1. In at the beginning…

You know how some people are scared of spiders, or snakes, or the dark, or heights, or … you get the point. I once worked with someone who was genuinely scared of currants. Not the electrical kind (I know, different spelling), but the currant bun variety. Weird, but this was the 1990s. This colleague’s reason for detesting the dried berry was that to him they looked like dead flies. “But they’re really tasty” I once protested, to which he replied “you like dead flies?!” All very strange, but then again, he did have the complete run of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS.

All of this came to mind as I was preparing for the new semester and the first lecture in a Journalism in History module. The lecture, after a preamble that flirts with Roman Britain’s Acta Diurna (essentially a stone or metal tablet carved with various items of news) and the invention of the printing press, jumps ahead to 1702 and the launch of Britain’s first daily newspaper called, you guessed it, The Daily Currant. Well actually it was called the Daily Courant but you see what made me think of my erstwhile co-worker. In this case, courant comes from the Scottish dialect for newspaper.

The person behind this ground-breaking endeavour was a woman, Elizabeth Mallet, a fact that students always find very surprising. It is quite rewarding to feel the sense of pride many feel (regardless of their gender) when they learn that it was a woman who was in there right at the beginning of daily British print journalism. They also raise a collective eyebrow when I tell them that she sold the paper to a man after just forty days. Perhaps she realised what she had done.

In many ways the Daily Courant was the predecessor to today’s Metro and i titles, as it aimed to report all the day’s news in a brief and easily digestible way (just half a sheet in its case) as readers obviously had better things to do than engage with long reads (such as watch the new monarch’s coronation or vote in the general election). Besides, the paper only covered foreign news as reporting on goings on in this Sceptred Isle would see you in prison faster than you could say ‘what do you mean the Tories have won again?’

The history of journalism is filled with such surprises and has an endearing habit of upsetting expectations. It also helps us see today’s media world through a different lens. Women were there at the beginning, so why today (according to a recent Reuters survey) do women only make up 23% of the top editors across 200 major outlets? Things are not much better abroad, either. And as for those who own newspaper titles you can count them on one hand (and you wouldn’t need to take your mittens off).

My modest hope is these facts help motivate my journalism students into doing something about it because, let’s be honest, my generation made a bit of a hash of it (a classic case of ‘could do better’). But then again, we did have the excuse that we were too busy contending with the dark art of setting a VHS video recorder to tape Star Trek, and dealing with the weird food fears of the then currant generation.