Commercial news, especially printed news, began this period regarded as scorned and untrustworthy, the product of base men for base men. It ended this period with a modicum of respect – hedged about with qualifiers by the good gentlemen of England, but nonetheless real. This was an extraordinary transformation. Some basic fund of credibility had been ascribed to printed military news reports. But this did not happen automatically. Such credibility had to be acquired step by step. Newswriters waged a campaign to have their reports believed, first by claiming to be an accurate imitation of traditionally credible news, and then by the radical expedient of shifting the claim of credibility from the (now unknown) author to the text – by emphasizing the claims to credibility of what would become genre characteristics of the military news pamphlet, the texts' plain style, corroborative detail, and partiality. The shift of credibility claims from author to text in turn successfully provoked a shift in reading practices by newsreaders in the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who began to judge the credibility of the news by reference to the text rather than to the author. In this first stage of transformation, newsreaders became intensive readers of texts.

Mimicry – Governmental Information and Sociable News

A first solution was to mimic traditional forms of credibility. Parasitically, military news could pretend that it was something other than what it was, something the culture of the day credited more, so as to gain some of the credibility adhering to these other genres. Now, doubtless some of these pretensions were true: some, perhaps much, of the printed news was precisely what it claimed to be. But much was not. And both required such mimicry, regardless of the truth of the matter, as a way to establish their credibility. This was not an expedient for the long term, but it served until such time as military news could find a theory of credibility that fitted new circumstances.