EUROPEAN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS IN THE EARLY MODERN AGE

Communication & Society, 2019

This paper analyses the information sources used in a large corpus of news items published in Spanish printed newspapers between 1618 and 1635. The initial aim is to determine how information credibility was constructed in both historical and rhetorical terms. To this end, the rhetorical construction of credibility in the news stories are analysed by focusing on the information sources that these reveal or conceal. And in order to determine whether or not these sources were deliberately concealed, the frequency with which 'on deep background' attribution appears is examined. The methodological approach on which this study is based is Historical News Discourse, which applies the conclusions and methods of critical discourse analysis to newspapers of the past, in addition to contextualising and explaining the results in terms of journalism history and communication approaches (Conboy, Brownlees and Broersma, among others). In this work, we contend that the discourse analysis of the first printed newspapers is essential for gaining further insights into how the journalistic profession consolidated its position in Spain thanks to a new form of auctoritas based on discourse competence. The gazetteer or journalist emerged as a new kind of writer, whose credibility and reputation depended on his ability to access, organise and reveal-according to rhetorical patterns recognisable to readers-the information sources available to him. Keywords News items, Modern Age, history of journalism, information sources, information credibility, on deep background attribution, journalistic profession. 1 We have defended the designation of "multi-thematic publications" in Gacetas y avisos informativos: género, redacción y práctica profesional entre 1618 y 1635, a PhD thesis defended by Rafael Soto Escobar at the University of Seville in 2017. We believe that it is necessary to introduce this new term in the lexicon of the history of journalism so as to

2013

This article explores the changes in news agency mechanisms that accompanied the restructuring of Europe after World War I. During the interwar period, a new form of negotiation replaced the pre-World War I conception of English, French and German spheres of influence with a more cooperative vision of the collection and dissemination of news. I argue that the private and business-oriented nature of news agency cooperation enabled it to outlast better-known political attempts at multilateralism. Indeed, it often produced more concrete results by offering different incentives for cooperation to all involved from large global agencies, such as Reuters, down to the small agencies of new Central and Eastern European nation-states. Overall, the agencies' cooperation until the outbreak of World War II suggests alternative periodizations of the interwar period than the division into a fairly internationalist 1920s followed by the increasing bilateralism of the 1930s.

2013

The purpose of this essay is to understand if there was a real circulation of news in 16th Century Venice and how it was arranged. Starting from the analysis of the spread of news in Early Modern Europe, we will try to focus on the specific case of Venice and to answer to two questions. First of all, can we consider the so called Venetian gazzette as the early beginning of the periodical press? Furthermore, was there in Venice the possibility to write freely?

During the Mid-Seventeenth Century, Europe experienced a revolutionary wave whose impact transcended the borders of single countries. The years 1647-48 represent the apex of a long period of challenges to political powers. The outcomes (i.e. the British Revolution, the Neapolitan Rebellion and the French Fronde, just to mention the most relevant ones) would changed profoundly the political, social and cultural framework of the Old Continent. My paper tries to suggest that the dissemination of political information created the conditions through which new political ideas and practices were publicly developed, exchanged and debated throughout Early Modern Europe. It analyses information which passed through diplomatic channels, for instance, manuscript and printed gazettes between Florence and the British Isles sent by the Tuscany envoy in London, Amerigo Salvetti; or the news flow between the Roman Curia and the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. These examples will prove not only how the diplomatic entourage reported on similar events, but also how it reacted to exceptional conjunctures. Moreover, my paper will try to figure out the movement of news not only through the geographical space but also within a variegated media landscape. Through the analysis of the contents and materiality of information, on the one hand, we will see how news went from a manuscript from to a printed one; on the other, their renegotiation in other cultural contexts following their translation in different languages and the appearance in different early modern political arena. This approach could help us link again not only important events which were artificially separated by the narrative of national historiographies, but also to balance the dichotomy of some historical categories, such as printing/writing and public/private.

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2016

This work deals with the study of the evolution and the historicalexperience of Spanish journalism in the context of decades of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the selection of the most relevant cases and the examination of tracking, or not, of models and European patterns of the reference press, singularities and analogies of the historical evolution of the Spanish journalism model may be seen-an evolutionary model fully registered within the framework of Western Europe and in one of its most fruitful phases: the origins and first development of the mass media. Therefore, the following trilogy of reference media is selected covering specified time periods:

Renaissance and Reformation

The topic of our study is journalism as a narrative genre. Before becoming periodical, newssheets adopted many forms at the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries, which we aim to typologize before conducting a corpus-based analysis (Biber, 2009, 2012), in which predetermined categories will be applied in search of patterns. In order to prove the validity and productivity of this approach in an exploratory manner, we have applied those methods to a reduced corpus of some of the first gazette-type printed newssheets in the Spanish language, so as to longitudinally extend this strategy in further research to many other corpora of miscellaneous newssheets. This first tentative sample is composed of four newssheets published from 1597 to 1621, our goal being to trace the patterns and continuities of a narratological model for the early days of Spanish journalism. In our opinion, and following an Italian style detailed by Panfilo Persico in Il Segretario (Venice, 1620), narrative newswriting strategies, at least in the Mediterranean area, were most especially consolidated during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), and were even present in Spanish gazettes in one of the most flourishing periods of activity, the decade of 1683, because of the Turkish Wars (Díaz Noci, 2008).