A History of Mass Media

Story

8 January 1815: The battle fought after the peace

The peace treaty was signed at Ghent on 24 December 1814. Fifteen days later, on 8 January 1815, Americans and the British fought a major battle outside New Orleans. Why? Because neither the armies nor the American Congress knew the treaty had been signed; the news had not yet crossed the Atlantic. Some Americans learned of the peace and of the battle at about the same time, within January. The treaty itself was ratified on the American side in February.

Think about it: the end of a war is late because of the travel time of a piece of news. People are fighting because a sheet of paper is still on its way. Today a message crosses the same distance in seconds; so the real question is what kind of world speed builds.

This lesson will follow exactly that question: how fast, how cheaply, to how many people and with whose permission can information travel? The answer changed with every new medium, and each of the theories you will meet in this course was born on one stage of that change. From writing to printing, from the newspaper to the telegraph, from radio to the internet, we will tell one story: as media change, who can speak to whom, and how fast?

Lab

Four questions to ask of every medium

In this lesson we will scan a journey of more than a thousand years with the same four questions. They are not a theory but a working framework I am handing you; still, they help to gather history’s scattered dates:

1. Production: Who can publish, and what does it cost?
2. Reach: How many people and how far does the message get?
3. Speed: How much time passes between the event and the news?
4. Control and feedback: Who gives permission, who can cut it off; can the receiver answer back?

A small experiment. (Hypothetical example.) In a village, an official reads the announcements aloud in the mosque courtyard every morning. Now a printing press prints the same announcement onto a thousand sheets. Which answers changed? Reach and cost: a thousand sheets instead of one person’s voice. Control too: stopping the official is easy, but gathering the sheets back once they are scattered is hard.

Put on these glasses on every card: most historical “firsts” matter because they changed the answer to one of these four questions. What makes a medium “new” is not its machinery but the shift in these answers. A small rule: if you cannot answer all four questions in one sentence each, you have not understood the medium yet; read the card again.

Card

The time ladder: seventeen rungs

Each of the dates below will come up in detail on the cards; here I put only the skeleton. Each date is the version of a “first” claim that rests on reliable sources; whenever someone says “first”, a parenthesis stays open.

• 868: the oldest dated woodblock-printed book, the Diamond Sutra
• 1377: the Jikji, printed in Korea with movable metal type
• 1454–55: the 42-line Bible in Mainz
• 1605: the first regularly printed news sheet, in Strasbourg
• 1727–1729: permission for Müteferrika’s press and its first book
• 1831: Takvim-i Vekayi
• 1833: the one-cent Sun in New York
• 1839: the daguerreotype offered as a gift to humanity
• 1844: Morse’s Washington–Baltimore line
• 1860: Tercüman-ı Ahval
• 1895: the Lumière brothers’ paid screening
• 1920: radio station KDKA broadcasting election returns, and the founding of the Anadolu Agency
• 1927: Istanbul Radio
• 1936: the BBC’s television service
• 1968: TRT’s test broadcast
• 1989–1993: the proposal for the Web and its release to the public

Card

The lesson’s one-sentence claim

The claim: The history of mass communication is not a history of machines but of shifts in the answers on production, reach, speed and control; the machine makes the shift possible but does not determine it alone.

Both halves of this sentence matter.

First: tools really do matter. Cities that had a printing press grew faster in the following century than those that did not, and were more likely to be Protestant; you will see this in two economics studies. Even the region-by-region spread of television in the US affected voter turnout.

Second: the same technique gave different results in different societies. Movable type was invented in China but did not become dominant there, because for a script with thousands of characters carving a whole page as one block stayed cheaper. For the penny press, too, Michael Schudson finds explanations based only on technology or literacy insufficient; for him what counted was the environment called a “democratic market society”.

So throughout the course we will carry this pair: a medium offers an environment; the people, institutions and money that use it decide how things turn out. The theories in later lessons (for example The Payne Fund Studies and the Invasion from Mars for film and children, Cultivation Theory for television) are readings of this pair with different weights.

Card

A small glossary: words you will meet often in this lesson

So that you do not stumble on the cards, let us gather the words first:

• Mass media: print, electronic and digital channels that carry the same message at the same time to large numbers of receivers who do not know one another mass media
• Movable type: a printing technique in which every character is a separate piece; the difference from block printing is that the whole page is not a single mould movable type
• Colophon: a note at the beginning or end of a book naming the printer, place and date. The 42-line Bible has none.
• Penny press: the newspaper of the 1830s, sold on the street for one cent and financed by advertising penny press
• News agency: an organization that gathers news once and sells it to many newspapers news agency
• Broadcasting: sending the same programme from a centre to a large number of receivers at the same time broadcasting
• Firman and fatwa: the sultan’s written order and the chief mufti’s religious-legal opinion; Müteferrika’s permission for his press came with both.

A hint: in this lesson you will often see the word “first” in quotation marks. Whether something is first depends on what you count as first, that is, on the definition: the first typesetting, the first dated print, the first regular newspaper are different races.

Story

“Broadcast”: scattering seed over a field

In the middle of the 18th century a farmer, instead of sowing seed in rows, scatters it by hand over a wide area. English called this method broadcast: a blend of “broad” and “cast”. Later the word slid into the sense of “widely spread”; its use for radio is recorded around 1921–22.

The comparison is surprisingly apt. The person scattering seed does not know the soil one patch at a time, nor where each seed lands. A radio broadcaster likewise “scatters” the same programme to everyone without knowing who is listening. The difference from older media is this: a letter had an address, and a newspaper sold by subscription had a subscriber list; in broadcasting the receiver was a crowd whose faces you could not see.

One more coincidence: the cultivation theory you will meet in this course is also built on a farming comparison Cultivation Theory. Broadcasting scatters the seed; cultivation asks what crop comes from the same seeds being sown for years. Put the two comparisons side by side and the “how” of broadcasting and the “what happened” of the theory complete each other. Turkish does the same job with the word “yayın” (broadcast): radio yayını, televizyon yayını. The farming trace is erased in the word; but the verb “yaymak” (to spread) carries the same idea, scattering something over a wide area.

Myth check

Myth check: “Gutenberg invented printing”

What people assume. Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450s; before him the world lived by handwriting; the printed book spread from Europe to the world.

What the sources say.

• The oldest surviving dated printed book comes from China: the Diamond Sutra, dated 11 May 868 and printed with woodblocks.
• Movable type was tried in East Asia too: Bi Sheng’s baked-clay characters of the 1040s in China, known as far as the scholar Shen Kuo wrote about them. In Korea the Jikji was printed with movable metal type in 1377; according to the BnF, 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.
• The Bible in Mainz was printed around 1454–55; Gutenberg’s shop is valuable as a pioneer of printing technique in Europe, but not the “first in the world”.

So what is Gutenberg’s share? Being among the early and documented pioneers of book production with movable metal type in Europe. Correct the story and Gutenberg does not shrink; the story grows: the idea of printing was tried in East Asia and in Europe, in different environments (any possible links between them are not claimed in this lesson). This goes back to the warning of the first card: a medium offers an environment; the people who use it decide the result.

Story

The document we have is a lawsuit: what is really known about Gutenberg

6 November 1455: a notary in Mainz writes up the summary of a hearing. Face to face are the wealthy Johann Fust and Johannes Gutenberg. Fust had lent 800 guilders twice; now he wants his money back. This document, written by the notary Helmasperger, has come down to us as the most important contemporary source about Gutenberg’s printing venture; it was found in 1734. We can trace Gutenberg as a goldsmith in Strasbourg from 1434; the first proof of his return to Mainz is also a loan document (1448). So the documents of his life are mostly documents about money.

Now the surprising part: the famous 42-line Bible has neither a title page nor a colophon, so we have to ask whose book it is. Gutenberg’s name appears nowhere in the book; today the book is attributed to him by general acceptance. The sources estimate that at most 180 copies were printed, a quarter of them on parchment.

This detail matters for our lesson: history writing was a job of answering “who did what, and when?” with documents; where there is no document, “probably” goes in front of the answer. Legend fills that gap with lovely stories. We leave the gap empty.

Step by step

1605: From the handwritten newsletter to the printed newspaper

The newspaper was born not of a discovery but of a squeeze. Step by step:

1. Newsletters. Johann Carolus in Strasbourg sold handwritten newsletters to wealthy subscribers.
2. The bottleneck. Copying each newsletter by hand ate up time. Carolus bought a printing shop in 1604 and in the summer of 1605 began printing his newsletters.
3. The ground was ready. According to Johannes Weber, around 1600 everything needed was in place: the technique of book printing, a regular postal relay open to the public, and a network of correspondents around the world.
4. The newspaper. In Strasbourg in 1605 the first regular printed news sheet appeared; the World Association of Newspapers accepted this date in 2005.
5. Spread. By the 1620s a variety of newspapers were circulating in central Europe; in the second half of the seventeenth century newspapers were the most widely read secular texts. According to Weber the real result was this: the events and personalities of political life were now regularly made public.

Caution: claims of “the first newspaper” depend on how a newspaper is defined: regular, printed, sold to anyone? In England too there are rival claims to the oldest newspaper; which is right changes with the criterion.

Story

1833: The one-cent newspaper and the bat-people of the Moon

3 September 1833, New York. Benjamin Day brings out the first issue of The Sun: the price is one cent. The papers of the day cost six cents and relied on yearly subscriptions; the Sun was sold one copy at a time on the street, its sellers were “newsboys”, and its income came largely from advertising. The content changed too: court and police reports, local events, human stories. It was called the penny press.

The “product” of this new trade was news, and sales depended on how interesting the news was. On 25 August 1835 the Sun began a six-part series: it claimed that through the famous astronomer John Herschel’s huge telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, plants and bat-winged people had been seen on the Moon. In reality the series was fiction; its author is known to have been the Sun’s reporter Richard Adams Locke. The paper never openly admitted the hoax; Locke acknowledged it only five years later, in a private letter.

This story teaches two things. First: news had become a commercial product. Second: Michael Schudson ties the penny press not only to technical innovation but to a “democratic market society”, and argues that the very thing we call “news” settled in this period.

Step by step

The telegraph: news makes money and speed becomes a race

In 1815 a piece of news crossing the Atlantic took weeks. Fifty years later the same distance shrank to minutes. How, step by step?

1. 24 May 1844. From the Supreme Court chamber in Washington, Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” to Alfred Vail in Baltimore. The first line saw little use; but within a few years some fifty telegraph companies were operating.
2. 1846. Five New York newspapers set up a joint arrangement to share the cost of Mexican War news; it later became the Associated Press. The papers carried the war news by pony express from New Orleans to Charleston and passed it on by telegraph to New York.
3. Agencies. Havas was founded in Paris in 1835 and was always looking for the fastest means, from pigeons to the telegraph. Paul Julius Reuter in 1850 filled the telegraph gap between Aachen and Belgium with pigeons; on 10 October 1851 he opened a telegraph office in London and sent stock prices between London and Paris over the Calais–Dover cable.
4. The ocean. The transatlantic cable laid in 1858 failed within a few weeks; the cable laid by the Great Eastern on 27 July 1866 was permanent. Weeks shrank to a day, even to minutes.

The result: news became a product detached from place. In the late 1860s the three big agencies (Havas, Reuters and Wolff) divided their service areas in Europe among themselves. Newspapers were now publishing the same text on the same day; this is the first stone on the road to the agenda-setting and gatekeeping discussions of later lessons.

Card

The image multiplies: photography, halftone and cinema

Words could be printed; but what about images? Here are three steps.

1839: A gift from the state. On 19 August 1839 Arago presented Daguerre’s process to the academies. Instead of patenting it for private profit, the French state opened it to the public and announced it as a gift to humanity. It spread fast: the first export shipment reached Berlin on 6 September.

1880: The photograph enters the newspaper. Photographs could be taken but could not enter the newspaper press; papers gave images mostly as engravings and woodcuts. On 4 March 1880 the New York Daily Graphic printed the image titled “A Scene in Shantytown, New York” with the halftone technique; it is remembered as the first halftone photograph published in a newspaper. Stephen Horgan adapted halftone to rotary presses in 1897; only that made the wide use of photographs in newspapers possible.

1895: Watching together in the dark. On 28 December 1895 the Lumière brothers showed short scenes from everyday French life to paying spectators at the Grand Café in Paris. Cinema meant watching the same moving image together, at the same moment, in one room; in the language of our four questions, what changed was less reach than the form of shared experience.

The three steps together: the image first spread as a method opened to the public, then entered the newspaper, then gained movement. You will meet the first large studies of children and film in the The Payne Fund Studies and the Invasion from Mars lesson.

Step by step

Broadcasting enters the home: radio and television

By the 1920s a way had been found to carry a piece of news to thousands of homes at once. The scenes in order:

1. 2 November 1920, Pittsburgh. KDKA broadcast the returns of the Harding–Cox presidential election; the results were telephoned to the station from the office of the Pittsburgh Post. The station had been licensed on 27 October 1920. The aim was to raise sales of receivers.
2. Britain, 1922–1927. The British Broadcasting Company was formed in 1922; the first broadcast went out on 14 November 1922 from the 2LO studio in London. In 1927, under John Reith, it became the British Broadcasting Corporation by royal charter. So two models stand side by side: a commercial station founded to sell receivers and a public broadcaster run on a licence fee.
3. 2 November 1936, London. The BBC began its regular television service from Alexandra Palace: a 405-line picture, two hours a day, six days a week.
4. The common result. The same programme, at the same moment, is heard at home. This is the synchronous and private-space side of the concept of “broadcasting” broadcasting.

Caution: the claim of the “world’s first regular television service” depends on the criterion. Germany had started a regular but 180-line, lower-definition service a year earlier. Add the definition to every sentence you build on a “first”.

Card

Did printing really change anything? Two economics studies

“Printing changed Europe” sounds true; but what is the evidence? Two economists tested it city by city.

Jeremiah Dittmar (2011). European cities with printing presses in the 1400s grew 60 per cent faster between 1500 and 1600 than similar cities. These cities had no advantage before the press arrived; nor had printers deliberately chosen “auspicious” cities.

Jared Rubin (2014). Cities with at least one press by 1500 were at least 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600.

Both studies use a similar route: knowing that printing spread outwards from Mainz, they use a city’s distance from Mainz as a tool for explaining how the press came to the city. The reason: if cities with presses were already rich and educated, crediting growth to the press would be wrong; distance helps to sift out that confusion.

Here we report what the papers claim in their abstracts. The message is clear: “technology changes things” is not a hunch on paper but a countable claim, and even when counted it shows an average relationship; it is not a rule valid for every city.

Story

A new medium, a new voter: natural experiments with radio and television

When a medium suddenly arrives somewhere, an interesting natural experiment appears: you can look before and after, and at places that got it and places that did not.

Radio and the New Deal (1930s). David Strömberg looked at a big New Deal relief programme in the years radio was spreading. His main finding: US counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds. Funds went more to poor counties with high unemployment; but even holding these constant, the effect of radio was large and significant. The logic of the explanation: a new mass medium changes who is informed and therefore which policies come out.

Television and the ballot box. Matthew Gentzkow used the different timing of television’s arrival across markets and found that voter turnout fell; by his estimate it accounted for between a quarter and a half of the decline in turnout since the 1950s. The mechanism he proposes: when television came, people cut their consumption of newspapers and radio, and political knowledge fell too. These effects were largest in off-year congressional elections, which newspapers cover extensively and television hardly at all.

The two findings point in different directions: with radio, the counties with many listeners gained; with television, the shift away from newspapers and radio lowered political knowledge. So “is the new medium good or bad?” is the wrong question; “which old medium did it replace and whose attention did it capture?” is the right one.

Myth check

Myth check: “Every new medium was met with the same empty fear”

What people assume. Today we fear social media; but people have always feared new media and always exaggerated. So the fears are empty.

What the sources say. The cycle of fear is real; but “always empty” does not follow.

• In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates tells the story of Theuth, the inventor of writing, and Thamus, the king of Egypt. According to Thamus, writing will create forgetfulness in those who learn it and will give the appearance of wisdom instead of real wisdom.
• In 1545 Conrad Gessner called the flood of books a “confusing and harmful abundance of books” (in the translation given by Blair).
• According to Ann Blair, scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries answered this abundance with new tools such as the alphabetical index, reference books and note-taking shortcuts.

Caution: this historical resemblance does not show that all fears were unjustified. Gentzkow’s television finding shows that a new medium can really reduce newspaper and radio consumption and political knowledge. The lesson of the story: do not hand every fear straight over to history; ask “which old habit is being replaced by what?”. There is a small irony too: we discuss the worry that writing creates forgetfulness today thanks to a text that was written down.

Myth check

A lovely explanation, the wrong date: the inverted pyramid

What people assume. The “inverted pyramid” of news writing, which puts the most important information first, was born in the American Civil War (1861–65), because the new telegraph lines were unreliable and the important information had to come first. Other explanations circulate too: the Union’s information policy, or the commercial competition among publishers.

What the source says. Horst Pöttker, looking at a content analysis of the New York Herald and the New York Times, finds that the inverted pyramid became commonplace only about twenty years later, in the 1880s. Between 1880 and 1890 publishers had tried systematically to make their products easier to understand with tools such as headlines and illustrations. Pöttker therefore interprets the inverted pyramid as the result of a professional effort to strengthen the communicative quality of news.

Why is this card in the course? Because stories of the “technology gave birth to this” kind are seductive: short, memorable, single-cause. The telegraph really was important, but the inverted pyramid shows that the link between a technical cause and history has to be measured. Solid knowledge stands not on “everybody says so” but on a counted piece of evidence. The method is simple too: look at the newspapers’ own pages and count how many times a writing pattern was used in which year.

Card

The Web and after: old media did not die, they piled up

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, proposed a system for scientists to share information. By 1990 the first site, browser and server were ready. On 30 April 1993 CERN put the Web software in the public domain, so that anyone could use it free of charge.

Let us look with our four questions (these four answers are this lesson’s interpretation, not a measured finding). Production: the cost of publishing fell sharply. Reach: global. Speed: almost instant. Control: we meet a new situation; the answer to “who gives permission?” is often no longer a government office or an editor but a platform. You will see the platform discussion in detail in the The Platform Society lesson.

But a warning: do not fall for the fallacy that “the new medium ends the old”. In Pew Research’s August 2025 survey, 86 per cent of US adults at least sometimes got news from a smartphone, computer or tablet; yet television at 64 per cent, radio at 44 per cent and print publications at 25 per cent were still in the picture. Social media stood at 53 per cent. So history works less by “replacement” than by “piling up in layers”. Most of the old media we have met in this lesson are still with us.

Lab

Mini laboratory: a one-day media dig

Turn your own day into a small archaeological dig. Write in five lines what you saw, read or heard yesterday. Then ask each line the four questions: Who produced it? How many people does it reach? How fast did it arrive? Who controls it, and can I answer back?

(Hypothetical example.) A student’s day might go like this: in the morning she reads a news agency text on her phone; at noon she listens to a bulletin on the radio; in the evening she watches a series; at night she watches a video a friend shared and writes a comment; while studying she consults a printed book.

Within this single day she has lived almost all the time layers of the lesson: the news agency (since 1835), radio (1920s), television-style broadcasting, the network (1990s) and the printed book (from more than a thousand years back). The real question is: in which of them can you answer back? In broadcasting the receiver is mostly just a listener; on the network the possibility of answering back has grown.

Repeat this exercise when the lesson is over: this time add to each medium “which theory’s question would I ask about it?”. For the series, for example, Cultivation Theory comes to mind; for the news feed, agenda-setting (Agenda-Setting).

Myth check

Myth check: “The Ottomans banned printing”

What people assume. The Ottoman sultans banned the printing press: Bayezid II in 1485, Selim I in 1515. That is why the first press was set up only in 1727.

What the source says. Kathryn Schwartz’s 2017 article traces this narrative back to its source:

• According to the author, the first person to publish the ban was apparently the French priest and cosmographer André Thevet: he tells it in a book printed in Paris in 1584 and gives no source.
• The author says she has come across no one who claims to have seen these firmans; that is, the documents are not there.
• Even Thevet’s date is inconsistent: he places Bayezid’s firman in 1483, nine years before the Jews came from Spain. Yet the first printers of the Ottoman Empire were precisely those immigrants.
• Count Luigi Marsigli (1658–1730), who had twenty years of contact with the Ottomans, thought the idea that they did not print because printing was forbidden was wrong.
• In 1493 Jews who had come from Spain set up a press in Istanbul; in the 32 years between the two alleged firmans Jews and Christians opened presses.

The upshot. According to Schwartz the available sources do not support the idea that the sultans banned printing; the claim arose as an answer to the question European scholars asked, “why do the Ottomans not print?”. This does not mean that printing spread quickly in the Ottoman world; it means that looking for the reason for the slowness in a ban is not backed by evidence.

Story

1729: A firman and a fatwa printed at the front of the first book

Imagine it is 1729 and you pick up the Vankulu Dictionary. Before you enter the dictionary you read something else: a firman and a fatwa printed at the front of the book. This is a real practice; the printer seems to have wanted to show everyone that his work was permitted.

The printer was İbrahim Müteferrika İbrahim Müteferrika. This Ottoman official, born in Transylvania and converted from Unitarian Christianity to Islam, wrote in 1726 a treatise on the benefits of printing, Vesîletü’t-tıbâa. In it he said he wanted to print dictionaries, history, medicine, astronomy, geography, travel books and logic, and that he was leaving out books of jurisprudence, Quranic exegesis, hadith and theology.

Permission came in two steps. First Sheikh al-Islam Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi found printing acceptable and asked, as a condition, that learned correctors be appointed. Then the firman of Ahmed III followed. The sources date the permission to July 1727 (Zilkade 1139). The first book came out in 1729; by 1742 about seventeen works had been printed (16–17 depending on the source).

What is striking: according to Schwartz the firman should be read not as a document that made printing legal but as a trace of the effort Müteferrika spent promoting his own project. The legitimacy of a new medium is often a job that has to be done before the medium itself.

Card

From the state’s gazette to private enterprise: Takvim-i Vekayi, Tercüman-ı Ahval, Tasvir-i Efkâr

Apply the same four questions to the Ottoman press: who is speaking?

• Takvim-i Vekayi (November 1831). The state gazette issued in the reign of Mahmud II. Its aim was to inform domestic and foreign public opinion more regularly and quickly; European examples were the model. Its French edition, Le Moniteur ottoman, appeared four days later; Armenian, Greek, Arabic and Persian editions followed in 1832. It is noted that some copies were compulsory for state officials.
• Ceride-i Havadis (1840). Issued by the Englishman William Churchill, a private paper published with the state’s permission.
• Tercüman-ı Ahval (22 October 1860). A paper with Âgâh Efendi as publisher and Şinasi running the editorial side in the early issues; it is remembered as the first private newspaper issued by Turks without state support. Şinasi’s introduction describes the paper as a paper of thought and discussion.
• Tasvir-i Efkâr (27 June 1862). Founded by Şinasi, the fourth Turkish-language newspaper of the empire; run by Namık Kemal after Şinasi went to Europe in 1865, a meeting place of the Young Ottomans.

The shift in the four questions (this is the lesson’s interpretation): the speaker moved from the state to a foreigner and then to Turkish entrepreneurs; the reader moved from being someone who “receives” news towards being someone invited to discuss.

Step by step

Ankara’s agency, Istanbul’s radio, TRT’s screen

The media history of the Republic begins with a short list of dates; but behind every date there is a “who is speaking?” question.

1. 6 April 1920: the Anadolu Agency. Yunus Nadi and Halide Edib set up an agency in Ankara to make the National Struggle known to domestic and foreign publics; the name was chosen among “Türk Ajansı”, “Ankara Ajansı” and “Anadolu Ajansı”. By analogy: Havas’s logic of 1835, that is, gather the news once and distribute it in many places.
2. 6 May 1927: Istanbul Radio. The first broadcast was made from the basement of the Central Post Office in Sirkeci; a loudspeaker at the post office door let the public listen. The broadcasts were run by a private company, the Turkish Wireless Telephone Company.
3. 28 October 1938: Ankara Radio was officially opened for operation.
4. 1 May 1964: TRT. Radio broadcasts were brought together under the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, an institution with autonomous legal personality by special law.
5. 31 January 1968: Television. The first test broadcast was made from the studio on Mithatpaşa Street in Ankara; three days a week, three hours at a time. Television began in İzmir in 1970 and in Istanbul in 1971; in 1974 broadcasts became every day of the week.

A comparison: the BBC had begun its television service in 1936; in Turkey the test broadcast came in 1968. This gap of thirty-two years is a reminder that what we call a “new medium” can be old in one place and new in another.

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This is how exams ask it: firsts, date pairs and easy traps

In a topic like this, exam questions usually fall into three patterns: (1) “which is the first?”, (2) “this event is in this year”, (3) “which of the following is wrong?”. Watch for these traps:

• Gutenberg or East Asia? The oldest dated printed book: the Diamond Sutra (868). Movable metal type: the Jikji (1377). The 42-line Bible in Europe: 1454–55. “Printing began with Gutenberg” is the wrong pattern.
• Year pairs. Carolus’s printed newspaper 1605; the Oxford Gazette 1665. The Sun 1833, the telegraph 1844. Havas 1835, Reuters’ London office 1851. The daguerreotype 1839, the first halftone photograph 1880. The Lumière screening 1895, KDKA 1920.
• Turkey. Permission for Müteferrika 1727, first book (Vankulu Dictionary) 1729. Takvim-i Vekayi 1831 (state), Ceride-i Havadis 1840 (English-owned), Tercüman-ı Ahval 1860 (private, without state support), Tasvir-i Efkâr 1862. Anadolu Agency 6 April 1920; Istanbul Radio 1927; TRT 1964; television test broadcast 1968.
• Different names in the sources. In Turkish academic texts “kitle iletişim araçları” (mass communication media) and simply “medya” often describe the same thing (they are sometimes written side by side as “medya (kitle iletişim araçları)”); “haber ajansı” is briefly “ajans”. We could not verify a settled Turkish counterpart for “penny press”; we suggest you use it only with a description (a one-cent newspaper).
• The most common traps. Tying the inverted pyramid to the telegraph; thinking the 1858 cable was permanent; writing that the Ottomans “imposed a ban”; writing the BBC as “the world’s first television” and forgetting the definition.

Summary

Summary card

• The history of mass communication is not a history of machines but of shifts in the answers on production, reach, speed and control. The machine makes the shift possible; it does not determine it.
• The idea of printing was not tried only in Europe: the Diamond Sutra (868), Bi Sheng’s clay characters (1040s), the Jikji (1377), the Mainz Bible (1454–55). The most solid document we have about Gutenberg is a lawsuit record (6 November 1455).
• The newspaper is the product of a squeeze: in 1605 Carolus moved from a handwritten newsletter to a printed news sheet. The penny press (1833) turned news into a commercial product.
• The telegraph (1844), the agencies (Havas 1835, Reuters 1851) and the cable (1866) tore news loose from place. The 1858 cable failed within weeks.
• Photography (1839), halftone (1880) and cinema (1895) multiplied the image; radio (1920) and television (1936) brought simultaneous listening at home. Add a definition to everything you call “first”.
• The evidence: cities with presses grew faster and were more Protestant; TV lowered turnout. But attractive technology explanations such as the inverted pyramid story can be wrong when they are not tested against evidence.
• Turkey: Müteferrika 1727–1729; the “ban” claim is a rumour without a source. Takvim-i Vekayi (1831) → Tercüman-ı Ahval (1860) → Anadolu Agency (1920) → Istanbul Radio (1927) → TRT (1964) → television (1968).
• Today the old media did not die, they piled up in layers: in 2025 in the US 64 per cent of adults still get news from television and 25 per cent from print publications.