For centuries the crier was the mass medium: a licensed officer who rang a bell and shouted official proclamations, and — for a fee — merchants' announcements, in an age when most customers could not read. Mass literacy and cheap newspapers erased the commercial role through the nineteenth century, leaving today's ceremonial criers, who survive mainly in British and Commonwealth pageantry and competitive "crying" championships.
Town crier no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
What else was happening then
1477
Caxton prints England's first ad
William Caxton, England's first printer, produced a small handbill advertising the Sarum Ordinal, a priest's handbook, for sale at his Westminster shop — ending with the Latin plea "Supplico stet cedula": please leave this notice up. Printed advertising and the fight against ad removal were born in the same document.
1841
The first advertising agency
Volney B. Palmer opened the first American advertising agency in Philadelphia, buying newspaper space in bulk and reselling it to advertisers for a commission. The commission model he improvised governed agency economics for the next century and a half.
1923
Hopkins publishes Scientific Advertising
Claude C. Hopkins, who tracked every campaign with keyed coupons so each ad's sales could be counted, distilled decades of measured results into Scientific Advertising — the founding text of testing culture. David Ogilvy later wrote that nobody should be allowed to touch advertising without reading it seven times.
1931
P&G invents brand management
Neil McElroy, a junior Procter & Gamble advertising manager frustrated that Camay was starved of attention next to Ivory, wrote a three-page memo proposing one man and one team fully accountable for each brand, competing internally as if rivals. The memo created the brand manager — the template for the modern marketer. McElroy later became US Secretary of Defense.
Where that work lives now
The professional who creates demand — from Pompeii's painted walls and P&G's 1931 brand-man memo to the auction-driven feeds of the digital era.
📣 Marketer →Before mass literacy, official news reached most people by voice: the crier rang a bell, shouted 'Oyez,' and proclaimed ordinances, markets, wars and executions in the street, protected by law because harming the messenger meant defying the crown. Cheap newspapers and rising literacy erased the trade through the nineteenth century; it survives today only ceremonially, in the competitive town-crier championships of Britain, Canada and Australia.
59 BCE – 1500
Gazettes before print
For fifteen centuries news was an instrument of administration: Rome's posted Acta Diurna, China's hand-copied dibao carrying edicts and appointments to officials across dynasties, town criers proclaiming ordinances to the unlettered. The writers were scribes and clerks whose loyalty ran to the state or a patron. What did not yet exist was the idea that finding things out and telling the public could be an independent occupation with its own standards and its own risks.
What else was happening then
1605
The first printed newspaper
In Strasbourg, printer Johann Carolus, tired of hand-copying his subscription newsletter of dispatches, sets it in type as the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien — recognized by the World Association of Newspapers as the world's first printed newspaper.
1735
The Zenger verdict
New York printer John Peter Zenger, jailed for seditious libel after his paper attacked Governor William Cosby, is acquitted when lawyer Andrew Hamilton persuades the jury that printing the truth cannot be a crime. The verdict changes no statute but becomes a founding legend of press freedom in the American colonies.
1851
Reuter wires the news
Paul Julius Reuter — who a year earlier bridged a gap in the telegraph line with carrier pigeons flown between Aachen and Brussels — opens a telegraph office beside the London Stock Exchange. His agency, alongside Havas in Paris (1835) and Wolff in Berlin, turns news into a wired, traded global commodity.
1887
Nellie Bly goes inside
For Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, 23-year-old Nellie Bly feigns insanity to get committed to the Blackwell's Island asylum and spends ten days inside. Ten Days in a Mad-House triggers a grand jury investigation, budget increases follow, and undercover investigation becomes a repeatable journalistic method.
Where that work lives now
The witness who finds out what is happening and tells the public — from Rome's Acta Diurna to the Panama Papers, still asking questions power would rather skip.
📰 Journalist →