@KorvinStarmast Didn't notice your chat message until just now, but it has indeed in the interim been moved to chat. I see a couple of people didn't respect that, and need to have their later comments nuked too...

@KorvinStarmast If that wasn't a rhetorical question, the answer is probably because nobody until a day or two ago flagged it.

Or perhaps the moderators at the time were incompetent. For disclosure purposes, I don't believe I was a moderator back in 2011, but I was definitely incompetent when I first started. :-)

(and not making any claims about the present time either. But I do try...)

I was listening to the latest Nerdist podcast, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I heard an unbelievable claim: That nobody thought of making newspapers until 400 years after the printing press was invented.

Well, it should be unbelievable, because it does not appear to be true.

Wikipedia has a handy page of the oldest newspapers. The first one on the list is the Relation, from 1605 (155 years after Gutenberg's first operating press)

The best I can come up with for what Tyson could possibly have been thinking is that the first daily newspaper started in 1702. That's 352 years. So perhaps he was rounding up, and further trying to pull the redefinition trick he pulled on Pluto...

There were apparently as early as the mid 1500's weekly publications that met all the critera to be considered newspapers save one - they weren't printed. They were hand-written by copyists.

To me that implies that there was likely some reason it was cheaper to hand-copy weekly "newspapers" prior to the 1600's.