Johann Carolus

 ( German Male Journalists ) 

Johann Carolus (26 March 1575 − 15 August 1634) was a Germans publisher of the first newspaper, called Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (). The Relation is recognised by the World Association of Newspapers, as well as many authors,Many authors do not make a distinction between a newsbook/pamphlet and a newspaper. See for example: Chappell, W. (1999) A Short History of the Printed Word. Hartley & Marks, Vancouver. Smith, A. (1979) The Newspaper: an international history. Thames and Hudson Ltd, . as the world's first newspaper.

Carolus published the German-language newspaper in Strasbourg, which had the status of a free imperial city in the Holy Roman Empire.

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Life Johann Carolus was born in 1575 in Muhlbach-sur-Munster in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the son of a priest and his wife. He made an apprenticeship as a bookbinder and later worked as a bookseller, a scribe for a newspaper and as a printshop owner. Because of these professions, especially his job as scribe, he held good relationships to postmen and traders, what helped him later to create the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien in 1605. Carolus died in 1634 in Strasbourg.

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Dates In 2005, the World Association of Newspapers accepted evidence that the Carolus pamphlet was printed beginning in 1605, not 1609 as previously thought. The Carolus petition discovered in the Strasbourg Municipal Archive during the 1980s may be regarded as the birth certificate of the newspaper:

Soon the Relation was followed by other periodicals, such as, the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung.

If a newspaper is defined by the functional criteria of publicity, seriality, periodicity, and currency or actuality (that is, as a single current-affairs series published regularly at intervals short enough for readers to keep abreast of incoming news) then Relation was the first European newspaper.

However the English historian of printing Stanley Morison held that the Relation should be classified as a newsbook, on the grounds that it still employed the format and most of the conventions of a book: it is printed in book size size and the text is set in a single wide column.Morison, S. (1980) The Origins of the Newspaper. In Selected Essays on the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print, (Ed, McKitterick, D.) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, By Morison's definition, the world's first newspaper would be the Netherlands Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. from 1618. By the same definition no German, English, French, or Italian weekly or daily news publications from the first half of the seventeenth century could be considered "newspapers" either. As noted above, the World Association of Newspapers and many others have not adopted his definition.

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See also

• List of newspapers by date

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Notes and references

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Citations

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Sources

• Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (1972). 9783111559216, Verlag Dokumentation Saur. ISBN 9783111559216

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Further reading

• Andrew Pettegree (2025). 9780300179088, Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300179088
• Martin Welke (2025). 9783934686373, Edition Lumière. ISBN 9783934686373

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External links

• University Heidelberg, Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien - Facsimile of 1609
• World Association of Newspapers, "Newspapers: 400 Years Young!"
• "400 Jahre Zeitung," exhibition at Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, Germany
• Mitchell Stephens, "History of Newspapers," from Collier's Encyclopedia

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