Beginning of Newspaper

• The way the news has spread, has changed a lot since people first began communicating. The first form of a newspaper was created in Rome more than two millenniums ago, in 59 BC (World Association of Newspapers [WAN], 2004).
• It was titled Acta Diurna and began under the reign of Julius Caesar, who believed it was important to inform his citizens of events that would occur, politics, and his military.
• Acta Diurna was not printed for each Roman citizen, but it was put up in public places for many people to read (WAN, 2004).
• Although it was not like today’s printed newspaper, it was the start of a big revolution that would slowly and eventually become the news industry.
• Once the World Wide Web was created, a newspaper company that had been printing newspapers, decided to put its newspaper online. In the spring of 1993, the newspaper of San Jose Mercury News was the first full newspaper to be published electronically (Violino, 1998). This was the beginning of a new era of the electronic publishing of newspapers. Only five years after San Jose Mercury News was put online, there were almost three thousand newspapers published online, worldwide, according to Editor & Publisher Interactive (Peng, Tham, and Xiaoming, 1999). In these short five years, so many newspaper companies started publishing their news online. This changed the traditional profile of newspapers, the readership, and their circulation.