The early network of hand-written news sheets expanded from Italy into the German speaking world in late 16th century, writes Paola Molino, of Ludwig-Maximilian University. Molino analysed the so-called Fuggerzeitungen, a vast collection of news sheets gathered by the Fugger brothers, who were famous bankers and creditors for Europe’s nobility. This corpus was compared to … Continued

A new article by Joop W. Koopmans, of University of Groningen, looks at the way 18th century Dutch news digests positioned themselves in relation to other news products of the time. The article focuses on the coverage of the 1748 Aix-la-Chapelle peace treaty. Newspapers commonly made mistakes with names and dates while scrambling to report … Continued

Songs used to be hugely popular form of news media in early modern Europe. An article by Una McIlvenna of the University of Kent studies this phenomenon and suggests new skills for historians studying news media. Because levels of literacy were low, news-songs were vey popular: a song was the most effective medium of information … Continued

Grub-Street Journal (1730–1737) was a weekly paper that satirized the conventions of London journalism. Its editor Richard Russel searched through publications for accounts of the same event and through satire revealed their errors and contradictions. The author of the article, Will Slauter, describes Russels work as “a manual version of news aggregation”. It exposed errors … Continued

While film has become a dominant cultural form in cultural journalism, its prominence in the quality newspapers does not indicate an inclination towards the principals of popular culture, write Annemarie Kersten and Susanne Janssen. Their newly published article studies trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. Analysis shows that this coverage mostly … Continued