A Hunger for News

Abstract

Chapter 4 explores how English printers developed a domestic market for a different kind of novel material: news itself, ranging from accounts of natural marvels through to polemical exchanges about current events. In doing so, they followed the example of their continental counterparts. Accounts of state affairs emulated Parisian publications, while news about calamitous events was frequently translated from best-selling European pamphlets. The chapter argues that printers persuaded readers to pay for what had traditionally been received free, by word of mouth, by emphasizing the reliability and veracity of the news they published rather than—as is often assumed—appealing to a taste for sensation or moralization. Concluding the chapter with a discussion of the news pamphlets and broadsides surrounding the Western Rebellion in 1549, it suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century printed news had gained sufficient status that its circulation could influence events, giving printers a potential power and responsibility they had not anticipated.