<P> Avvisi, or Gazzettes (not gazettes), were a mid-16th - century Venice phenomenon . They were issued on single sheets, folded to form four pages, and issued on a weekly schedule . These publications reached a larger audience than handwritten news had in early Rome . Their format and appearance at regular intervals were two major influences on the newspaper as we know it today . The idea of a weekly, handwritten newssheet went from Italy to Germany and then to Holland . </P> <P> The term newspaper became common in the 16th century . However, in Germany, publications that we would today consider to be newspaper publications, were appearing as early as the 16th century . They were discernibly newspapers for the following reasons: they were printed, dated, appeared at regular and frequent publication intervals, and included a variety of news items (unlike single item news mentioned above). The emergence of the new media branch was based on the spread of the printing press from which the publishing press derives its name . Historian Johannes Weber says, "At the same time, then, as the printing press in the physical, technological sense was invented,' the press' in the extended sense of the word also entered the historical stage . The phenomenon of publishing was born . The German - language Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, printed from 1605 onwards by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, was the first newspaper . </P> <P> Other early papers include the Dutch Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. of 1618 which was the first to appear in folio - rather than quarto - size . Amsterdam, a center of world trade, quickly became home to newspapers in many languages, often before they were published in their own country . </P> <P> The first English - language newspaper, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, etc., was published in Amsterdam in 1620 . A year and a half later, Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys . was published in England by an "N.B." (generally thought to be either Nathaniel Butter or Nicholas Bourne) and Thomas Archer . </P>

In less than two years in the early 1920s the cost of a german newspaper