When News Was New. Terhi Rantanen. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 154 pp.
The clever title of this brief historical study harks back to earlier times as changing technology provided a constantly renewed window through which to view what was happening in the world. Ranging from medieval storytellers through nineteenth-century news agencies to the bloggers of today, the book’s theme is that “news” has meant very different things at different times.
Director of the global media and communications master’s program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and long a student of news agencies, Terhi Rantanen provides a brief but insightful survey of how technology has helped to shape our perception of what “news” is and means.
“The newness of news has been regularly reconstructed,” Rantanen writes, “and that news is mostly old stories made new. At the same time, these stories inhabit temporal and spatial structures that challenge our ideas about our mental space in the past, the present and the future.” Rather than a chronological approach, as might be expected, she arranges her material by several basic themes.
The factor of time is where the book begins—how what is new is defined by (while also helping to define) our governing sense of time. The regularity of the appearance of news helped to form a sense of (soon weekly and then daily) schedule as well. Rantanen turns next to the early importance of cities (rather than nations or regions) within and among which news was exchanged. Early news exchanges—forerunners of wire services—were based in major marketing towns and grew thanks to printing and eventually the telegraph.
Technology helped news become a more global commodity with the development of submarine telegraph cables in the late nineteenth century. How news agencies developed and carved up coverage of the world is described as a part of this eventual trend to news globalism.
A focus on the telegraph and how it changed the transmission and consumption of news comes next. For the first time, news could travel faster than people or vehicles. Breaking the bonds of physical transport hugely changed our conception of what news was, and how rapidly we expected to be informed about it. This, in turned, helped news become a commodity with sometimes very limited shelf life in an increasingly competitive market for news that was new.
Chapter 5 turns to localization, and how electronic services from the telegraph on helped to emphasize a sense of place, the “here” where we learn about news from “there,” where events happen.
Two brief chapters conclude this fascinating book. The nationalization of news chapter offers case studies of German, Russian, and U.S. news agencies, some of the material drawing from the author’s earlier historical monographs—she has published extensively on global news, is author of six previous books and dozens of articles taking in the global nature of news and information. Each of these case study offers different stories demonstrating why even having a news agency became an important means of national identity. In a thoughtful epilog, Rantenan reviews the very notion of news “newness” over time. “Rather than asking whether news is ‘objective,’” she writes, the goal is to explore “the temporality and spatiality of news, in order to show how it changes not only itself but the space around it.”
This is the kind of book a seasoned scholar like Rantanen can best provide. It is based not only on decades of research but also on thinking about the trends the research seems to uncover. This is a “big picture” analysis based on a host of specific examples. It makes for compelling reading.
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University