at the instance of the council of Venice regarding events
that had either occurred within the republic or been reported by
ambassadors, consuls, and officials, by ships' captains, merchants, and
the like. These were sent as circular despatches to the Venetian
representatives abroad to keep them posted on international affairs.
Such collections of news were called _fogli d'avvisi_.

The further development of news publication in the field that it has
occupied since the more general adoption of the printing-press has been
peculiar. At the outset the publisher of a periodical printed newspaper
differed in no wise from the publisher of any other printed work--for
instance, of a pamphlet or a book. He was but the multiplier and seller
of a literary product, over whose content he had no control. The
newspaper publisher marketed the regular post-news in its printed form
just as another publisher offered the public a herbal or an edition of
an old writer.

But this soon changed. It was readily perceived that the contents of a
newspaper number did not form an entity in the same sense as the
contents of a book or pamphlet. The news items there brought together,
taken from different sources, were of varying reliability. They needed
to be used judicially and critically: in this a political or religious
bias could find ready expression. In a still higher degree was this the
case when men began to discuss contemporary political questions in the
newspapers and to employ them as a medium for disseminating party
opinions.

This took place first in England during the Long Parliament and the
Revolution of 1640. The Netherlands and a part of the imperial free
towns of Germany followed later. In France the change was not
consummated before the era of the great Revolution: in most other
countries it occurred in the nineteenth century. The newspaper, from
being a mere vehicle for the publication of news, became an instrument
for supporting and shaping public opinion and a weapon of party
politics.

The effect of this upon the internal organization of the newspaper
undertaking was to introduce a third department, the _editorship_,
between news collecting and news publication. For the newspaper
publisher, however, it signified that from a mere seller of news he had
become a dealer in public opinion as well.

At first this meant nothing more than that the publisher was placed in a
position to shift a portion of the risk of his undertaking