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Human beings have always valued news—the process by which people gather information and create narrative reports to help one another make sense of events happening around them. The earliest news was passed along orally from family to family, and from tribe to tribe, by community leaders and oral historians. The first known written news account was developed by Julius Caesar and posted in Rome in 59 B.C.E. In the fifteenth century, the development of the printing press accelerated people’s ability to disseminate news through the printed word, and now, with the Internet, people can get the latest news—in real time—about events happening practically anywhere in the world.

Yet after the news moved from oral to written form, it soon shifted from an information source accessible only to elites or local readers to a mass medium that satisfied a growing audience’s hunger for information. In the earliest days of American newspapers (the late 1600s through the 1800s), written news took on a number of different formats—political analyses printed on expensive, handmade paper; cheaper accounts printed on machine-made paper; sensationalist and investigative reporting. Each of these formats fulfilled Americans’ “need to know”—whether they wanted coverage of the political scene, exposés of corruption in business, or even a humorous or entertaining perspective on current events.