes of approach to control, and political uncertainty as foreign policies changed. The publishers built news supply relationships and a distribution infrastructure. Supply needed to be as steady as possible and dissemination networks needed to reach towns and rural communities on a consistent basis.