How Messages Reached the Public: From Broadside to Livestream

The broadside is a large sheet printed on one side only, made to be plastered on walls as street literature. The earliest surviving examples date from the early sixteenth century, and relatively few survive from before 1550, because these were ephemera meant to be read once and thrown away.

The word pamphlet is attested as early as 1344 in The Philobiblon, but its modern sense of a tract on a contemporary issue dates to 1642, a product of the heated arguments leading to the English Civil War. By the UNESCO definition a pamphlet runs from five to forty-eight pages, short enough to be cheap and quick to print.

Paid promotion is far older than any agency: Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters, and the atlas records no single place of origin. The date it carries, 1786, marks William Taylor, described as the first acknowledged advertising agency.

The Welsh entrepreneur Pryce Pryce-Jones of Newtown set up the first modern mail order in 1861. He distributed catalogs of his wares across the country so that people could choose items and order them by post, a method that grew into the circulars, catalogs and coupon envelopes now called direct mail.

Outdoor advertising is described as one of the oldest forms of mass communication, with flyposting practiced in Europe from the late fifteenth century. The atlas dates the form to 1867, the earliest known billboard rentals, and sorts the modern industry into billboards, street furniture, transit advertising and alternative or experiential formats.

Most textbooks regard the founding of the Publicity Bureau in Boston in 1900 as the start of the public relations profession. Unlike advertising, which buys space or airtime, public relations works mostly through earned media, coverage a practitioner secures rather than purchases.

In 1909 Pathe started producing weekly newsreels in Europe, short documentary films of topical news shown in cinemas before the feature. The form was prevalent from the 1910s to the late 1960s, until television news took over the job of bringing moving pictures of current events to audiences.

Zines trace to the amateur press movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Comet, published in 1930 by the Chicago chapter of the Science Correspondence Club, is frequently cited as the first science-fiction fanzine, and zines are generally defined by circulations of one thousand copies or fewer.

The first company to duplicate and distribute feature films from film studios on home video was The Nostalgia Merchant, in late 1976 into February 1977. Home video then became a mass medium as the videocassette recorder reached households, with VHS and Betamax competing for the market and VHS ultimately prevailing.

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog on December 17, 1997, when, inspired by Dave Winer's Scripting News, he began posting daily entries to his Robot Wisdom Weblog. A blog is a website whose basic unit is a post, with posts typically shown in reverse chronological order.

Justin.tv, created in 2007 by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt so that anyone could broadcast video online, began continuous live streaming at midnight on March 19, 2007. The medium became mainstream with platforms such as Twitch, which began as a video-game-focused streaming service, and viewers typically respond as it happens through a chat or comment stream.