News and History
Hsieh, Ying-chun, Ph.D.
Professor at Department of Journalism
College of Communication
National Chengchi University
Abstract
This paper is focused on discussing the core theme of news, i.e., including the six elements of an event what contained some values of the nature of news, also the advent of news in human history. Meanwhile, the Chinese news content markup using XML and the implication of news events study for historical studies are included.
From the history of Journalism, news is highly related to the human history. According Professor Wang's book, the early collections of ancient poems in Chinese are viewed as the very early beginning form of news. In today's term, those poems( 詩歌) and Chun Chiu (春秋) are the first form of story-telling, i.e., the nature of news. In Rome, Julius Caesar's (100-44 B.C.) daily records are told as the earliest form of news. The nearest modern news form in Europe in the 15th century is the widely distributed “news” (so-called as newsletter nowadays).
“Today's news is Tomorrow's history” is the first lesson taught in journalism school. It is true in deed; news in newspapers and other mass media are always a reference library for historians. In this sense, the analysis of news event using markup languages like XML is a reference for the digitalization of ancient historical archives in the future.