Information is an essential part of human existence. Individuals and societies need information to communicate, make decisions, share new ideas and improve upon their lives. We need information to survive, hence to ensure effective transmitting of information to improve upon our lives, there is the need for information to be provided and shared. The sharing of information did not begin today but right from the day of creation. Early methods of transmitting information or news began with the word of mouth .Though its content was limited to what people saw, the mouth has been a key tool for communicating and disseminating information until the embracement of modern day journalism which according Robert Niles, a renowned online journalist, journalism is “about telling the people things that really happened that they might not have known about already.
Till date, the origination of journalism cannot be attributed to one particular person or group since the dissemination of news dates back to the beginning of time. Professor Mark Grawbowski, a columnist, lawyer and media expert is of the view that “journalism is storytelling”. Stovall (2005, chapter 20), also puts it that journalism ‘is tied to the history of the development of human society”, though he thinks the disseminating of news has gone through some technological change. To him the most profound technological change is the printing press which has now allowed the efficient duplication of information in a form that could be easily distributed.
In the same vein, American author, Rutledge (2008), claims that ‘the idea of journalism goes back to the beginning of time’ thus: from the ancient scrawling of the cave man on cave walls to symbols to strolling minstrels. According to him, stories about other parts of the world have travelled via many different means; he therefore endorses the claim that journalism was practiced many years ago. Though he thinks the foundation of modern day journalism was the newspapers which began with Johannes Gutenberg, who in 1456 invented the movable type printing press that led to the wide dissemination of the Holy Bible and other printed books. It is believed that the first printed periodical, “‘Mercurious Gattobelgicus” appeared first in cologne now Germany in 1594,written in Latin, it was distributed widely and found its way to readers in England. The first regularly published newspaper in England was the Oxford “Gazzette” which first appeared in 1665.Its publication began when the Britain royal court was in Oxford avoid the plague in London, and it was published twice a week. Another earlier newspaper or newsbook, “the continuation of our weekly news” had been published regularly in London since 1623. The first daily newspaper called “The Daily Courant” appeared in 1702 and continued publication for more than 30 years.It had its editor as the first woman in journalism. Newspapers in America according to Stovall also began in 1690 and 1704 with the New York Herald, which began in 1835 as the first newspaper to fit the modern definition as a newspaper. It covered regular beats and spot news, as well as regular business and Wall Street coverage. It was also credited with being the first which had the first foreign correspondent staff assigned to cover news from Europe.
After the birth of newspapers, came the creation of the first wire service, radio which according to McCutcheon, Shaffer and Wycoff, (1994, p. 586) was invented in 1895 by Gugliemo Marconi to transmit signals to Europe. Based on earlier experiments in a bid to send signals through the air without wires, the wealthy Italian businessman saw to the birth of radio. Public radio broadcast was first experienced on 1906 in New England. Subsequently, in the same year, American Lee Defures improved and amplified wireless to signals that brought about clear voices and music. This provided the platform for many radio stations to spring up. The next big thing after radio was the television and the internet which came onto the scene at various points in our history to make obtaining news from a variety of journalistic media a bit easy and less stressful. Electronic Television according to Mitchell Stephens in his article the ‘History of Television’ ‘was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927 by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had conceived of a system that could capture moving images in a form that could be coded onto radio waves and then transformed back into a picture on a screen. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) afterwards launched the world’s first television service in 1936 which opened the doors for TV broadcasting as well as the competition in broadcast journalism. `
Today, whatever form it takes, people depend greatly on journalists as their main source to information and to the journalist, the aim is the simple: share information and keep the public informed.
REFRENCES
Journalism : J.G. Stovall, (2004) , Journalism, who, what ,when, where , why, and how, Pearson/Allyn& Bacon. http://www.robertniles.com/journalism/ (retireived on 19- 10 -2011) http://savethemedia.com/2009/04/06/so-what-is-journalism/ (retireived on 19- 10 -2011) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1953/churchill-bio.html(retireived on 19- 10 -2011) http://yangkaimedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/importance-of-journalism.html(retireived on 19- 10 -2011)
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