Successive, overlapping transformations reshaped sociable English news letters in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First, the sheer expansion of newswriting led to the abstraction of news from its sociable context into separates of news; these, copied promiscuously, led to the separation of correspondent from recipient, and the production of anonymous news that could not be guaranteed by sociable or honourable means. Second, news became commercialized, bought and sold as commercial manuscript newsletters; the exchange of news by means of the cash nexus further disrupted the conventions of sociable and honourable news transmission. Third, the transition of news into printed news pamphlets, and then corantos (early newspapers), by attaching the stigma of print, completed the destruction of the sociable guarantees of news credibility. The genres of the printed news pamphlets and the coranto were born shorn of credibility; they were by traditional standards only vile rumour.

Defamiliarization

As noted above, sociable news depended on the mutual trust of people who knew one another. Temporarily separated, their letters stood in for them, and could be verified upon the correspondent's return. When a sociable news letter commended someone else's testimony of the news, it was tantamount to a social introduction: the commendation declared that the recipient could trust the testifier because he could (and should) in honour enter into social intercourse with him. The expectation of such news was that it could eventually be justified by personal communication and knowledge.

Yet the developments of written news undermined this assumption. Writing in general, a written letter of news in particular, was inherently uncontrollable. A letter could be passed on to an unknown reader. A letter could be copied for other unknown readers. The restraints of sociability against passing on and copying news were soft and ambiguous: since a letter took time to write, it made sense to have a recipient show it to some close family members and friends. But what if a mild acquaintance or a distant cousin wanted to read it?