Portugal — A short story of a great journalism I: from manufacturing to industry

Between 1641, the year in which the first Portuguese newspaper, the Gazeta, appeared, and 1926, the year of the military coup that instituted the Dictatorship, there were considerable changes in the Portuguese journalistic landscape. This book intends to record these changes, through a general, systematic and diachronic approach to the history of journalism in Portugal. Its edition is justified because synthesis works, like this one, introduce a subject, in its general aspects, to a community of readers. The historical narrative is guided by the emergence and disappearance of journalistic media and by the interpreters of the activity in each historical moment - the journalists. The work obeys, in its ordering and exposition, to the author’s personal interpretation of history, since the succession of facts throughout time, some more notable and noticed than others, having no a priori meaning, needs interpretations that make it intelligible. The author’s personal perspective on the history of Portuguese journalism is revealed not only in the way his vision of history is expressed in the narrative, but also in the chronological extension addressed, since it is considered that news production activity and news periodicals that emerges in Modernity is a form, although archaic, of journalism, therefore deserving to be included in a history of Portuguese journalism; and it is revealed, also, in the proposal of periodization of journalism in Portugal that is made as a conclusion of the narrative. The following periodization is proposed for the history of Portuguese journalism between 1641 and 1926: 1) Artisanal news reporting (from the late 16th century to 1730); 2) Segmentation of the press and dominance of the informative artisanal press (1730-1820); 3) Segmented artisanal press and dominance of the political artisanal press (1820-1851); 4) Segmented pre-industrial press (1851-1864); and 5) Segmented industrial press and development of mass news newspapers (1864-1926). The narrative ends in 1926, with the imposition of the Dictatorship. A second volume will seek to bring it up to the dawn of the 21st century.