Comm455/History of Journalism

Sports Illustrated.  One of the most popular magazines among readers in the United States. It has been a hit since the first issue came out on August 16, 1954. There were 148 pages in the first issue containing advertisements, small stories, feature stories, and even pictures and full stats of baseball players during that time. The sports that […]

Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela When the roman empire fell in the fourth and fifth century, literacy, transportation and trade suffered a severe blow which ultimately put a halt on written news. Most of Europe was left without any knowledge of contemporary news, which was the case until the 12th century. The earliest known form of […]

“President Shot Dead,” “Attack on America” “Berlin Wall Crumbles” Headlines like these have been fed to the world since the beginnings of the press and media in general. Always being a front page story, significant news stories that shape the world are the first thing a reader sees when he or she picks up a […]

With the advent of  newspapers, Americans were given the information they craved on a daily basis. With papers covering politics, economics and social events, citizens of the 50 states were fed the valuable information they craved. Yep, immigrants too! With periodicals starting to gain a large following in the late 19th century, newbies to the […]

A form of the earliest newspapers, the Roman Acta Diurna were a daily posting of news from the Roman officials. Unlike the flimsy and disposable modern newspaper, the Actas were carved onto stone and metal and published in the forums for public viewing. The first Acta was published sometime around 131 B.C. during the Roman […]

Moveable type was first used to print by Bi Sheng in China around 1041 A.D. His system of printing was very labor intensive, however. Creating the large ceramic slabs with the details of each character in the Chinese language proved near impossible. Korea tried methods similar to Sheng’s just a few centuries later, but ran […]

On April 11, 1836, 23-year-old prostitute Ellen Jewett was found brutally murdered in her bed. With a bloody gash in her head, and her body left charred from arson, police arrested clerk Richard P. Robinson. Usually this would be the end of the case, but as most journalists are, James Gordon Bennett was curious wanted […]

Since Johannes Gutenberg’s Printing Press—invented around 1436—prints of all kinds have been massively produced. Following this invention, the newspaper was able to spread the news in the form of printed paper. The time in between Gutenberg’s Printing Press and our modern society of blogging, tweeting and online publications has come to be known as the […]

The earliest sports reports date back to 1470 when the Italians wrote about tournaments.  Books, reports, and writing for America’s pastime did not start until 1837 when Henry Chadwick invented the game. The father of baseball they called him. Chadwick wrote the first rule book along with inventing all the rules himself.  Surprisingly, he never […]