Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/28

6 are expected to listen to this spoken newspaper, and no one can fall back, if he transgresses one of the published decrees, on the assertion that he was not present when The Town Crier announced the official decree.

The Town Crier of Champery has its spoken advertising department. Its publisher gives notice, by spoken word, of the public auctions of household goods, cattle, etc., as announced by the Office of Law and Bankruptcy. The Town Crier gives the news of mercantile houses, with the prices of the goods they are offering. It gives notice of lost and found articles and quotes the price paid by local establishments for farm products. In other words, it takes the place of a local printed newspaper, which, up to the present time, has never existed in Champery.

In some respects the evolution of journalism in London was the same as that found in Rome. Men of wealth lived only four or five months in London and spent the rest of the year in the country. While away from the city, they wanted to know the doings of the court and the gossip of the coffee-houses. To keep themselves informed, they hired professional letter-writers who gathered the items and then forwarded the most important by special post. One of the best and hence busiest writers of such letters was one Thomas Archer. So excellent was his service that demand for his letters became larger than he could supply by his pen. To meet this demand he called the printing-press to his aid, and instead of posting items on irregular days of the week, he put them all in one letter, printed it, and mailed it by a certain post. Nathaniel Butter was the first regular publisher of this printed news-letter, The Weekly Newes, and posterity has called him rather than Archer the founder of the English newspaper press. There had been an occasional printed news-sheet or news-book before the appearance of The Weekly Newes, but to Nathaniel Butter belongs the honor of "printing all the news of the day upon a single sheet and publishing it regularly week by week upon fixed days and of giving it a distinctive title at a time when there was nothing that could with strictness be called a newspaper." Papers with dates prior to 1622, when The Weekly