It has, of course, been quite a millennium for journalism. Few human endeavors have changed as much in the past thousand years as newsmongering. But it is also true that few aspects of human culture have changed as little as news itself.

First the change: anthropological and historical accounts paint a reasonably clear picture of the news systems most of those alive in the year 1000 would have had at their command. Messengers might occasionally arrive with news. In some cities or villages criers might proclaim it. The literate might sporadically record it. But most of what most of the people in the world knew of current events one thousand years ago came from whomever they happened to run into - from word of mouth.

This is the news system upon which humanity, with rare exceptions, had always relied. And there wasn't much change in the first half of this millennium. According to a letter written in 1471, those up to speed on the latest news, or "flyeng talys," in England were those who had "walkyd in London."

The progression of developments that would transform the way humans received their news started, of course, with the invention of the European letterpress. In the final decades of the fifteenth century, printed newsbooks and news ballads began to circulate in Europe. By 1566 a hand-copied weekly, the oldest direct ancestor of all the world's newspapers, was being distributed in Venice. By 1609 weeklies were printed in two German-speaking towns. The world's first printed daily appeared in Leipzig in 1650. Journalism, as we know it, was being invented. Thomas Paine, Edward R. Murrow, Ted Turner, and Salon would, in time, follow.

Spoken news had its advantages. But the news system that dominated the first half of this millennium had severely limited reach. The major international news story of the turn of the previous millennium was undoubtedly the Viking landing in America, or "Vinland." This news made it as far as Denmark, and not much farther. For most of those dependent upon word of mouth, the world on the other side of the forest, let alone the other side of the ocean, remained a mystery - the province of dragons. Spoken news was also notoriously inaccurate and unreliable. It was difficult, consequently, to gain sure knowledge on such basic questions as whether this or that major figure was in fact dead. Imposters passed themselves off as Richard II, Joan of Arc, and Charles the Bold.

Bewailers take note: our journalism - the journalism invented roughly in this half millennium - would change all that. Pamphlets describing Columbus's discoveries in his own words were printed in Barcelona, Rome, Paris, Antwerp, Basel, and Florence in 1493, the year he returned. The dead, with the exception of the Romanovs and a certain rock star, began to stay dead. News of politics and science spread. Lights were turned on; the haze lifted - choose your metaphor. Dragons were forced to retreat to unusually deep lakes in Scotland. It became possible to be confident of learning of any major disaster, war, or political development anywhere in the world.

But through all this the news itself hardly changed. Its concerns - power, survival, violence, sex - have remained remarkably constant. We know from those anthropological and historical accounts that societies without printing, let alone cable or the Internet, were as adept as we are at mixing news of the serious and the sensational. They even mixed in some bewailing about the latter. More than two millennia ago, Cicero complained about the contents of the letters a friend was sending him while he was out of Rome. They contained, Cicero huffed, "reports of the gladiatorial pairs, the adjournment of trials, [a] burglary, and such tittle-tattle as nobody would have the impertinence to repeat to me when I am at Rome."

And news has also always been a large, clumsy, and intimidating political force. The English in the fifteenth century had so much respect for its power that, during a particularly bad stretch of the War of the Roses, they closed off roads to keep word of their troubles from spreading.

A hunger for and a vulnerability to a wide range of news seems basic to being human. We have gotten better and better at satisfying that hunger. We know, consequently, an awful lot more about the world's turns than did our ancestors half a millennium ago. And if some of that information appears frivolous, sordid, or politically unhelpful, the fault, dear bewailers, would seem to lie less in our networks, and their behavior this week, than in our nature.

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