44 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Despite these strong differences in media policy, the West European news-
papers were surprisingly similar in content and form. In contrast to today,
news items were mostly arranged in the order in which they were received
rather than according to relevance, thus splitting events up into a list of iso-
lated incidences (see Schröder 1995: 214, 229). In order to inspire trust and
highlight its up-to-dateness, each message was preceded by the time and place
at which it was received, even though, depending on distance, events might
date back several weeks, and so printers scarcely intervened by editing news
reports from their foreign correspondents. Consequently, articles had linguis-
tic deficiencies and were difficult to understand. The number of foreign words
and technical terms was fairly high, and the many intermittently mentioned
people, locations and details required firm background knowledge. The per-
sonalisation of news reports, on the other hand, made them more accessible
(Schröder 1995: 146, 269; Schultheiß-Heinz 2004: 105–11).
European newspapers were also of a striking similarity in respect of content.
Foreign affairs predominated, with regional reports constituting less than a
tenth of the news (Morineau, in North 1995: 37; Schultheiß-Heinz 2004:
271; Haks, in Koopmans 2005: 169). Whilst news coverage of America and
the Orient was not uncommon, on the whole it was centred on neighbouring
European countries. The Holy Roman Empire especially was often the focus
of the foreign press (Wilke 1986: 80). International journalism was strongly
interwoven as far as content was concerned; however, as reports were passed
from paper to paper the news was also altered (Dooley 2010).
Regional events were covered mostly by pamphlets. Since they were often
produced in the same print shops as periodicals, one can say that the division
of responsibilities was intermeshed (Bellingradt 2011). The fact that newspa-
pers scarcely published local or regional news could be accounted for by fear
of censorship. In periods of greater freedom of press, the amount of local and
domestic news coverage did in fact increase, for example during the English
Civil War in the 1640s, and the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Yet even in
comparatively liberal regions such as the Netherlands, reporting chiefly con-
sisted of news from abroad. In order to explain the newspapers’ choice of
topics one must also see them in relation to their readers’ interests: it was
doubtless more convenient to communicate regional incidents verbally or via
pamphlet journalism, with sensationalist news such as miraculous births being
primarily disseminated by broadsides and rarely published in newspapers.
In nearly all European newspapers, military references took up by far the
most space. In Germany they accounted for as much as 70 to 80 per cent of
all articles during the battle-ridden summer months, and as much as 40 per
cent in the winter (Adrians 1999: 185f.; Neumann, in Blühm and Gebhardt
1987: 315). The spread of newspapers was closely connected with war as well:
their expansion throughout Western Europe and all the way to England did