## 3 Information as Function
### Information as News
News as we understand it today would not be possible without the printing press, but it is also the product of further technological developments occurring during the 19 th century. One of the earliest and most important was the application of steam power to the press, which was previously operated largely by hand. This innovation represented a giant leap in mass production capabilities, giving rise to the first mass circulation daily newspapers, while economies of scale allowed for the papers to be sold at much cheaper prices than previously possible (e.g., the penny press in the United States). The need to fill these papers with news led to the regular employment of reporters, and with it the separation of reporting from editorial functions; at the same time, in search of content for these media, newspapers turned for the first time to covering crime on a regular basis [70]. It also inaugurated the shift from simply gathering the news to manufacturing the news, through innovations such as the interview, the publicity stunt, investigative reporting, and eventually the press release, press conference, and such phenomena as background briefings, trial balloons, and leaks [68]. While publishers and editors felt free to express their opinions and endorse political candidates and initiatives, the ideal of objective reporting gained momentum over the course of the 19 th century [70], with opinion relegated to the op-ed pages, in part in an effort to appeal to a broad and heterogeneous readership. Objectivity in reporting, with its stress on the propositional character of language as a discursive symbolic form, had much to do with the popular conception of news reporting as pure information, _factual information_, so to speak. In this sense, _information_ might be distinguished from _ideas_, which originate from human beings and therefore are inherently subjective in nature. The notion of a _free marketplace of ideas_ is based on the assumption that competition among them will lead to the discovery of truth. There is no comparable sense of a _free marketplace of information_, because objective descriptions are assumed to be true in that they are propositions or statements of fact that can be checked for accuracy, much like scientists can test each others' findings. It would follow that news should remain essentially the same no matter which reporter or newspaper it originates from, as the reports would or should contain essentially the same information. Complementing this rational conception of news, the development of various methods of printing images, and especially incorporating photographs into print media, gave information a new form, later to be complemented by motion pictures and television. As noted, the resulting flood of visual images constitutes a new, unprecedented kind of information explosion, unquantifiable, seemingly objective but in a form that appeals to the emotions rather than to reason [25,33]. While in some ways counterbalancing the rationality of objective journalism, ultimately the result are two extremes of irrationality and hyperrationality [27]. Perhaps no technology more radically changed the concept of news than the telegraph. As previously noted, it transformed material, written documents into electronic signals for instantaneous transmission, and in this sense helped to form the modern idea of information, as well as news. As [PERSON] observed, telegraphic news was associated with the breakdown of linearity in newspapers, as the storyline gave way to the dateline, a loss of narrative form that helped to give the impression of news as pure information [7]. In place of a linear progression of events, the inverted pyramid format was introduced, where the article begins with the most important information in the first paragraph, the _who_, _what_, _where_, _when_, _why_, _and how_, followed by information of lesser importance in each succeeding paragraph. In this way, editors would still have the main news \"story\" even if transmission broke down before the full report was transmitted.