Francis Foster

So a correspondent would be someone from this community who traveled and wrote a letter home.

And these letters would be reprinted in the newspaper.

Like, this is what I saw in Paris.

This is what I saw in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Shanghai.

And they would often print who the letter was addressed to.

And even like, I hope Sally's OK.

Like, that would show up in the piece.

These were very homespun kind of things originally.

But with the mass printing, they begin to think about employing their own correspondence.

And the next bit of the revolution comes with the telegraph.

The telegraph is the closest thing to the internet that the 19th century has.

Because the telegraph means that you can send a large amount of information

almost instantly over an incredible distance.

Stock prices can move from London to New York, across the Atlantic.

And this business still influences how our news is gathered to this day.

Reuter, I think Julius Reuter, if I'm getting his name right,

notices that there's a gap in the telegraph lines in Belgium.

And he uses carrier pigeons to move the news for stock trading and other business news purposes.

And from the money from that and various other ventures, he eventually opens a newswire that uses telegraph lines

to move news, gather news from around the world and sell it to newspapers.