Happy Birthday to the newspaper - 400 and going strong

March 9, 2005 Mass media will celebrate its 400th birthday later this year when the newspaper, the first mass medium begins its fifth century of publication. The exact date of the first newspaper is not known, and was thought to have been during 1609 but recent evidence accepted by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) pinpoints the year in which Strasbourg's Johann Carolus began printing his handwritten newsletters as 1605. Though radio, television, and the internet have long threatened to usurp print's status as the primary mass medium, the fact remains that print still garners more than half of the world's advertising expenditure.

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