The desire to be informed, to be in the know, is common to all periods of human history; but who has access to news has changed radically. In this presentation Andrew Pettegree reflects on the media debate that has followed publication of his study of the first development of a commercial culture of information: The Invention of News. How the world came to know about itself. Contrary to what is often thought, the appearance of newspapers in the seventeenth century was not the decisive step. In fact for two centuries after their first appearance newspapers struggled to make their way in a multi-media world not unlike that being re-created in the digital age. In pondering our digital future, Andrew Pettegree probes what lessons can be drawn from this last great media transformation, from manuscript to print, some five hundred years ago, and what are the likely prospects for the future of professional journalism.
Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. After education at Oxford and fellowships in Hamburg and Cambridge he moved to St Andrews in 1986, where he was founding director of the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. He now runs the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a ground-breaking digital resource for the study of the first printed books. Among his many books The Book in the Renaissance was a New York Times notable book of 2010, and won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America.