When we  think about newspapers, we imagine they began with the the printing press and regular distribution of periodicals. Basically, while news was always circulating, whether in and out of print, though, technology made news what it is today.  But like most other things, the Romans helped create that industry that we know today and make news, well, news. They had a premium on daily info millennia earlier...and it was, like all things Roman, scandalous and fascinating.

The Roman concept of "daily news" was literal. In one form or another, public announcements about important events in the city had been made for centuries. Since the fourth century B.C., important items were posted in the Forum on an album, an ancient whiteboard ("albus" means "white" in Latin). There, the names of major officials, dates of religious festivals, and major announcements were recorded. In 59 B.C., Julius Caesar decreed that the masses, the populi, be made aware of his and the Senate's daily deeds. It was apparently pretty important, as he enacted this new policy as soon as he came into office as consul. In his Life of Julius Caesar - part of his Twelve Caesars series - Suetonius notes, "Caesar's very first enactment after becoming consul was, that the proceedings both of the senate and of the people should day by day be compiled and published." Thus, Caesar could "show" to his common supporters how he was advocating for them in the Senate and show off his glorious deeds. More on that later.

So just what were these announcements? They were called the acta, which, in Latin, aptly means "acts" or "movements." The Acta came in two forms: one for real politicos, and one for everyone else. The Acta Senatus, or Commentarii Senatus, was a play-by-play of everything the Senate did, minutes of their meetings for those who followed the ins and outs of Roman politics. Caesar may have been the first to order regular publication of Senate meetings, but he definitely wasn't the first to encourage distribution of senatorial speeches.

How and where did people see these announcements? Accounts of senatorial decrees and actions may have been distributed throughout Rome, where everyone could see them. If someone couldn't read, others who could would presumably read the news aloud for them. Still, the fact that records were written for people to read, along with the plentiful graffiti in communal spaces, implies many Romans were indeed literate. They may have been written on public "notice-boards" or kept in private archives to which only a few had access, as classicist Robert Morstein-Marx notes in his Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic. What did they look like? We're not sure. In his history of papyrus, aptly titled Papyrus: the Plant that Changed the World, John Gaudet claims that the Acta were originally carved on stone or wood, then were inscribed onto a lighter and more portable form: papyrus. 

The Acta Senatus were governmentally sponsored and, thus, probably censored, but Rome's move towards communication with its people was a watershed in informational history. Eventually, Caesar's adopted son and heir, Augustus (formerly known as Octavian) redacted them years later. In his Life of Augustus, Suetonius recounts, "He introduced other innovations too, among them these: that the proceedings of the senate should not be published..."  Even though Augustus prohibited publication of the Senate meetings, they continued to be compiled privately for select individuals' perusal in the aerarium, the treasury. Who kept these records? Cicero knows! When Marcus Caelius Rufus, a client of Cicero, writes to his friend and lawyer, who's out of town, he knows that Cicero wants to be kept in the know of what's going on in Rome. Caelius sends Cicero a packet of information; if there's anything he left out that the operarii, the clerks who copy out the records, cannot find, Caelius will himself write an account of these events. There seems to have been a staff of clerks to handle these records, as well as perhaps some shorthand notetakers to take down notes in actual meetings, which were then turned into longer records.

Although Augustus kept the Acta Senatus private, there still continued to exist the Acta Populi, or Acta Publica. In this incarnation, it kept people abreast of "the major incidents and events in the city and beyond,"  comments historian Ana Rodriguez-Mayorgas in her essay "Annales Maximi: Writing, Memory, and Religious Performance in the Roman Republic."  In Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World: Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice, classicist Elizabeth A. Meyer names several of these types of major events that would merit mention in the Acta. These include Caesar's refusal to be named king, military victories, social happenings (marriages, divorces), and more mundane occurrences, like sports events Romans of all classes enjoyed chariot racing, the results of which would appear in the "Daily Gazette," as some modern historians dub the Acta Populi. 

There is ample evidence to indicate that the Acta Populi continued well into imperial times. The famed politician and writer Pliny the Younger exchanged a series of letters with the historian Tacitus. In one, Pliny describes a fight he had with one informant back in the days of the Emperor Domitian; he tells Tacitus, "I am quite sure that it would not have escaped your conscientious researches, since it is in the public Acts." When Tacitus is conducting his research for his grand history, the Annals, he looks in the archives for information, noting, "I find in the records of the senate that Anicius Cerialis, consul designate, gave it as his opinion that a temple should be built to Nero the Divine, as early as possible and out of public funds." Even historians in antiquity used the Acta - both the senatorial records and the public acts - as primary source material for their own work. Going further into imperial history, the emperors didn't stop keeping records. As chroinicled the Historia Augusta, the third-century A.D. emperor Alexander Severus appoints "fourteen overseers of the city of Rome," who, among their other duties, "should be present whenever the records [acta] were made." 

What did the imperial household get out of having their business aired in the Acta, though? The emperor probably used this daily source of news to project a certain image of himself and the domus divina, the divine [royal] house, to his subjects, both inside and outside the city and into the provinces. Tacitus notes that, in the reign of Nero, "the daily record of the Roman people is the more attentively read throughout the provinces and throughout the army."  As Clifford Ando describes in his Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, important proclamations would be inscribed on stone in some provincial cities or publicly expressed in other ways...these may have included imperial notices originally recorded on the Acta. Can you say "ancient Twitter"?