Reporting on occurred events is part of our human being. But how did we go from informing our tribe to multinational press agencies?
The modern media field, and the power these are gaining progressively in the global community, has set a number of questions and issues for inspection, regarding the past and consequently the future of journalism. How did it start? Where did it come from? How did media manage to become the forth estate and extend their empire almost worldwide? What is the next step? Many answers have been given to those questions, and academics on the field keep finding a plethora of approaches about those subjects. Besides the academics’ quests and arguments though, the uncontested truth is that people have always been mastered by two major instincts.
The primer urge we will talk about is what we can call the “briefing instinct”, that is the need of a person or a community to be aware of any change or any progress taking place in the world around them. Information and knowledge has always been power, thus from the ancient times what could be considered the most forceful institution was the one that could access fast, accurate and supplemented information. Spies and heralds who acted in the imperatorial and royal curiae of the past, evolved in a way to become the modern journalists, trading information, not for the emperor or the king anymore, but for the vast majority of the public that devours sloppily everything it is fed by the media.
From the first moment humans gathered in organised communities that used language, and started forming some civilization, occurred the need for messages to be spread quickly amongst a number of people that varied from case to case. The forerunner or the town crier served for this purpose, but as communities were enlarged and started using the alphabet, the needs became more complex. That is when the first wall announcements appeared, containing state orders or important messages dangled at some major place of the city, mainly during the ancient Greek and Roman Empires years. The first news in print made their appearance during the 16th century in various states of Europe, under the name of occasionnels, corantos, canards and miscellaneous others, depending on the country. The fist newspapers, approaching in form and content of our modern idea about them, appeared early in the 17th century, while the first news agencies in the 19th, and they have shaped the history of journalism until our days.
The second major instinct of human beings is their need for communication and most specifically to spread the news and share what they’ve experienced with other people. Mainly in lettered societies, where citizens have unconsciously developed the feeling that what they write can –in contrast with anything spoken– be preserved, travel in time and lead them in immortality, people seem to wish to save their thoughts and feelings, and report their experiences either to teach something, or just to tell, or only for the pleasure to narrate. The same phenomenon can be found nowadays, with the aid of technology, in the form of on-line blogs. This tendency of the people to write down their experiences, share and communicate their thoughts, views, knowledge, is the escort of journalism, and every other form of written civilization. We should always have in mind that journalism emerged and developed the same time –and on the same geographical spot– with the big novel, thus has common routes with literature.
Europe vs. USA
During the 19th and even the 20th century literary and journalistic texts were printed on the same media and, mainly in Europe, newspapers employed in their staff many members of the intellect who wrote for a living. This has been possible because the European (or French) journalistic model, that is completely different than the Anglo-Saxon model, functioning mainly in England and the USA, gives priority to annotations and long analysis passages, and not the core of the news with as little words as possible, and focuses on big narrative texts and opinion articles, consequently intellectual people were most welcome to work as journalists. Nowadays of course, with the development of the electronic media, many things have changed, but not the human greed to consume information and news, and the human mettle to communicate their experience.
