Newsletters: the internet of 18th century France.

In his book, Publishing Newsletters, Howard Penn Hudson says the first known examples of newsletters are the hand-written business news sheets developed by Count Philip Edward Fugger (1546-1618). He continues:

English newsletters started in Amsterdam about 1620.... The first American newsletter, the Boston News-Letter, which has also been called the first newspaper, was published in 1704.

To Hudson's history we can now add another chapter, thanks to the research and writing of Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has just completed a term as president of the American Historical Association.

His contribution is part of a lengthy essay in the June 29th issue of The New York Review of Books, titled "Paris: The Early Internet." He proposes:

a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication. In principle this kind of history could be applied to any time and place. In practice, it must be worked out in case studies. So I would direct the question to my own field of study and ask: How did you find out what the news was in Paris around 1750? Not, I submit, by reading a newspaper, because papers with news in them -- news as we understand it today, about public affairs and personalities -- did not exist. The government did not permit them.

In that absence of legitimate newspapers, during the reign of Louis XVI, newsletters and other channels of information served up a mix of news, rumor, gossip, opinion, and heresay about the royal family -- in much the same way as The Drudge Report and The May Report do today on the internet.

Prof. Darnton continues: But ordinary heresay did not satisfy Parisians with a powerful appetite for information. They needed to sift through the public noise in order to discover what really was happening. Sometimes they pooled their information and criticized it collectively by meeting in groups such as the famous solon of Mme. M.-A.L. Doublet, known as "the parish." Twenty-nine "parishioners," many of them well connected with the parlement of Paris or the court and all of them famished for news, gathered regularly in Mme. Doublet's apartment in the Enclos des Files Saint-Thomas. When they entered the solon, they found two large registers on a desk near the door. One contained news reputed to be reliable, the other, gossip. Together, they comprised the menu for the day's discussion, which was prepared by one of Mme. Doublet's servants, who may qualify as the first "reporter" in the history of France.... The servant wrote the first entries for each day's news on the registers; the "parishioners" read throug h them, adding whatever other information they had gathered; and after a general vetting, the reports were copied and sent to select friends of Mme. Doublet.

One of them, Mme. d'Argental, had a lackey named Gullet, who organized another copying service. When he began to make money by selling the copies, some of his copyists set up shops of their own; and those shops spawned other other shops, so that by 1750 multiple editions of Mme. Doublet's newsletter were flying around Paris and the Provinces.

Prof. Darnton's essay is lively, detailed and intelligent -- highly recommended to the journalism and history buffs among us.

"Paris: The Early Internet" also raises important questions about the nature of journalism itself, paricularly in light of its evolving role on the internet.

This week, for example, The New York Times featured a p. 1 business section article on Ron May, editor of The May Report (www.themayreport.com). It covers Chicago's dot-com scene and is described as "an odd mixture of news, gossip, job listings and e-mail from readers, as well as awkward personal digressions and philosophical musings from the 44-year-old Mr. May."

Among the comments quoted by author David Barboza:

* Howard Tullman, former chief executive at Tunes.com:

I don't think he checks anything. I think people have given him phony stories to see if he'll print anything, and apparently he will.

* Chicago investment banker Robert Hendrickson:

He's the town tattler of the high-tech community. Everyone badmouths The May Report, but everyone reads it.

* The May Report columnist Jeff Gilbert:

At a newspaper, the fundamental person is the editor. What Ron has done is he's disintermediated, or eliminated, the editor. He says, "Here's all I know You determine what's important. You determine the facts." And all the papers have discredited him for that.

We're interested in hearing what editors and reporters think of this evolution -- or reversion to 18th century France -- especially Jeff Gilbert's assertion that editors are obsolete.