The compact revolution

In 59BC, Julius Caesar ordered that handwritten news sheets be displayed daily in the Forum in Rome detailing the latest wars and executions. A news sheet was called an "acta"; a reporter was an "actuarii". This was the beginning of the newspaper.

Around 1450, Johann Gutenberg, a German metal-worker living in Strasbourg, created a new printing press - based on the wine press - with movable type. William Caxton, a cloth dealer, spotted it while travelling and brought it to England.

The first papers grew up in ports where ships could distribute them. Venice had one of the earliest newspaper industries in the mid 16th century. Weekly newspapers contained letters from correspondents in distant cities who wrote "running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences and flim flam tales". These newspapers were very cheap - they cost no more than a small Venetian coin called a "gazeta" (about a farthing). Therefore, they became known as "gazettes".

The oldest surviving newspaper in English was published in 1620 in Amsterdam - another port with an early newspaper industry. It includes the oldest surviving newspaper misprint: it is dated on the front page "the 2. of Decemember".

Dutch papers were called "corantos" - runners or messengers. Just as the Middlesbrough Gazette can trace its name to Venice, so papers such as the Hexham Courant get their names from Dutch.

(This calls for a digression into the meaning of "echo". In Greek mythology, Echo was a nymph who lived on Mount Helicon. Naughty Zeus, king of the gods, liked to frolic with the other nymphs on the mountainside. Every time his angry wife Hera stormed out to find him, she was thwarted by Echo who held her up with an endless flow of idle chatter which allowed the nymphs to escape. Frustrated, Hera removed Echo's power to originate speech. The poor nymph could only repeat the last words that were said to her - an echo. The Northern Echo therefore set out to echo the thoughts of the North-East.)

The first newspaper in England was printed in London in 1621. The oldest surviving is from September 24 that year. Its title is: "Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys."

Most news was foreign because it was too dangerous to report domestic affairs. If the king didn't like what you wrote, you quickly found yourself in jail. In the 1640s when the authority of King Charles I broke down and newspapers openly discussed governmental affairs. They employed "she-intelligencers" - women reporters - and "newsgirls" who stood on street corners selling papers.

The first recorded use of the word newspaper - or "newes paper" - is in 1670.

Early editors worried that there would not be enough news to fill a weekly paper. Indeed, the first US paper, Publick Occurences of 1690, promised it would appear "once a month or if any Glut of Occurences happen, oftener". The gluts of occurrences were so great that the first daily newspaper in England, the Daily Courant, appeared on March 11, 1702.

In 1712, a tax was introduced on newspapers at d a sheet. Proprietors tried to avoid the tax. Some printed on linen; others printed one large sheet of paper (tax: d) instead of four smaller ones (tax: 2d). This large single sheet was called a broadside or a broadsheet.

During the 18th century, the government was desperate for money to fight the War of the Spanish Succession, so it taxed leather, candles, soap and playing cards as well as newspapers. Every new war meant a tax hike. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out at the end of the century, the duty on a single sheet reached 4d, making even tax-avoiding broadsheets too costly for most people - was this the real intention of the government which strangely failed to prosecute those newspapers which didn't pay their tax but toed the government line?

Newspaper tax was scrapped in June 1855. The Daily Telegraph began in September 1855 costing just 1d.

The Industrial Revolution took Gutenberg's primitive press into steam-powered mass production. Newspapers sprung up all over the world, becoming more and more salacious as they tried to out-do one another. Leading the way was the 1d Herald which was set up in 1835 in America and was soon selling 20,000 copies a day. Its publisher James Gordon Bennett went to great lengths - including personally investigating a prostitute's murder - to make his paper unmissable. Hence the exclamation of disbelief "Gordon Bennett". (This could also have come from his son, James Gordon Bennett Jnr, who used his father's newspaper wealth to bankroll a number of extraordinary adventures and an outrageous social life - he was once so drunk at his fiancee's father's party that he urinated in the fire mistakenly thinking it was a toilet.)

The Northern Echo was first printed on January 1, 1870. It was a political vehicle for the local Liberal Pease family who, in 1868, had come embarrassingly close to losing their MP. Their rival, Henry King Spark, had used his two Darlington weekly papers to support his candidature. To overshadow Mr Spark's little local weeklies, the Peases launched their own big regional daily.

The Northern Echo was the first d morning paper in the country. At the centre of the railway network, it was the first truly national paper in the country: it was on sale simultaneously in the two great capitals of Great Britain, London and Edinburgh, while the London 'nationals' had a ten-hour train journey to reach Scotland.

In those early days, the Echo appeared in a variety of sizes. It started as a compact (its first edition measured 35cms by 40cms whereas this morning's paper measures 27cms by 35cms), but quickly grew into a broadsheet. There was some concern about this because it was feared miners, in their tiny, candlelit terraced houses, would damage their eyes straining to read the huge pages.

Henry S Wellcome was a publicity-seeking American chemist who settled in London and wanted a catchy name for his new tablets. They contained concentrated chemicals which were easily absorbed by the body. He joined "tablet" with the trendy scientific-sounding suffix "oid", and in 1884 patented the result: "tabloid".

Soon everything was tabloid. Royalty, explorers and aviators took space-saving tabloids on their journeys round the world; they took tabloid photographic chemicals to develop their pictures; they took tabloid tea to refresh themselves. Wellcome's pharmaceutical company is now part of Glaxo.

"Tabloid" was first applied to a style of journalism - concentrated, easily-absorbed news - in 1901. It was first applied to the size of a newspaper in 1918 when the New York Daily News was launched in a small size which its proprietors termed "tabloid".

The racy red-top style of tabloids has given the word a sensationalist meaning. This is true all around the world - there is a tabloid in Mexico called !oooorale!, and you can probably guess its contents from its title.

Because of tabloid's bad connotations, when the Daily Mail reduced its size in 1971, it said it was going "compact". To avoid the tabloid stigma, the Independent and the Times have also gone "compact" recently.

This morning, The Northern Echo joins them. On Saturdays only, we drop the broadsheet - which was only created as a tax-avoidance measure - and take to the tabloid - which originally was a potent little medicine. This is just about the size we started with 136 years ago. What do you think?