Business letter
Merchant's letters are a pre-form of the newspaper that emerged in the late Middle Ages and early modern times .
During this period, a class of wealthy merchants formed in the larger cities who traded over long distances. In order to assess the market situation, they were dependent on information from the destinations of their business connections, which should come from sources familiar with the area as unadulterated as possible. To ensure this, they chose the route of written reports. Since the news should not be influenced by business interests, the immediate trading partners were often ruled out as reporters. Where there was no relative of the merchant or a representative of his own trading house in the foreign city, service providers soon emerged who created professional merchant letters and sent them to regular customers for payment.
Initially, the business letters were probably sent together with the transport of goods. With the expansion of the postal system , business letters were increasingly sent independently in order to be more topical. In the early modern period, real "publishers" for business letters were formed. They maintained correspondents in important cities from whom they received regular reports. These reports were then bundled into larger text collections, copied by hand and the collections sold to subscribers.
Large trading houses also organized their own and exclusive networks of correspondents. The most important example of this approach is the Fugger newspaper .
The move from a business letter to a newspaper according to today's understanding took place in Strasbourg in 1605 , when Johann Carolus not only reproduced the news collection in print, but also offered it for subscription outside the long-distance trade.
literature
- Thomas Schröder: The first newspapers. Text design and message selection. Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-8233-4144-8
- Margot Lindemann: German press until 1815 . History of the German Press Part 1. [Treatises and materials for journalism, Volume 5], Colloquium, Berlin 1969
Individual evidence
- ^ Schröder: The first newspapers. Tübingen 1995, p. 29
- ^ Markus Grill: Post and Newspaper. The power of the message. In: Spiegel Geschichte 4 (2011). Retrieved December 28, 2012 .