Known as the chroniclers of daily life, newspapers assemble large amounts of information in the form of words, pictures, and graphics printed on lightweight, inexpensive paper stock for the purpose of informing and entertaining the public. Newspapers are portable, inexpensive, and printed either daily or weekly in tabloid or broadsheet format. Estimates indicate that there
Historians tend to agree that the Acta Diurna in ancient Rome, a daily gazette of official news, was one of the most important precursors of the newspaper as a public disseminator of topical information in the western world. (Newspapers, in their modern sense, would not emerge in countries such as China, Japan, and Korea until
The first newspapers appeared in western Europe in the seventeenth century, in forms that laid the basis for, and anticipated the form and content of, the contemporary newspaper. While they developed out of sixteenth-century print and manuscript news media, their advent constituted an early modern media revolution that was central to state formation, reading, and
The newspaper is the oldest and arguably the most important of all media for journalism. More journalists work in newspapers than in any other media. Moreover, dominant ideas of news – as a factual, independent account of the day’s principal events, set out in an ordered way for a geographically defined audience – emerged historically
Newspaper editors assign, review, edit, rewrite, and lay out all copy in a newspaper except advertisements. Editors sometimes write stories or editorials that offer opinions on issues. Editors review the editorial page and copy written by staff or syndicated columnists. A large metropolitan daily newspaper staff may include various editors who process thousands of words