Until the early 19th century there was no technology for spreading news to large numbers of people in a short time. It travelled
as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with their friends. This phenomenon can be traced back to Roman
times, when members of the elite kept each other informed with a torrent of letters, transcriptions of speeches and copies of the acta
diurna, the official gazette that was posted in the forum each day. News travelled along social networks because there was no other__ 11__ .
The invention of the printing press meant that many copies of a document could be produced more quickly than before, but
distribution still relied on personal connections. In early 1518 Martin Luther King’s writings spread around Germany in two weeks as
they were carried from one town to the next. In January 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense”, which __12__ the
colonists against the British crown, was printed in a run of 1,000 copies. By July 1776, around 250,000 people had been exposed to
Paine’s ideas. Newspapers at the time had small, local circulations and were a mix of __13__ , contributions from readers, and items
from other papers; there were no dedicated reporters. All these early media conveyed news, gossip, opinions and ideas within
particular social circles or communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information. They were social
media.
The invention of the steam press in the early 19th century, and the emergence of mass-market newspapers such as the New York
Sun, therefore, marked a __14__ shift. The new technologies of mass distribution could reach large numbers of people at an
unprecedented speed, but put control of the flow of information into the hands of a__ 15__ few. For the first time, vertical
distribution of news, from a specialist elite to a general audience, had a decisive advantage over horizontal distribution among
citizens. This trend accelerated __16__ with the advent of radio and television in the 20th century. New businesses grew up around
these mass-media technologies.
In modern media organizations, news is gathered by specialists and __17__ to a mass audience
along with advertising, which helps to pay for the whole operation.
In the past decade, the Internet has disrupted this model and enabled the social aspect of media to __18__ itself. In many ways
news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the Internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs,
Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange
information in the past. “Social media is nothing new; it’s just more widespread now,” says Craig Newmark. He __19__ John Locke,
Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin to modern bloggers.
News is also becoming more diverse as publishing tools become widely available, barriers to entry fall and new models become
possible, as demonstrated by the astonishing __20__ of the Huffington Post, WikiLeaks and other newcomers in the past few years,
not to mention millions of blogs. At the same time news is becoming more opinionated, polarized and partisan, as it used to be in the
knockabout days of pamphleteering.
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(BD) rise (BE) exponentially (CD) conduit (CE) denouement (DE) editorials
(ABC) disseminated (ABD) weighty (ABE) reassert (BCD) vilifies (BCE) unctuously