A Brief History of News: A Political Economic Assessment

This study examines the transformation of information production from the early modern period to the age of artificial intelligence from political economy perspective, treating news as a commodity within a historical continuum. The central thesis of the research is that news has always existed as a commodity, and that what has changed is only the form of commodification. Accordingly, the study analyzes the historical trajectory from the commercial information market of 16th-century Venice to the mass press of industrial capitalism, then to the platform capitalism of the digital age and today’s productive artificial intelligence systems, through the lens of Marx’s commodity theory and Mosco’s framework of the political economy of communication. Based on a historical materialist method, the research reveals that news continues to exist as a commodity shaped by the dominant production relations of each period, while changing technological conditions transform the depth and form of commodification. The advertising model of industrial capitalism, which sells the audience to advertisers, the attention economy of the digital age, and the practices of capital appropriation in the age of artificial intelligence, which transform news archives into training data, are analyzed as successive stages of this continuity of commodification. The study aims to make visible the structural tension between journalistic ethics and the logic of capital by reconstructing the history of news commodification and to establish a historical basis for a critical understanding of journalism.