The advent of the coranto fundamentally changed the way many newsletter writers operated. While pages of news were once laboriously copied by hand, printed news made the spread and the consumption of news much more common.
The most important news of the week served as the title for these early corantos. But in 1632, the government of Charles I banned the publication of corantos. However, fearful of losing a propaganda opportunity, in 1638 the Crown licensed the publishers Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne to produce newsbooks of foreign affairs, subject to government scrutiny before publication. In an epistle to coranto readers, Butter and Bourne informed their reading public that they could look forward to a resumption of frequent news reports.
Although Nathaniel Butter was imprisoned in August 1627as a result of the government’s increasingly hostile attitude towards news publication, he continued to publish corantos. Though still not completely standardized, the title pages were updated to reflect the exact dates of the news included in the issue, and included the phrase, “the continuation of our weekly news.”
Making further strides, and unlike previous news printers who primarily translated foreign news, Samuel Pecke—considered the first English journalist—cultivated his own sources of information and published domestic news gleaned from the proceedings in Parliament. A Perfect Diurnall, published weekly from 1642 through 1655, quickly spawned imitators.
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