History of the News in Five Paragraphs

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Richard Wald now teaches at the Columbia Journalism School. But for many years, he was a leading figure in the news business, first in print, then running NBC News and finally with Roone Arledge during ABC's heyday. Wald is the man who brought David Brinkley to Sunday morning for ABC. So when he wrote this pocket history of communication for the Columbia Spectator, he was was trying to make a bigger point about how new forms of communication don't obliterate the old ones:

Writing seems to have appeared first in Sumer, on clay tablets, about 3,300 years Before the Common Era. Most people stayed illiterate and bards and praise singers were the main communicators. Roughly 2,300 years later, Homer, or someone just like him in Ionia, pulled together the stories of Troy and Odysseus and enriched oral traditions, also encouraging Greeks to write down the verses on papyrus, a technical advance which the Egyptians invented to the detriment of stone carving.

Wood block printing developed in the Middle Ages, but the scribes of Paris had a pretty strong union until Gutenberg developed movable type, designed the printing press and in 1452 published the Bible, the first book ever printed in volume. Goodbye scribes, hello Enlightenment.

Four hundred years later, in the middle of the 1800s, you get the inventions of the typewriter, the rotary press, the Linotype and the first full-page newspaper ad (in “The New York Ledger”). The mass circulation press is born.

Fifty years later, Marconi invents the wireless and by 1920, the first licensed radio station is on the air. Twenty-eight years later, the first widely disseminated commercial television is broadcast. Twenty-one years after that, ARPANET begins development of the Internet. Twenty years pass, computers become ubiquitous, and the World Wide Web is set up. Five years later, America and the world go nuts in the Great Digital Bubble that litters the landscape with fiber optic hookups.

Attentive Reader will now have noticed two things: One, technology comes first with one thought in its head (radio for ships at sea, or an Internet for scholarly discourse) and then others figure out how to use it differently. Two, everything comes faster nowadays (2,300 years from the first writing to Homer, 400 years from Gutenberg to the rotary press, 100 years from Marconi to the Internet bubble).