In 16th century England, actors held roughly the same social standing as prostitutes. But the arrival in of the first newspaper in 1620 introduced another, equally dubious profession to Her Majesty’s empire: Journalism.

Yes, by the time the old-fashioned, ink-on-dead-tree newspaper breathes its last, it’ll have hung in for centuries, give or take a few years. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the Mother Country morph from monarchy to commonwealth to monarchy again.  Shaping readers’ perceptions of these confusing times quickly evolved into a high-risk, high-excitement occupation.