Publishing on a regular basis information about recent events.
The first true secular newspapers combining miscellaneous topical information with some pretensions to regular, periodic appearance, began in 1605-10. Possibly the earliest was the "Nieuwe Tijdinghen", published from 1605 onward in Antwerp by Abraham Verhoeven, though the oldest known copy dates only from 1621. It seems to have grown from a commercial bulletin, the "Courante Bladen", which circulated in the late sixteenth century among the merchants of Antwerp and Venice. Military, ecclesiastical and diplomatic regular reporting through circularized letters had already a prior history of two thousand years. Most European countries had their first rudimentary newspaper in the 17th century. In Japan the forerunners of newspapers were broadsheets published in the Edo period (1603 to 1867). The oldest known example of printed news is in 1615 when the Battle of Abeno Oska was reported.
Newspapers can be quite a destabilizing force. They will probably be superseded in the future by other forms of mass communication, e.g. television print-out hard copy matter.