Chapter 2
The Establishment of Periodicals
Newspapers as a New Medium
Newspapers and magazines are still counted among those mass media which
exert the most influence in the realms of politics, culture and society. Nev-
ertheless, the invention of the periodical press in 1605 is not classified as a
turning point in remembrance culture or in historical studies. Until today,
even major encyclopedic works have mostly failed to consider the inventor of
the newspaper, Johann Carolus, worthy of an entry. Nor did contemporaries
often bring up the issue of the new medium. It was not until newspapers were
established Europe-wide in the last third of the seventeenth century that an
intensive debate emerged on the subject (Pompe 2004). While communica-
tion studies have long stressed the social significance of early newspapers, his-
torians are now also beginning to emphasise their importance. In the German
context, Wolfgang Behringer in particular refers to the emergence of newspa-
pers as a media revolution in whose course the interplay of the postal network
and newspapers ‘contributed considerably to changing the view of the world
within a generation’ (Behringer 1999: 81).
One reason why the rise of the newspaper was generally not considered as a
‘media revolution’ was the fact that no technical innovation was linked with it.
In fact, printing techniques hardly changed between the age of Gutenberg and
the French Revolution. This underlines the argument that technical changes
were not a prerequisite for media developments, but that the form and acqui-
sition of media were shaped rather by cultural, political and social precondi-
tions. Linguistically, the invention of the newspaper also fails to constitute a
distinct break: on the one hand, the German term Zeitung (originally meaning
‘news’) had been used from around 1500 to denote non-periodical leaflets
containing the latest news (so-called Neue Zeitungen, ‘New Newspapers’). On
the other hand, Zeitung only succeeded in asserting itself as a term for this
specific medium in the nineteenth century. At the same time, other terms