46 | Mass Media and Historical Change
be understood as part of a media network comprising leaflets and broadsides
as well as handwritten newspapers, and that they alternately both influenced
and distinguished themselves from one another.
Generally newspapers were surprisingly well informed and their reporting
proved to be fairly detailed for the time. Using the example of the 1648 Peace
of Westphalia, Konrad Repgen has demonstrated that even dossiers, which
historians classify as secret sources, appeared in contemporaneous newspapers
with reasonable accuracy (Repgen 1997: 48f., 83). Furthermore, from the very
beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, newspapers printed handwritten corre-
spondences considered by researchers to have been secret (Weber 1999: 28).
The example of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) highlights
that in the case of the Netherlands, newspapers were just as well informed
as the most knowledgeable politician of the time would have been (Haks, in
Koopmans 2005: 181). These findings enhance the value of early newspapers
as research sources and stakeholders in history.
Specificities about newspaper authors and correspondents are hard to pin-
point, since they also wrote anonymously for fear of censorship. Early ‘jour-
nalists’ are thought to have been fairly young and ‘at a transitional stage in
their professional lives between their academic training and a hoped-for full-
time job, in accordance with the career ideal of the Early Modern Era’ (Arndt
2006: 109). Publishing a newspaper could mean great opportunities for profit
as well as high risks, since many newspapers failed after only a short while in
the business. Depending on the scope of their news reporting, correspondents
who worked in cities that served as information hubs, such as Vienna (South
East Europe), Hamburg (Northern Europe) or Cologne (North West Europe)
could earn a respectable amount of money, depending on the length of the
articles, and this constituted about a fifth of all newspaper costs. They were
often ‘experts in the orbit of power’, such as military or state officials (Weber,
in Kutsch and Weber 2002: 18; Blühm and Engelsing 1967: 29f.). Be that as
it may, they seldom travelled to the scenes of events, despite the fact that as
many as 1,666 war correspondents that actually travelled to theatres of war
have been recorded for the Netherlands (Morineau 1995: 38).
Existing information about publishers of early newspapers is somewhat
more substantial. Previous assumptions that postmasters were chiefly the ones
to publish newspapers, since they could immediately make use of the trans-
mitted information, have been refuted for the German territories. Rather, it
was the printers themselves who collected reports and hired editors. Occa-
sionally, even scholars would employ a hired printer (Arndt 2006: 102). In
the seventeenth century, thirty-five women who had taken over their late hus-
bands’ trades in accordance with guild precepts managed such print shops
in German regions (Welke 1971: 6f.). Of course, if one views Europe as a
whole, differences are obvious. Postmasters played a significant role in Sweden,