Rates of pay for newsletter writers in the sixteenth century

The Substack writers of the Early Modern period

Between 1594 and 1640, the Republic of Lucca paid news-writers in its service between fifteen and fifty Lucchese scudi a year each. At the top of this pay-scale was the Venetian reportista Lucio Aresi, whose fifty scudi may have recognized the importance of his location, as well as his skill. According to the diplomat Fulvio Testi (1593–1646), Aresi was a ‘most able news-writer’ (valentissimo novellista), able ‘to penetrate even the most hidden and abstruse matters’. Testi notes that Aresi was tempted by the Duke of Modena’s offer of thirty-five ducats for the same services.
The Venetian reportista Antonio Meschita charged thirty ducats per year for a newsletter (as reported to the Venetian Inquisitors of State); he was investigated for working as an informant for the Spanish ambassador. These are substantial rewards, and they were conventionally supplemented, in Italy at least, by an honorarium at the end of a year’s service. In Augsburg, Philipp Eduard Fugger paid the Venetian Marsilio della Croce twenty-five scudi a year for a weekly newsletter in the 1570s; he also paid Jeremias Schiffle forty gulden a year (approximately the same value) for his news-writing service. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) paid less extravagantly for its newsletters, twenty-five gulden per year in 1606, but stopped subscribing in 1616 because its members preferred individual letters. The scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) in Antwerp paid fourteen gulden for weekly newsletters in the year 1602; the town council of Leiden paid thirty-six gulden around the same time. There are some later figures for Britain: John Pory (1572–1633) received £20 a year in the 1620s for a weekly newsletter to John Scudamore (a personalized letter, though containing news from avvisi). Another of Pory’s patrons was Sir Thomas Puckering; when Edward Rossingham replaced Pory as Puckering’s news-supplier in the late 1630s he was said to earn a similar sum, though one hostile commentator later exaggerated that he earned £500 per annum. Professional news-writers made a good income — for writers. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, English news-writers, such as Henry Muddiman, Giles Hancock and Will Urwin, charged less for their weekly letters. In 1664 a gazette printed in Mantua was compiled using weekly avvisi from Venice, Vienna, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam and Augsburg; the annual subscriptions for these avvisi ranged from 240 lire to 360 lire, including the cost of posting.

So these were sort-of the Early Modern equivalent of Substackers like Emily Sundbergand Matthew Yglesias. This is from The Great Exchange, a history of news and the media from the late Middle Ages to modern times, that just came out in the UK. I picked it up this morning and have not spent very much time with it, but so far it is full of interesting passages like this, including information about how quickly letters could travel in the time of the Pastons and details about the importance of invention of the paragraph in the early newsletters. (If you want to know more about the Pastons, Helen Castor is currently writing about them one letter at a time.) The Great Exchange is written by John Raymond Wren, a former academic turned writer.