Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/26

4 The Daily Acts had a special department in which were recorded all the births and deaths of the city. It did not neglect financial news, for it recorded the receipt by the treasury of taxes from the provinces. Like the modern newspaper, it paid special attention to both civil and criminal courts and made a special feature of election news. Everything done by the Imperial family was chronicled faithfully. One other fact must be noticed in passing—both Julius and Augustus Caesar knew how to work the press. The former secured good display in The Daily Acts when he declined the title of king; and the latter promoted his attack on race suicide by inserting items about Romans who had large families. In addition to the bulletin-board edition of The Daily Acts there was a written one for circulation in the home. One Latin author mentioned a Roman lady reading her morning paper, and another said that he would wait at Thessaloniea for The Daily Acts. Seneca once boasted that his liberality was not "written up" in The Daily Acts. Based upon this edition was a still larger written newspaper sent to subscribers outside of Rome. The professional journalist took the items of The Daily Acts, gathered others of his own, and then, mounting a little platform in his shop, dictated the news to a dozen slaves who produced a written newspaper of twelve copies. The size of such an edition was limited only by the number of slaves employed.

The Daily Acts probably continued even after the capital had been moved from Rome to Constantinople. For fifteen centuries little advance was made in the written newspaper unless the ability to manufacture news might in some way be considered a development. The ability to invent news and to mix truth and falsehood became almost a profession (ars) in Rome, and was carried to such an extent that the church was forced to take drastic action. Papal bulls were issued against the writing of such news-letters, under penalties recorded in both temporal and ecclesiastical laws. In 1572 the saintly Pope Pius V threatened "death and confiscation of property," according to "the degree of the offense and the rank of the offender." His successor, Gregory XIII, a great educationist, issued another bull which,